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So of course the 97% of published papers that agree with their position don't have anything to do with their positions.

No, sorry, not true. Check the original paper yourself:

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

The majority of papers didn't agree, they took no position. The "consensus" that a subset of papers agree with is simply that human carbon emissions may have contributed to temperature increases in the 20th century, an absolutely trivial fact of no practical relevance by itself.

The answer (global warming) can be found in this recent paper (among others) whose results emphasize "the oceans' role as Earth's primary energy store. Correlation of trends in total system energy (TE time integrated TOA) against trends in OHC suggests that for most models the ocean becomes the dominant term in the planetary energy budget on a timescale of about 12 months." http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...

I just searched for an answer to this question. Seems that pair generation by irradiation of matter (e.g. a mirror) is shown experimentally and can reach quite high intensities:
http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...
Generation in vacuum though seems to be shown only in models until now:
http://iopscience.iop.org/0295...
http://journals.aps.org/pra/ab...
Seems that the reaction rate is much lower, so maybe this is not a limiting factor for building a laser.
Normally high intensities are achieved by building a pulsed laser. This produces a beam of laser pulses, which is then focussed into a tiny spot. Intensities in this spot can be alot higher than inside the laser cavity. You could achieve higher laser intensities just by building a larger laser (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... ).
Inside the laser cavity intensities are normally limited by the effects of nonlinear optics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... ), which occur in all kinds of matter.

"Worldwide average temperatures. According to NASA and NOAA."

No, only according to GISS.

And there is real evidence that GISS "fudged" those figures.

You keep trotting out that invisionfree list of selected papers, as if that somehow invalidates the entire body of work on climate science over the last few decades ((tens of thousands of papers) - then you actually accuse peer-reviewed surveys of cherry-picking? Your double standards are breathtaking.

a relatively small, rather incestuous group who try to lie with statistics to "prove" their cause to the populace, by doing things like cherry-picking papers in order to claim [the] "97% consensus" [is bogus]

FTFY.

Those "rebuttals" to Cook et al 2013 that try to claim the 97% consensus is bogus? Maybe you should try analysing the data yourself instead of parroting someone else's misinformation; I did. My own findings: 41 times more papers (986) explicitly endorse AGW than explicitly reject it (24); 64 times more papers (3896) implicitly endorse AGW than implicitly reject it (78). That's a crapload of real, peer-reviewed evidence that the deniers are still desperately pretending doesn't exist.

If you truly believe this is not an accurate survey of the state of climate science, despite similar results to half a dozen other surveys and despite agreeing with the positions held by the IPCC's own comprehensive surveys and every reputable scientific institution out there, then do please produce a more accurate survey, and get it peer-reviewed - if you can. Then we can talk.

Hi, kudos for being interested, and not just throwing bombs.

The article you linked isn't relevant to your question, since we're interested in the question on whether gasoline lead is being measured in the ocean. As such, we only need to look at a time course for Pb in the ocean over the time period in question. (i.e., the age of leaded gasoline.) Your linked paper is concerned with much larger time scales, on the order of 10k years.

Science:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1755...

Pay close attention to the caveats about Pb and paleo measurements of it.

You could just read the Cook 2013 paper for yourself. Even just the abstract - it's pretty clear about that.

there's this huge majority that say there's not enough data to draw strong conclusions

Where did you get that idea? In fact, where did you get the figure of 4000 articles endorsing AGW? The original link (Powell's study) makes no mention of that.

Perhaps you're confusing it with Cook et al 2013, which does say that 4,014 of 11,944 papers "expressed no position". Reading the actual study however shows that 0.7% of papers examined rejected AGW and a tiny 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.

Let me repeat: of 11,944 published papers, 66.4% expressed no position on AGW - they concerned themselves only with a specific area of climate science - and no conclusions can be drawn from them. Only 1% felt the evidence was inconclusive OR counter to AGW. Thus, of the papers that did take a position, including that no conclusion was possible yet, 97% supported AGW.

If you've read "analyses" that claim otherwise, they are being deliberately misleading.

Plus of course the half-dozen other studies over the last decade confirm and verify these results.

I would like to point out a theory where a solar lull also results in lower global temperatures -- in a way that may be complementary with the UV-centric approach taken in TA... Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. See this documentary Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery. Radiation-seeded cloud formation was first observed by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1896. In BBC: Connections, Death In The Morning (index to 38:15) James Burke describes the events that led to WIlson's great invention, the cloud chamber. I highly recommend the entire Connections series, especially the original first season which begins with "The Trigger Effect".

On clouds... another Good Watch is the BBC documentary on the phenomenon of Global Dimming, especially its opening minutes where David Travis of the University of Wisconsin measured a 1 degree C change in temperature ranges in the days following 9/11, when all aircraft in the US were grounded. This (shocking!) correlation, that could only be ascribed to a particular human activity -- a lack of contrail cloud seeding -- reminds us that our contribution to climate might far exceed pure-chemical CO2 causation.

On clouds... while researching contrails years ago I had a true what-the-fuck moment to see that NASA had also noticed significant human triggered cirrus cloud formation but managed to leverage the presence of cirrus (Minnis et. al) into a net warming effect. This has led to extraordinary ideas like enlarging ice crystal size in cirrus by seeding to 'reduce' this 'warming' effect. I am old school and any claim that increased clouds (of any kind) are net-warming and not net-cooling is an extraordinary claim and should be confirmed by an extraordinary level of proof, not just computer energy-budget models of incoming versus outgoing long-wave radiation. And I'm glad to see that the cirrus net effect is not yet decided by everyone.

On survival during the coming solar minimum... those jolly old River Thames Frost Fairs look like a a real tonne of funne, but faced with the likelihood of global cooling it behooves us to fast-track the development of Thorium based energy. Because MSR/Thorium is the answer for both Global Warming and Global Cooling. I am generally behooved these days.

Also... the timely development of molten salt reactors and supplying the globe with cheaper grid-energy would improve the human race. It would help to offset the effect of driving on women's pelvises by relief from washing clothes by hand.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

I wonder if any of the several coronal mass ejections that appear in the movie interacted with the plasma tail of the comet.

This appears to be the original article: http://iopscience.iop.org/0960-1317/15/9/S06?fromSearchPage=true

Here's the abstract:
"The first urine-activated laminated paper batteries have been demonstrated and reported in this paper. A simple and cheap fabrication process for the paper batteries has been developed which is compatible with the existing plastic laminating technologies or plastic molding technologies. In this battery, a magnesium (Mg) layer and copper chloride (CuCl) in the filter paper are used as the anode and the cathode, respectively. A stack consisting of a Mg layer, CuCl-doped filter paper and a copper (Cu) layer sandwiched between two plastic layers is laminated into the paper batteries by passing through the heating roller at 120 C. The paper battery is tested and it can deliver a power greater than 1.5 mW. In addition, these urine-activated laminated paper batteries could be integrated with bioMEMS devices such as home-based health test kits providing a power source for the electronic circuit."

Looks to me like it's nothing more than the old trick of making a battery out of a lemon or other piece of acidic fruit.

Why is this being reported as an asteroid when the original research paper says that it is a comet? http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/778/1/L21/article What is the difference between a comet and an asteroid?

Oh that's why F=G(m1*m2)/r^2 has the "speed limit" of 'c' in it. Oh wait it doesn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation

Oh that is why Gravity is capped by the "speed limit" of 'c'. Oh wait it doesn't.
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp

That's why we can measure the speed of gravity with light. Oh wait we can't.
"Propagation Speed of Gravity and the Relativistic Time Delay"
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/590/2/683/fulltext/57516.text.html

You are ignorant. period.

I was able to get to the article via this page. If the above link doesn't work.

The paper (PDF, 1.7MB)

Amazing work. If I was still a student, I'd start looking up the references in the paper - which, BTW is available here. It reminds me of how simple steps in signal processing can have such an amazing aggregate effect when applied.

Arrhenius stated only that CO2 acted to absorb heat (long-wave infra-red radiation for the nitpickers). He posited that if you added CO2 to the atmosphere the heat would increase. What Arrhenius didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, is that at 280ppm, the atmospheric CO2 already absorbs 97% of all incoming long-wave infra-red radiation. Doubling the CO2 to 560ppm, would not make it absorb 194% of the radiation, it would make it absorb about 99% of the incoming radiation. Since CO2 accounts for approximately 4-7 degrees C of the Earth's warming (there's arguments on the exact figure) that would be an increase of about 0.08 to 0.14 degrees C. Now, there are some factors that add to that (re-radiation, tropospheric concentration and re-reflection of albedo infra-red, etc) that could make that as much as 1 degree C of surface warming. But that's it.

Adding twice the CO2 doesn't mean twice the temperature. And the feedback mechanisms are neutral to negative. They must be, or the 7000ppm CO2 of the carboniferous period would have resulted in Earth looking like a ball of molten rock.

Now, let's get back to the real point.

Climate scientists continue to make statements like, "We can expect more Katrina's every year!" Yet the U.S. is now in its longest cycle without a major hurricane landing since records began being kept in the 1930's. "We can expect more tornados to ravage cities across the U.S.!", yet tornadic activity across the U.S. is at a 50 year low. Total thunderstorms are average at best, and while there is some evidence of slightly stronger convection cells, there's a certain bias in the fact that we never before had satellites capable of sampling and quantifying such activity in seconds rather than days.

In short, the evidence all points the other way.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for gas or oil or coal. I'd rather see all of it go away. Give me clean, safe, cheap, plentiful nuclear power every day of the week over all of that. Preferably LFTR designs spread out like candy all over the country. I'd love fusion too, but like my Grandfather who was promised to see it "within his lifetime" and died in 1988, I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Solar power is a joke, with its rare earths and sulfur-hexafluoride washes doing a dozen times more damage to the environment then they'll ever recover in a lifetime. We've already tapped 95% or more of the hydropower on Earth, and I doubt the birds will live through putting up enough windmills to power a typical city, much less the planet. Not to mention, that has it's own problems. Wind Power Potential Overestimated

Your point, "We've seen warming" ignores the one great thing about climate change -- the climate is a complex system -- it is always changing. It is a vast, living, breathing system taking in all life on earth, all changes in the sun, all chemistry in the oceans, every wave, every sunbeam, every butterfly flapping its wings. It must be constantly changing. We are looking at a tiny sliver of it and saying, "Oh no, we're all doomed!" We act as if we want the climate never to change, not one iota, not one jot.

The climate never changes on Venus, on Mercury, on Mars... They all have one thing in common. They're dead worlds.

Give me a changing climate any day over that.

This just reveals your wooly thinking. TFA doesn't say "97% of scientists believe in AGW". It's 97% of scientific papers. i.e. 97% of the ways of examining the question scientifically resulted in a conclusion that AGW is real. Scientific method, not belief.

First, scientific method relies on reason rather than consensus. "Earth is flat" was a consensus opinion. Oh, and TFA DOES NOT say what comrade soulskill put up there. 97% of the papers DID NOT claim AGW. Only 32.6% of the papers did. Here's a direct quote from the article's abstract:

"...We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW..."

Here's the link to the actual paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

The paper shows cites 97% of papers.

Actually it doesn't, read the paper again, it's in the abstract.

Here is a link to the paper for you.

I think it can be easily demonstrated that this is a ridiculously biased study:

From the paper:

Abstracts were randomly distributed via a web-based
system to raters with only the title and abstract visible.
All other information such as author names and afïliations,
journal and publishing date were hidden. Each abstract was
categorized by two independent, anonymized raters. A team
of 12 individuals completed 97.4% (23 061) of the ratings

So 12 people did all the work on 11,944 papers, sorting them according to how much they agreed with the idea that "Humans are the cause of Global Warming". We are given no indication of who these 12 people were, how much time was spent going through each paper, how quickly they came to their determinations, or what their own personal biases happened to be, but we can get an indication of the results of their sorting based on the examples included with the criteria they were measuring abstracts against.

And what were their criteria? Let's take a looksee:

Table 2. Deïnitions of each level of endorsement of AGW.
Key: Level of endorsement, Description, Example

(1) Explicit endorsement with quantiïcation
Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause
of recent global warming

Example: "The global warming during the 20th century is
caused mainly by increasing greenhouse gas
concentration especially since the late 1980s"

(2) Explicit endorsement without quantiïcation
Explicitly states humans are causing global
warming or refers to anthropogenic global
warming/climate change as a known fact

Example: "Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases
of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate
change"

(3) Implicit endorsement Implies humans are causing global warming.
E.g., research assumes greenhouse gas emissions
cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause

Example: ". . . carbon sequestration in soil is important
for mitigating global climate change"

(4a) No position Does not address or mention the cause of global warming.
(4b) Uncertain Expresses position that humanâ(TM)s role on
recent global warming is uncertain/undeïned

Example: "While the extent of human-induced global
warming is inconclusive. . . "

(5) Implicit rejection
Implies humans have had a minimal impact on
global warming without saying so explicitly E.g.,
proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of
global warming

Example: ". . . anywhere from a major portion to all of
the warming of the 20th century could plausibly
result from natural causes according to these
results"

(6) Explicit rejection without quantiïcation
Explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are
causing global warming

Example: ". . . the global temperature record provides
little support for the catastrophic view of the greenhouse effect"

(7) Explicit rejection with quantiïcation
Explicitly states that humans are causing less than
half of global warming

Example: "The human contribution to the CO2 content in
the atmosphere and the increase in temperature is
negligible in comparison with other sources of carbon dioxide emission"

Wow. There's huge bias built right into the criteria! Just look at point number 2 for instance:

Example: "Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases
of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change"

Think of it this way. Say you're a scientist studying volcano emissions. Or methane levels over the last million years. Or have decided that automotive emissions cannot reasonably be discounted from the overall equation despite their contributing a neg

It's not even 97% of published papers. The headline is a good example of selective statistics. If you look at the actual data, you can see that over the past couple of years, the number of papers endorsing AGW has decreased. Imagine if that had been the headline, "Number of Scientists Endorsing AGW Decreases!"

If you look at the data in the actual paper, you can see that the number is much closer to 60%, whereas 15 years ago it was 80%.

There's a saying I like to remember in situations like this, which I learned on Slashdot, "don't use statistics the way a drunk man uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination." Was the purpose of this paper to build support, or to illuminate? How is the media using it?

Actually according to them, only 32.6% "of climate science papers agree on it":

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. source

This publishing model already has some competition. Here is an article from a similar pay-to-publish-under-professional-editorship journal: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326

My concerns with such models, despite the excellent credentials for the objectivity of the present crop of promoters/purveyors, is that as an author, you are buying your way into people's attention. It is difficult to imagine a fire wall separating advertising intentions from pure scientific communication that can really work when the motives are thus configured. And what on earth would keep a bunch of well funded liars like American Heritage Institute from buying up all the articles they want? Meanwhile out in real world of academic publishing [yes oxymoronic] it would appear that "Academic researchers want to make their papers open access for the world to read." is a bit off the mark: wisely or not, researchers often choose less-than-open journals for their papers

Don't you mean an acoustic spanner, like this:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/10/1/013018

It's been know for quite a while than one can generate a torque with soundwaves.

Here you go: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044035/article

According to whom?

Stefan Rahmstorf, Grant Foster and Anny Cazenave.

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044035/article

This is a great point. This study shows an increase in arable land by as much as 67% in some places. Overall though it sites a figure somewhere between a decrease of 1.7% to a total increase of 4.4%.

This might be a great point if Planet Earth had a single global culture and some form of worldwide communist government, which could simply re-allocate people from, say, the Netherlands to Siberia with no problems.

Meanwhile, in the real world, there will be huge problems if Europe loses something like 10% of its inhabitable land area.

This is a great point. This study shows an increase in arable land by as much as 67% in some places. Overall though it sites a figure somewhere between a decrease of 1.7% to a total increase of 4.4%.

Very, very little. Pacemakers use very little power, on the order nanojoules.

They aren't, because the idea doesn't really work, though pneumatic hybrids could have some future in other forms (according to this paper).

Perhaps not.

Last year, many accredited the success to cultural influences, such as the “Brian Cox effect”.

New data, however, suggest a network designed to help science teachers inspire students with the wonder of physics, called the Stimulating Physics Network (SPN), has played a major part in translating this nascent inspiration into A-level entries.

I've observed that people who regard themselves as climate science "skeptics" generally insist that one should disregard information provided by web sites run by experienced scientists who have studied the primary literature in depth and have concluded that the scientific consensus on the nature and hazards of global warming is broadly correct. Apparently, in "skeptic speak," having studied the evidence enough to have formed an opinion constitutes being "biased" (presumably, only ignorant people can be "objective"). So sites such as RealClimate, Skeptical Science, Open Mind, the IPCC web site, and the the NASA GISS web site are all out of bounds. Of course the distinguishing feature of climate science "skeptics" is that (unlike the skepticism of successful scientists) their skepticism is quite one-sided, and they become quite credulous when it comes to anything that seems to cast doubt on climate science--so they will happily cite sites like "WUWT."

But I cite SkepticalScience not as a source of opinion (I've already stated my opinion) but because that it is a site that provides good links to published reports that contain the evidence supporting my opinion. Nevertheless, it happens that I've personally reviewed many of the summaries provided on SkepticalScience and have compared them to the primary literature, and I find that SkepticalScience tends to be reliable and accurate, and a fair reflection of the consensus opinion of working climate scientists. This is in dramatic contrast to my experience at WUWT and other "skeptic" sites, where I often find that descriptions of the published literature are highly misleading, sometimes in ways that appear to me to be intentional.

Take a look at the chart they're using vs a google search [google.ca] for the same chart. Why is their chart different than the rest? All the other charts show that real temperatures most closely match Hansen's scenario C, which involved CO2 emissions ceasing to increase past 1990.

And here we see an example of why a site like SkepticalScience is useful, particularly compared to a Google search, which often turns up frequently-repeated misinformation. If you doubt that SkepticalScience is accurately reporting the models, all you have to do is click on the link, and it will take you to the original paper by Hansen. And if you doubt that the GISS data is accurate, you can click on the link, and it will take you to actual GISS data. Moreover, it is quite obvious just from looking at the short term variation of the models that Scenarios B and C diverge only slightly up to the present day, so it is impossible that we could have temperature data that would differentiate between them. However, the question of whether there is any evidence of the warming trend "leveling off" as described in Scenario C (which was calculated for an unrealistically optimistic scenario of CO2 mitigation that does not at all correspond to reality) can be addressed statistically by mathematically subtracting known sources of short term variation, and the answer is "No."

By the way, one way in which real scientific skepticism differs from climate science "skepticism" is that real scientists are skeptical of even their own work, and often acknowledge errors and revise their conclusions in the light of new evidence and better analysis. So, for example, based on subsequent work, it is now generally thought that

One thing that is in my own opinion nearly certain -- we may or may not be on a track to catastrophic warming, but I very strongly doubt that we're on a fast track or an irreversible track.

It certainly is not irreversible in geological time, but given the slow relaxation of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, it is likely to persist for a period of time that is long in the scale of human lifetimes. Of course, there is the potential for intentional climate engineering (as opposed to the climate-engineering-by-neglect that we are currently engaged in)--but every such proposal I've seen so far seems to involve doing things that are as hard/slow to reverse (i.e. if they "go wrong") as increasing CO2.

There is a fair bit of evidence that the climate is actually remarkably stable against more than a degree or two of additional warming

I'm not sure what you consider to be a "fair bit of evidence." Certainly global temperature has been more than a degree or two warmer in the distant past, so any such stability mechanism must be of recent vintage, geologically speaking. And there is no statistical evidence that any such mechanism is currently limiting temperature increase. Once one corrects for known sources of short term fluctuation, global warming seems to be continuing unabated. So any such temperature limiting mechanism must have a very sharp threshold if it is going to save us from the temperature increase projected as a consequence of continued CO2 pollution. Sharp thresholds are somewhat hard to come by in nature, and generally require some sort of strong feedback. What specific physical mechanism do you have in mind, and what is the "fair bit of evidence" for it?

http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/3/033001/pdf/1367-2630_14_3_033001.pdf

I am still not sure exactly what the physics is here.

Or perhaps I didn't get it from Wikipedia, but from the intro of a plamsa physics book which cites an American Scientist article from by Prof. Sanborn Brown who did a lot of early work with gas discharges and who seems to write about science history of related fields. I can't really see what plasma sheaths has to do with cellular behaviour, at least not any more than say boundary layer effects in aerodynamics or an electrostatic air scrubber which also have little to do with cellular behaviour.

The paper I found quickly by just searching the author's name and "cell" on Google scholar, it was the second link: here. It isn't that hard to not have the word plasma. Just flipping through a stack of papers on my desk I see an ICF paper and a tokamak paper that don't have the word plasma other than in journal names in the reference list. In short papers, there isn't much reason to state the obvious like that hydrogen at fusion temperatures is going to be a plasma, and it is just a matter of whether the jargon for their topic has the word "plasma" in it or not. And if it is a forbidden word, NASA seems to be doing a really bad job removing it, since it is mentioned in the FAQ, other stories, and featured in their "Solar Week" site pushing to explain science of the sun to in classrooms.

You don't solve a problem by building a bigger hammer;

By the Q scaling laws, yes you do.

Are you actually serious?

Do you have no problem with your library paying outrageous fees too give you access to non-free journals? After all, if everyone just reads the paper off arXiv (which is true for myself, and most people I know, as arXiv is a lot faster than any journal) anyway, why should we pay for the journals nobody reads? And if we don't pay for them, how they will survive and continue to provide the rubber-stamp refereeing process you use them for? It's just not a viable business model. Furthermore it enrages me that we have to *ask for permission* to publish our own papers on arXiv, since every journal (even non-evil ones, like APS' journals) demands the copyright of your paper.

You're correct that academia is conservative, and that it takes time to build up the reputation of a journal. But that does not mean it's impossible like you believe! For instance, look at the wonderful open-access, electronic journal New Journal of Physics. It is quite new (for a journal), being established in 1998, but it already has a reputation of a very high quality journal, with impact factor (if you care about it - I don't) larger than many traditional journals, such as PRA. In fact, they have just rejected a paper of mine =( but I still like them.

The beam could be intercepted at any point, without it being interrupted. It would also have horrific energy consumption per bit transmitted.

For practical communication using lasers to do something similar is much closer: http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/87/1/10010/pdf/0295-5075_87_1_10010.pdf

From teh abstract: "If these experiments nd evidence for hidden photons, laser communications through matter are possible. We show that, using methods from free-space optics, a channel capacity of more than 1 bit per second is possible in the near future, for distances up to the Earth’s diameter"

OK, as someone with a Ph.D. in engineering electromagnetics, I'm skeptical. I'm aware that physicists have a nomenclature different from engineers and I'll have to go and read some of the cited papers to make sense of "orbital angular momentum" in my frame of reference, but anyone who refers to the noise level as "electrosmog background" in a scientific paper rather than using signal-to-noise ratio raises my suspicion. I also couldn't find the level of peer review the article has received. The journal homepage mentions a review policy, but I couldn't find the minimum number of reviews required for publication (for IEEE, e.g., this is usually at least two, plus more if the reviewers disagree).

It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

So how will you discredit the TORCH report ( http://www.chernobylreport.org/torch.pdf [chernobylreport.org] ) commissioned by the German Green party? Are they too paid by or limited by IAEA? Or perhaps they are proponents of nuclear power? They estimate the total death-toll from cancer to between 30000 and 60000. What's more, they warn, that the results highly depend on risk factors used in calculations. So again, the increase in lethality isn't obvious and that means it's not significant.

How does posting multiple reports, all coming to very different conclusions, support your claim that enough conclusive data exists to conclude nuclear is the safest energy source? I have seen estimates range from 50 to 1 million for deaths from Chernobyl. What amazes me is that you (who have shown ignorance on some key aspects of this issue) are able to arbitrally pick one of those numbers and then, with great conviction, march forward with your own claims and calculations based on your arbitrally picked number. That takes faith, not scientific scrutiny.

Because you can eliminate internal exposure when you're living in very high background radiation area and the radioactive materials are in water you're drinking, bathing in or air you're breathing... Those are areas that have higher radiation levels than the permanently evacuated areas in Ukraine. As we know, studies for internal exposure haven't been conducted, at all: http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/24/4A/008 [iop.org] . Oops, there have been, multiple ones. But those results don't agree with your world view so you just ignore them.

Alright, that does not even make sense . . . You mean to imply that background radiation can also lead to internal exposure, correct? The problem whith that approach is that once you get into internal exposure, you are facing a biological problem space which includes things like biological concentration and biological half-life. Those vary based on the type of element you are dealing with. Most of background radiation is caused by Radon gas. Radon is a noble gas, which means no biological concentration and an extremely small biological half-life. It requires a lot higher concentrations of Radon contamination to cause harm compared to things like Cessium, Plutonium, or Strontium. Consequently, it is completely inappropriate to consider Radon internal exposure as a proxy for internal exposure for a nuclear meltdown.
Furthermore, your link appears to be concerned with the exposure of wildlife to ionizing radiation, not the contamination by radioactive particles of the food supply and subsequent consumption by humans. It has absolutely nothing to do with internal exposure through contamination of the environment from fallout.

First and foremost it requires convincing general population that the build is necessary, unlike fossil fuel plants which you can "just build" and poison neighbouring areas for next 40 or 60 years.

First of all, I think your fossil fuel bundling is inappropriate. How is natural gas poisoning the environment, especially when you do no think people are contributing to global warming?
Second, the potential damage a single nuclear plant could do to an area is off the scale compared to the potential damage of a single non-nuclear plant. To cover those risks, you need insurance. No insurance company can cover the risks of a nuclear plant, so you need government backing. In democracies, the government requires public consensus. Perhaps you are also against democracy?

Could you explain to me, why on earth French have the cheapest electricity in Europe if its so economically infeasible?

Because the French government "subsidizes" the insurance costs of the nuclear plants? This "subsidy" results in the public being completely exposed to the risks of an accident.

How is that for bias?

So how will you discredit the TORCH report ( http://www.chernobylreport.org/torch.pdf ) commissioned by the German Green party? Are they too paid by or limited by IAEA? Or perhaps they are proponents of nuclear power? They estimate the total death-toll from cancer to between 30000 and 60000. What's more, they warn, that the results highly depend on risk factors used in calculations. So again, the increase in lethality isn't obvious and that means it's not significant.

It still makes nuclear safer than mining coal, let alone burning it. And safer than hydro. Even if we assume that Fukushima will cause another 60000 deaths in next 40-80 years.

Again, external exposure is immaterial to this discussion . .

Because you can eliminate internal exposure when you're living in very high background radiation area and the radioactive materials are in water you're drinking, bathing in or air you're breathing... Those are areas that have higher radiation levels than the permanently evacuated areas in Ukraine. As we know, studies for internal exposure haven't been conducted, at all: http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/24/4A/008 . Oops, there have been, multiple ones. But those results don't agree with your world view so you just ignore them.

Building nuclear reactors requires a large amount of capital, an extensive period of construction time, and government insurance.

First and foremost it requires convincing general population that the build is necessary, unlike fossil fuel plants which you can "just build" and poison neighbouring areas for next 40 or 60 years. Could you explain to me, why on earth French have the cheapest electricity in Europe if its so economically infeasible?

How many generations will have to deal with nuclear waste

Because breeder reactors are impossible to build and you can't enrich "used" fuel once more... If you want the answer why France is sending its nuclear waste to Germany and Russia: it's because Greenpeace protests made their only breeder reactor uneconomical! USA shot themselves in the foot with law that makes it illegal.
You may want to read something more about radioactivity: the longer something is radioactive (its half-life is longer) the less its radioactive (it's more stable). The "waste" is buried because of political (nuclear non proliferation) and public relations reasons not because its actually needed or because its re-use is economically infeasible. You can separate highly-radioactive isotopes from not highly radioactive ones, you recycle non-highly radioactive to regular fuel. The highly radioactive stuff will decay to stable isotopes in few decades, not centuries. Not to mention that we have reactors that can burn anything radioactive, not necessarily Uranium or Plutionum. Even if this would make the fuel 100 times more expensive, the electricity produced with it would be only few percent more expensive. In the end my children's children won't have more problem to worry about than I do.
All because of Soviet propaganda and now Greenpeace scaremongering. "It's invisible so it's lethal", just like cellphones. Or will you tell me that there aren't people that are scared of radio waves or that claim that they are sensitive to them? Or that there's another conspiracy of cellphone makers to hide those results and they are in fact causing millions of deaths around the world?

Priceless . . . so you are a pro-nuke and global warming denier . . . That fits well with your low knowledge to conviction ratio. Are you sure you are not also a creationist?

And you believe in power from unicorns and rainbows. Just like I don't deny that nuclear power kills people, I don't deny that global warming is happening. I say we don't have enough data (where did I saw tha

Certainly not daylight, but probably quite visible to any decent gamma ray detector. If you did a Google Earth but at the gamma or x-ray frequencies, the Irish Sea would certainly be the brightest mass of water anywhere in the world and quite possibly THE brightest mass of anything outside of the remnants of nuclear test sites.

Well, the one from the NRPB might be a better one to look at. There have certainly been more than 5 cases - indeed the only 5 I could see in this report is to a specific section in the references. The Gardner Report, which DOES mention 5 cases, refers to 5 cases that occurred in a specific time interval over the entire nation where 4 of those occurred in Seascale. The Gardner Report is the one which is the most-cited reference to childhood leukemia in Britain.

In fact, the table at the bottom-right for the Gardner Report is the most interesting for this purpose - a six-fold rise in leukemia incidents in the region surrounding Seascale with levels of leukemia remaining (a) constant and (b) at expected levels everywhere else over the same time period.

Radionuclide research groups *fried* the attempts by BNFL to conceal the link at the time and would doubtless be disgusted by the other posters here trying to attribute the cancers to "natural lead poisoning". I look forward to seeing these alleged papers "proving" that these distinguished experts were wrong and that a pseud-anonymous Slashdot poster is so vastly better and brighter that they can identify a wholly imagined lead isotope as the cause without having done an ounce of legwork.

Other links to papers that may be of interest:

• The Seascale childhood leukaemia cases-the mutation rates implied by paternal preconceptional radiation doses
• Childhood leukemia and radioactive discharges at Seascale
• Leukemia Clusters Near La Hague and Sellafield
• The CERRIE Report
• An index of anything I might have forgotten

"Strong support among the public?" means absolutely nothing when 92% and 55% of the population incorrectly defined the terms geo-engineering and climate engineering respectively. Abstract: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044006/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044006.pdf

Lying with statistics is always bullshit.

Academic, Political, Religious, Biz-C*O lying for money or privilege is a gross injustice to the public, which very regrettably is not punished by public floggings.

The 1987a SuperKAK measurements (at least) got the direction (approximately, +- 20 deg or so) and energy (again approximiately) of the incoming neutrinos; they came from the right direction (except for one, IIRC), and had "normal" energies, so the identification is pretty robust. The energies for this experiment were much higher. Now, for tachyons, that means that the 1987a guys should have been much faster, and arrived earlier. If the SuperKAK guys are smart (and they are) they should be looking through the old data right now for a FTL burst prior to 1987.

I am going out on a long limb here, but my physical intuition is tell me that supersymmetry may be involved. In simple supersymmetry, neutrino masses are zero, but there is some discussion out there where supersymmetric neutrinos are tachyonic.

I robustly predict a bunch of theoretical ... whimsy before this is resolved.

Research in random structure searching has been going on for a bit now, and been oddly successful. E.g. http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-8984/23/5/053201/?rss=2.0

Since you're especially interested in physics, I'd recommend magazines like Physics Today, which I guess is accessible from decent libraries in both online and dead-tree formats. It's not a research journal and is intended for the general audience, but is somewhat more advanced than the material you usually find online. The American Physical Society also carries an on-line journal "Physics" which is free to read and provides a view into what physicists from around the globe are doing. It provides commentary and explanations to notable articles published in the Physical Review journals that are only open to subscribers.

You may also want to check some open-access journals such as the New Journal of Physics, and the upcoming Physical Review X (no content yet). But reading "real" research papers doesn't usually makes you feel it's "engaging"..

What probably happened is that the scientists tried to illustrate the incredible precision of their measurements by illustrating what that'll translate to for a classical charge distribution.

The author of the article who apparently didn't pay as much attention in high school as you did just ran with it and mistook the analogy for the real thing describing the electron as a perfect sphere.

Most current theories assume a tiny electron dipole moment and that's what motivates this slow motion goose chase.

If the electron had a dipole moment that'll either mean if has a sub-structure or it'll be the first point particle observed to have a dipole moment.

I am pretty disenchanted with the state of theoretical physics these days and I don't have much faith in any particular prediction.

Especially since the implications are pretty pro-found. It'll mean that parity invariance and time reversal invariance no longer hold.

So I am not holding my breath expecting an elementary electric dipole to be found any time.

Some estimates for sea level rise this century come in at about two meters. An exponential process might lead to five meters: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/2/024002/fulltext

For the maximum possible sea level rise (expected under BAU carbon dioxide emissions eventually) 80 meters is calculated here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Here's a link (paywall) to the research paper and a free preprint, if anyone cares to read. These *** news sites are never able to publish a link to the original paper.