Slashdot Mirror

The article mentions that the moon was tidally locked from the start but does not explain why. At first I was a bit suspicious because that is a huge assumption. The paper in http://iopscience.iop.org/2041... explains that in more details.

Also, another reason for having 12 months is that this number is, like 60 and 360, quite remarkable because it has a lot of divisors. Simply speaking 12 is the smallest number that can divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6 while 60 can also be divided by 5 and 10. That is why we still count eggs in dozen, times in 60 minutes or 60 seconds, days in 24 hours (2*12) ...

In ancient calendars, the time was often measured in 'moons' which made a lot of sense for hunter gatherers so when farming was invented, they switched to a yearly based calendar and it made sense to decompose the year in 12 months (so a convenient number) that also had the advantage of being relatively close to the moon period.

Climate Science has a big problem. That is that they can't seem to come up with a theory that is falsifiable. At first, they said if the pause continues for 10 years then it might mean something. Then, as ten years approached, they changed to twenty years. Now, as we approach 20 years, some are suggesting 50 years. Others are trying their best to just make the cause go away. BTW, out of 5 major studies on the Pause, only one, NOAA, claimed the Pause doesn't exist.

Here is an example of your typical Climate Science paper.

Money Shot:
However, internal climate variability creates irreducible uncertainty in the projected future trends in snow resource potential, with about 90% of snow-sensitive basins showing potential for either increases or decreases over the near-term decades.

So, it will snow more, or it will snow less. Either way, Climate Changes is the cause.

How can anyone take this seriously?

Sorry it's taken me a while to reply.

I'd suggest this paper, this one, and this. Tritium is obviously dangerous, but it does appear that there is a low acceptable dose. DNA can certainly be damaged by radiation emitted from radionuclides, I don't think anybody will contest that. And of course, I agree that it's too early to pin cancer cases on Fukushima. The Japanese government should be handling this better, I fully agree on that point too.

Sorry it's taken me a while to reply.

I'd suggest this paper, this one, and this. Tritium is obviously dangerous, but it does appear that there is a low acceptable dose. DNA can certainly be damaged by radiation emitted from radionuclides, I don't think anybody will contest that. And of course, I agree that it's too early to pin cancer cases on Fukushima. The Japanese government should be handling this better, I fully agree on that point too.

The truth remains — there have not been many climate-related predictions published, that came true in due time. In fact, I can't find even a single one such prediction, but there really ought to be many by now. We see new ones made in the press quite often...

Several times I've pointed out to you a scientific paper that compares temperature and sea level rise projections to observations up to 2011. Link You reject it since it is not in your required format. That's arguing like a lawyer not a scientist. You should care more about the information that is presented than how it's formatted.

In the realm of more general predictions scientists have said that increased CO2 would cause temperatures to rise. Temperatures on the Earth have risen and continue to rise. They said that the warming would cause land and sea based ice to melt. Land and sea based ice has melted. They said the combination of melting land based ice and warming oceans would cause sea level to rise. Sea level is rising (over 3 inches since 1993) and continues to rise. They said that increased CO2 in the atmosphere would cause ocean acidification. The oceans continue to acidify.

You can argue about it all you like but the real world and physics just doesn't care. It will do what it will do regardless of your (or my) feelings. I just don't see any good reasons to disbelieve the climate scientists.

Here is the paper I referenced again. It compares temperature predictions from the IPCC AR3 (2001) and AR4 (2007) reports to observations up to the end of 2011. It also compares sea level predictions from those reports to observations. It answers a couple of aspects of the question of how observations compare to predictions. If you reject that out of hand because it doesn't rigidly fit your required format that's your problem.

"You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes you can get what you need." (Jagger/Richards)

It matches the paper. Here are some sentences from the paper I had to read several times before understanding:

* Nevertheless, according to model evidence, both hot and cold extremes have already emerged across many areas.
* Hegerl et al (2004) found a detectable wettening signal in modelled heavy precipitation events at Northern high latitudes associated with anthropogenic influences on the climate.
* However, in North Asia (figure 2(c)), the TAE values are more similar across the temperature and precipitation indices.
* However, these studies did not take into account that the climate has changed over recent decades or implicitly assumed that society is fully adapted to the present-day climate.

Good thing that writing skill isn't necessary to do correct science.

97% of peer reviewed studies conclude global warming is man made. http://iopscience.iop.org/arti...

So where do your figures come from? Or are you just making them up?

Assuming I have the phrases around the right way, I meant that local stochastic theories violate Bell's inequality, just like deterministic local theories do. It is a common misunderstanding, even among physicists, that experiments like these have shown trouble only for local hidden variable theories. The fact is that Bell's inequality is violated by any account you like -- stochastic or deterministic -- so long as you insist on locality.

Locality is the problem, not hidden variables. I completely understand that you're not going to read a book to see my point defended. People are busy, and I only posted it in case you wanted to see. You could also check out a paper by the same author which I think will discuss the matter, but I haven't read this paper myself.

One final note. Suppose that in fact we had to choose between indeterminism and non-locality. I think that indeterminism is the crazier of the two options by a long shot. Non-locality can be understood, while indeterminism is, by its very nature, incomplete. If it came down to a choice between the two, non-locality should win hands down. At any rate, it doesn't matter. The universe is shown to be non-local by these experiments anyway, regardless of your views on determinism.

Nothing happens for some plant types, and even the authors of this study said may. They had good reason to.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/w518...

To quote from its abstract:

The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some other growth factor is severely limiting, such as low temperature (Long, 1991). Also, plants grown in some conditions, where limitations of rooting volume (Arp, 1991), light, or other factors restrict growth, have not shown a sustained response to elevated CO2 (Kramer, 1981).

Note well that again they use the term may. This is because -- unlike you -- they seem to recognize that even though the effect is real and will have an impact in many locations and conditions, including those that generally hold in agriculture where one generally avoids growing plants in strongly resource constrained environments, one can certainly suppress the effect (or fail to observe it in the wild) in specific environments, and they go even further and note that the effect is differential according to plant type with some plant types more likely to exhibit a stronger response or be resource limited than others.

The bulk of this report simply works through specific food crop species and estimates their likely response to a mix of increased CO2 and the imagined climate changes that are predicted, or projected, or prophecied (as you wish) by the GCMs that so far haven't done a very good job of PP or P-ing the climate.

You would obviously like more papers:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...

http://www.nature.com/nclimate...

(Abstract: Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.)

Probably the best review article on the effect on trees, in particular, is this:

http://www.climateaudit.info/p...

where in laboratory experiments on trees increasing CO2 by 300 ppm increased growth by 50 to 60%. Idso remarks that the problem with laboratory experiments is the opposite of what you assert -- it is difficult to grow trees in the lab without constraining their roots and access to resources and work he cites (in less abundance as it was ongoing in 1993) suggested that the response in the wild is even higher.

In general, in the mean, increasing ONLY CO2 in the environments of most wild plants does, in fact, increase their biomass and the net biomass of the Earth has almost certainly substantially increased on average, allowing for changes in land use over the last century. The effect is pronounced and relatively enormous in trees (and yes, I can cite papers t

So on one hand we have right-wing and tabloid outlets shouting "New Mini Ice Age", and on the other hand we have leftwing sites saying "No Possible Solar Changes Can Influence Climate" and referencing papers that are years old and don't even know of the new theory. How about going to the source? Interview with the scientists directly yesterday: http://www.iflscience.com/envi... Link to the paper being talked about: http://iopscience.iop.org/0004... She's an astrophysicist and seems pretty sure temps will be dropping due to noticeable solar activity drops. “During the minimum, the intensity of solar radiation will be reduced dramatically. So we will have less heat coming into the atmosphere, which will reduce the temperature.” Now we need some climate scientists to look at the new theories and new proposed solar activity levels and say how that will affect the AGW models.

You seem to be referring to the US National Ignition Facility. It was built at very large scale in an attempt to produce net energy positive fusion and also to simulate nuclear weapon implosions.

The Boeing concept is for an engine powered by fission, initiated by neutrons produced by a small fusion reaction. The fusion part is like the spark plug in a car - it doesn't produce significant energy itself, it's just a way to initiate and control the main reaction.

Inertial (laser) confinement fusion works fine on smaller scales as a neutron source. Here's a paper talking about using it for a cheap, bench top neutron source: http://iopscience.iop.org/0029...

Easy: We know the mass of the early solar system. You can back out how much free material is floating around in the system simply by knowing the mass of the other planets.

As for number and distribution, that's where statistics and asteroid formation models come into play.

Asteroids are very difficult to find, owing to their small size (relatively speaking) and their low albedo.

You cited no link to this phase 1 versus phase 2.

I'm so very glad you pointed this out, because it perfectly illustrates why you should be reading, at a minimum, the paper's abstract:

"We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."

The forbes article said nothing about it and neither did your subsequent citations.

Thereby demonstrating the folly of relying on opinion pieces written by lawyers masquerading as scientists to support your arguments.

Cite your source please.

See above.

Absent this information your argument boils down to ad hominem.

It comes as no surprise that you don't know what constitutes an ad hominem attack.

And this is the trick: continuity is a core aspect of the experience of consciousness; otherwise, this scenario is identical to killing the original and "activating" the cloned mind.

One thing that could throw a kink into the scenario, however, is the possibility (albeit, IMHO, less than even) that some core aspects of consciousness are encoded as quantum information, in which case it cannot be cloned (by the no-cloning theorem). Some hints that this may be the case are to be found in recent experimental research: the most important result is http://www.researchgate.net/pu... but also see http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and http://iopscience.iop.org/1742... as well as, for an overview of this area, http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonloc...

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

I'm not going to try again because I've already presented you with this peer reviewed paper that compares IPCC projections to observations for temperature and sea level rise. The fact that you won't accept the format I present it in just shows how you lack intellectual flexibility.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0295...

just to throw an appropriate spanner in the works, it's worthwhile mentioning the above article which notes a significant statistical correlation between variations in the measurement of the effect known as "gravity", and the (appx) 6.5 year cyclic variation of the earth's length of day.

now, before you go all "ooer" or "waah! gravity varies! we're all gonna dieeee spinning off into space", it's worthwhile pointing out that the author mentions, in the conclusion, that there *might* be some sort of unknown systemic errors in (a) how gravity is measured (b) how the length of day is measured which *happen* to coincide and give the *impression* that there is a statistical correlation between gravitational variation and the length of the earth's day. he does however state that in light of how the measurements are taken it would seem to be very unlikely that there are such systemic errors.

so, anyway, the point is: gravity appears not to be as simple as we assumed, hence why some long-distance space probes (Pioneer for example) have anomalous unexplained behaviour.

As riverat1 admits here, he "tangled" with me on this matter before — and was unable to offer suitable citations. Can you?

So what is your problem with this citation? It looks at IPCC predictions for temperature and sea level rise and compares them to observations up to 2011.

Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 [iop.org] (Rahmstorf, Foster, Cazenave, Environmental Research Letters 2012)

Don't expect much out of mi. I tangled with him about his request to list 2 or 3 successful predictions back in March and gave him a link to this paper which compares IPCC AR3 & AR4 predictions for temperature and sea level rise to current (2011) observations.

Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011 (Rahmstorf, Foster, Cazenave, Environmental Research Letters 2012)

He wouldn't accept it apparently because it wasn't formatted exactly as he requested. Apparently he won't take yes for an answer.

Tidal dissipation occurs when the tidal forces vary with time, generally due to the orbit of the secondary being eccentric. That brings it alternately closer to and farther from the primary, stretching and squeezing the interior.

However, the orbit of Charon about Pluto is circular (Buie et al., 2012), so the tidal bulge is constant. There's no time-varying deformation and no dissipation.

@Anonymous Coward: "How do you have a fraction of a bit?"

I dunno, I do know my brain hurts :)

"Here we describe a proof-of-principle experiment that indicates the feasibility of high-dimensional QKD based on the transverse structure of the light field allowing for the transfer of more than 1 bit per photon."

You keep claiming "science is settled" — but, when asked for falsifiable conclusions of this science, you are unable to come up with any.

That's exactly what the paper "Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011" has. Projections from two different IPCC reports about 1) temperatures and 2) Arctic sea ice extent compared to observations of each. What's not falsifiable about either of those? The links are in 30 different references at the bottom that the paper cites with enough information for you to look them up.

The fact that it's not exactly in the format you want or dumbed down enough for you to understand is not my problem. It's not that I lack the time, it's that you refuse to meet me half way and address what the paper says, instead arguing about the format of what I gave you. You're arguing like a lawyer, not a scientist.

The source for that wasn't a peer reviewed published paper but an interview with a journalist.

That's fine — I don't insist, your examples must come from a scientific magazine either.

So he wasn't saying it would never snow

He did say: "Children just aren't going to know what snow is". That means, it was not going to snow — in his opinion.

The ice free prediction by Maslowski was peer reviewed science but it was at odds with a lot of other predictions at the time.

Didn't prevent Al Gore from parroting it, did it? But fine, you can quote predictions, which were likewise disapproved by the predictor's peers at the time too.

So while Maslowski's projection may not be correct it was far from the only scientific opinion about it at the time.

In other words, contrary to frequent assertions, the science is not settled.

Ok, here's a twofer

I'm giving up... Just how can you call a single link a "twofer"? I gave you — and not for the first time — an example of the format:

1. Prediction of foo happening made in year XXXX. Foo happening N years later.

Is it really so hard?

Ok, here's a twofer in one paper that compares observations to IPCC projections for temperatures and sea level rise. The temperature projection turns out to be pretty good and observed sea level rise is at the top end of the projections.

Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011

Why does the linked paper refer to it as a "robot"? It seems to be a projectile at best. Is there some definition of robot I'm not aware of?

Nope. You're also wrong about the development of the language. Care to cite something?

"He who bestows his goods upon the poor shall have as much again, and ten times more."
John Bunyan (1626-1688).

Goods + 10 x Goods = 11 x Goods

This has not changed in the last 350 years.

This document, titled "Common Errors in Forming Arithmetic Comparisons" might help. See "Seven Common Errors" number 6.

Confusing ‘times as much’ with ‘times more than’: If B is three times as much as A, then B is two times more than A – not three times more than A. The essential feature is the difference is between ‘as much as’ and ‘more than.’ ‘As much as’ indicates a ratio; ‘more than’ indicates a difference. ‘More than’ means ‘added onto the base’. This essential difference is ignored by those who say that ‘times’ is dominant so that ‘three times as much’ is really the same as ‘three times more than.’

Or how about this one, from The Economist magazine's style guide:

Take care. Three times more than x means four times as much as x."

Perhaps you might be interested in the style gude from the Institute of Physics.

"Five times as much" does not mean the same as "five times more than" (i.e. six times as much) –the first is multiplicative, the second additive.

English speakers really only started getting sloppy with this in the last 100 years or so.

If you're wrong once, and then you're wrong two more times, how many total times are you wrong?

At this point, it's pretty obvious that you are the troll.

Yes you are missing something extremely important. This rate is about 36 times faster than ever recorded in the history of the planet

Probably not (temperature reconstructions are problematic, which is why I say 'probably'). If you look at temperature reconstructions for the last 1,500 years, they vary but you can see there are clearly measured periods of time with a rapid rise in temperature, before the industrial age. Look at the time period at the year 750, for example.

99.9% is a number that you just made up.

If you review the abstract of the meta-study, http://iopscience.iop.org/1748..., you'll see that 66% express no position on global warming, 32.6% endorsed it, 0.7% rejected, and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause (but accepted global warming was occuring). Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third.

Before others jump in, expressing no opinion is not affirmation of the hypothesis, it's stating that 'we don't know.'

You will find plenty in each of those fields who have written papers on each side of the debate.

Actually, you won't. 97% of the papers that took a position on global warming between 1991 and 2011 support it. Out the 11,944 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mention climate change or global warming, only 83 rejected the central premises of AGW, while 3894 supported the premise (the remaining 7967 mentioned climate change or global warming but did not expressly support or deny it). So if you consider 0.7% to be "plenty", then I question your mathematical abilities.

I understand how science works, thanks.

Can you link me to some conclusive research? Because I haven't found any. There seem to be just as many studies opposing that humans are responsible as there are studies implicating us.

Just as many? From Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature:

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

Based on those percentages, of the approximately 3977 papers published that took a position on AGW, about 3893 supported AGW and around 84 rejected AGW. So the appearance that their are "just as many" opposing studies is an illusion.

I believe that there are three possibilities here :

1.) A particle that interacts with normal matter via only the strong force, but evades the mass / cross section ratio limits on dark matter in some fashion.

2.) Matter that interacts with normal matter via all the usual forces, but evades the mass / cross section ratio limits on dark matter in some fashion. (Quark nuggets and primordial black holes fall into this category.)

3.) A particle that "strongly" interacts only with similar particles, by not the strong force, but by some new force.

I believe the present SIMPs are case number 3, that case number 2 aren't generally called "SIMPs", but case number 1 definitely has been so called; case number 1 particles have been significantly constrained in the past.

Sure if you're used to looking at a Mercator projection map

The problem here is that you are used to looking at a Mercator projection map and waving your hands instead of doing what you ought to be doing, namely look at specific regions now and in the future under climate change scenarios.

There are some studies that have attempted that, e.g., http://iopscience.iop.org/1748... For different scenarios, they predict somewhere between a slight decrease and a slight increase in arable land. Almost all the impact is from changes.

However, there is a reasonable case to be made that their criteria for arability are too narrow: cold temperatures are a much stronger bar to arability than warm temperatures, in particular as technology improves. Hence, I think it's likely we will end up with more arable land (not that we actually need it).

Also, if the power delivery curve is nice and smooth, indicating a progressive reaction is producing the signal.

Intermittent chargings, as the GP suggested, would produce a very spiky power delivery curve over the observation period.

In the case of a fusion based reaction producing heavier, and more unstable isotopes, this curve should resemble a bell curve, where initial fusion events are few, but their presence catalyzes additional fusion events, until the costs of further catalysis exceeds the energy liberated and the power curve falls off as useful fuel is depleted.

And again, there's the isotope population data that needs to be addressed. Neutrons are perniciously difficult to focus into a coherent beam, because they are 1) massed particles, and 2) have no charge. This means making a sufficiently powerful neutron source to accomplish the slow population shift from one isotope to another, heavier one over the month long observation window would require a very conspicuous neutron generator, which would probably have irradiated the researchers quite profoundly--- since it would have to be strong enough to literally cause the constituent atoms in the sample to have appreciable neutron capture. (The researchers themselves, being in close proximity to the sample being bombarded by the neutron source, would likewise also be subjected to this bombardment, due to the nature of focused neutron sources --- And again, external sources of such neutrons would be quite conspicuous. I somehow strongly suspect that the researchers would ask what the giant assed neutron collimator is doing in the lab, especially with the focal point of the collimator directly where the sample is.)

So, again-- that would be a pretty damned awesome thing. A focused neutron beam would have fantastic applications, especially one that is compact enough to be inconspicuous, yet powerful enough to cause substantive neutron capture in a large sample, --OR-- One that focuses neutrons into a tight and coherent enough beam to deliver the neutrons over a sufficient distance that the neutron source is not immediately apparent to the researchers.

No matter how you slice it, the data presented is showing something very enticing for further study.

According to the comments in the article this is based off of Deuterium, Tritium (D-T) fusion (which is the easiest to do). 80% of the energy from D-T fusion is in the form of high energy neutrons. The neutron flux is 100 times more than in conventional fission reactors which causes high levels of radiation in the vessel containing the fusion ( fusion vacuum vessel too hot for one year").

Tritium is not plentiful on this planet, so one solution that may solve both the high speed neutron energy capture and the breeding of Tritium is to surround the D-T reaction with Lithium which will 1) absorb the neutron's energy, and 2) create Tritium and Helium from the Lithium. So now we have electricity storage (Lithium batteries) and electricity generation (D-T fusion) bottle-necked by the same element: Lithium

Note that Tritium is radioactive and could leak or experience containment issues.

I am not so certain this will solve anything that current generation fission reactors don't solve just as well, except marketing / branding: I think selling the people on a fusion reactor in their backyard is easier than the fission one.

"Overall, the agricultural sector contributed nearly 7% of total US GHG emissions in 2010"

that is from http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...; that's just the USA
but it's indicative that there's something a *little* wrong with your claim

Podcasts: pick up a used ipod and subscribe to the astronomy related podcasts.

Kindle: get a used kindle that has the bubble-type keyboard, and let it read books and papers to you. The keyboard lets you start/stop the reader without looking, for in the car use. Download Calibre application and convert online/document resources and copy them to the kindle. You are not stuck with just Amazon eBooks, but many of them are good.

When online use an RSS reader and connecty to the publications feeds: e.g. http://iopscience.iop.org/ http://arxiv.org/ http://www.physicsforums.com/ http://prl.aps.org/ http://phys.org/ http://physics.stackexchange.c... http://prd.aps.org/ and many blogs!

Here is the abstract of the survery that NASA cited:

"Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" - http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

This is in very close agreement with more recent research that surveyed the literature rather than polling scientists:

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. ... Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus - http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...

Phantomfive sees hidden agendas and propaganda (from NASA no less), but it is really not clear why. Even the literature that he cited is in broad agreement.

97% of research papers on climate change that stated a position on whether AGW is real, took an affirmative stance. But this ignores the many papers that were non-committal, and stated no opinion.

Why, exactly, would you consider the papers that don't talk about a topic when considering whether there is a consensus of support for that topic or not? If you were seeking to see if a dog would make a good pet, how many books about orangutans would you read? Also, the Cook paper also clearly states what percentage of the papers took a position on climate change (32.6%) in the abstract.

According to your logic, we can lower the support level for any topic by simply including more papers that don't take a position on the topic. It doesn't even have to be climate change. Why not gravity, the round-earth hypothesis, or religion. Hey, if we include enough irrelevant papers we can get the consensus level down to 0.0001% for anything.

a) What hiatus? The hiatus only appears when you use incomplete data. citation [slate.com]

It's cute using something like Slate as a citation to demonstrate the state of scientific research. Regrettably for your argument, actual scientific journal articles like these ones in Nature, IOPScience and Science all contradict your statement. These articles all note "Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century" with multiple citations to yet other scientific journal articles that demonstrated this.

... and that's assuming any positive feedback loops don't override it (look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).

And that's assuming any negative feedback loops don't override it (look at the Iris hypothesis for an example of what could happen).

The global mean temperature trend for the last decade has fallen outside the error bars of the climate model projections gathered by the first IPCC assessment. Go ahead and deny that all you like, but the actual scientists are looking at the why and trying to sort out what they got wrong, in articles like those I've linked above.

The instability that causes the collapse of a stellar core and subsequent explosion comes from turning gamma rays into pairs of electrons and positrons. This turns energy into matter and cuts the pressure that the energy provides. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... It turns out that these explosions may make observing the early universe easier. One of the most important abundance ratios is the interstellar medium is the ratio of oxygen to carbon. The strength of the carbon monoxide bond is so strong that these two really pair up. Whichever runs out first determines the remaining chemistry to a large degree. Mass losing carbon rich stars produce carbon rich dust, while mass losing oxygen rich stars produce silicate dust for example. But, primordial Pair Instability Super Novae may produce lots of oxygen with little carbon or silicon to combine with. So the very early solid phase of the ISM may be mostly water ice. This happens to increase the far infrared emissivity of this solid phase making early objects brighter in the red-shifted sub-millimeter. Thus very early object may be easy to find in surveys at that wavelength. http://iopscience.iop.org/0004...

How about this recently published gem: Preparation of energy storage material derived from a used cigarette filter for a supercapacitor electrode .

Natural radioactivity is mainly something that hits you from the 'outside'... it hits your skin

Except for the ~5kBq of K-40 in your nerves. And the C-14 in all of your tissues. Also, cosmic radiation doesn't stop on your skin - it's comprised of extremely high energy particles at 1 GeV or more. Those sort of energies make the radiation from nuclear reactors seem like child's play. That is not to say that you'd rather be inside of a nuclear reactor - most definitely not, the flux there is many orders of magnitude larger - but it does show that cosmic rays don't just "hit your skin", but instead fire right through you and irradiate your internals quite easily.

First of all a healthy person has no Uranium or Thorium in his body.

I'd be careful with throwing around superlatives like "none", but it's probably fair to say that the abundance of actinides in most humans would be classed as "trace" at best.

you are again mixing up external radiation by natural sources with radioactive elements incorporated into the body

Except that both K-40 and C-14 are both natural and inside your body. In fact, we use C-14 abundance in tissues to date when organisms died. Whether something is or isn't natural has no bearing on where it is harmful.

The fallout is measurable every where in north Japan.

This statement, while true, is misleading, or at the very least oversimplified. We have extremely sensitive measurement equipment, but the mere detection of the presence of a radionuclide does not in itself imply any danger from it. What needs to be assessed is the particular type of radionuclide, its abundance and sample distribution, in order to be able to at least roughly assess the potential biological impacts. In pretty much any scoop e.g. topsoil you'd be able to find all manner of toxic stuff, from mercury through arsenic, lead and even to uranium - this is simply a consequence of the magnitude of Avogadro's number.

I'll leave you with just one tiny factiod: long-haul flights are associated with elevated exposure to cosmic rays, easily 20-30x sea-level background and comparable to some of the hotter parts of the Fukushima exclusion zone. This has been repeatedly assessed and demonstrated. As such, one would expect to find radiation-related cancer clusters among airline crew, who spend a sizable amount of their lives in this elevated radiation environment. And yet, no reliable evidence for this has been found so far.

You will find that in the field these materials are referred to as "YBCO, GdBCO etc etc" with only the rare earth as the full element. This is not wrong. HAve a look at the original paper which is freely available. http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-2048/27/8/082001

Reading the paper itself, the only reason they achieved this result was by gambling on a sample with enough purity to hold the magnetic force. They tried two other samples and failed. We won't be seeing any applications of this result until they can figure out enough process improvements to make the 33% success rate better.

It's worth noting that this solenoid research was funded by Boeing, so one might assume that an impressively powerful solenoid that operates at ~100K would be extraordinarily useful for making a missile that can turn on a dime.

This class of white dwarf stars are a mixture of primarily oxygen and carbon. Depending on the mass the amount of carbon and oxygen are roughly the same, but sometimes there is more oxygen. As the star cools it goes through a phase transition where the core becomes crystallized. This releases heat through two mechanisms: heat of crystallization and the release of gravothermal energy.

The inner crystallized section is enhanced in oxygen. The outer fluid mantel is enriched in carbon. Calling this a diamond is simply wrong. Perhaps at some point in the distant future one of these will cool and part of it will become a form of crystal carbon, but considering that the cooling time without mantle carbon crystallization is on the order of 10 Gigayears, it is not likely this has happened yet considering that the universe is around 13.6 gigayears old.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/486/1/413/fulltext/34903.text.html

The Cooling of CO White Dwarfs: Influence of the Internal Chemical Distribution

White dwarfs are the remnants of stars of low and intermediate masses on the main sequence. Since they have exhausted all of their nuclear fuel, their evolution is just a gravothermal process. The release of energy only depends on the detailed internal structure and chemical composition and on the properties of the envelope equation of state and opacity; its consequences on the cooling curve (i.e., the luminosity vs. time relationship) depend on the luminosity at which this energy is released.

The internal chemical profile depends on the rate of the 12C(, )16O reaction as well as on the treatment of convection. High reaction rates produce white dwarfs with oxygen-rich cores surrounded by carbon-rich mantles. This reduces the available gravothermal energy and decreases the lifetime of white dwarfs.

In this paper we compute detailed evolutionary models providing chemical profiles for white dwarfs having progenitors in the mass range from 1.0 to 7 M, and we examine the influence of such profiles in the cooling process. The influence of the process of separation of carbon and oxygen during crystallization is decreased as a consequence of the initial stratification, but it is still important and cannot be neglected. As an example, the best fit to the luminosity functions of Liebert et al. and Oswalt et al. gives an age of the disk of 9.3 and 11.0 Gyr, respectively, when this effect is taken into account, and only 8.3 and 10.0 Gyr when it is neglected.

Franson's theory cannot be right, as it disagrees with the solar system tests of General Relativity

His Equation 18 predicts a change in the gravitational red shift by a factor of 9 alpha / 64 for photons, where alpha is the fine structure constant (~ 1/137), so the correction is ~ 1.08 x 10^-2. The gravitational red shift has been tested, by GPS and also by Gravity Probe A, with an accuracy of a few parts in 10^-4 (see Figure 3 in that reference). This excludes the Franson correction, and so his theory cannot be correct. Since the Shapiro delay also depends on the gravitational redshift, Franson's theory thus predicts a 1% change in that too, which is also much too large to be consistent with experiment (see Figure 5), again excluding the Franson theory.

So the theory is wrong, and the other problems I have with the paper are irrelevant.

I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.

Unfortunately, that comparison is rarely disappassionate. In fact, some recent studies have found that the "just the facts" approach to education on controversial topics tends to backfire. Among the general populace, there a high tendency to acknowledge only the facts that support a pre-existing position and the ignore the facts that contradict it.

Frankly, that's why there is an entire cottage industry built around denying something that 97% of the people researching it have concluded is true. However, that 97% may actually be low-balling the consensus, since James Powell says he's reviewed 25,182 scientific articles in peer-reveiwed journals mentioning global warming and climate change since 1991 and only 26 of them reject the anthropogenic cause. That's would be a disagreement rate of about 0.1%.

The people most qualified to evaluate the evidence seem to be in a near universal agreement that is rarely accurately represented by the media.

Except the idea that most climate scientists favor the AGW hypothesis isn't even true.

The source of that meme is a paper lead by John Cook, who performed a meta-analysis of several thousand climate science papers, measured using the most embarrassingly confirmation-bias infected thought systems.

It's little better than a paper trying to prove that the Earth is only around 4000 years old and that Christ loves you. Among the several faulty assumptions: any paper just *talking* about gasses playing a role in climate behavior, but making no specific claims or mentions about climate change or AGW, in Cook's opinion automatically equates as full support for the AGW hypothesis.

Read it yourself and see if you can spot the logical errors:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...