Slashdot Mirror

An amazingly schizophrenic site
When they are "explaining" they say things like what you posted

When they report the facts they say things like this.
http://www.livescience.com/374...

And when you look at the overall Antarctic ice graph

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-i...

It seems to be growing despite volcanoes under western Antarctica.

So indeed who knew ?

Who knew.

I thought everybody knew.

http://www.livescience.com/461...

Who knew. By god lets that stuff done away with before it triggers Yellowstone.

more than 33% of all CO2 comes from 1 nation. Later this year, it will move into the nation that has emitted the most CO2 since mid 1800s. Note that if we were REALLY serious about CO2, then we would go back at least 1000 years ago, in which case, China ALONE has emitted more than 1/2 of all CO2 that man has EVER emitted.

Now, we have far left freaks that scream about America which currently emits less than 15% of all CO2. In addition, it is DROPPING fast.
OTOH, China's continues to grow unabated. By 2020, China will account for more than 50% of all CO2 that is emitted yearly.
Not sure about this? Then look at the OBJECTIVE map of this as shown by OCO2 satellite.

CO2 will continue to climb until the far left and politicians will look OBJECTIVELY at the issue and quit trying to use it for their own purposes.

The Sun is a stable G2 dwarf, and over the short term (millenia/eons) its power output is stable to parts per ten thousand.

Sure, I really would like that to be true too. But that "fact" doesn't explain the Maunder minimum which appears to be a fluctuation in solar power output considerably greater than the threshold your assertion. I notice that some researchers are actually claiming that a 0.2 W per square meter change in solar output somehow causes climate changes on par with a supposed 2 W per square meter heating today from greenhouse gases (other than water vapor).

Interesting point. According to your theory, it should now be much colder than it was in the 1950s and 60s. Why the fuck isn't it? http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg

So where does NYC using 30% less than the American average come in with you calculations?

http://www.livescience.com/137...

The Sun is a stable G2 dwarf, and over the short term (millenia/eons) its power output is stable to parts per ten thousand.

Sure, I really would like that to be true too. But that "fact" doesn't explain the Maunder minimum which appears to be a fluctuation in solar power output considerably greater than the threshold your assertion. I notice that some researchers are actually claiming that a 0.2 W per square meter change in solar output somehow causes climate changes on par with a supposed 2 W per square meter heating today from greenhouse gases (other than water vapor).

I think this is typical of the current silliness in climate research that one can assert without supporting evidence that solar output doesn't change significant on the scale of millennia while ignoring the only known solar fluctuation which correlates with significant climate variations of the time.

We have natural caves on earth big enough to hold the great pyramid, so with the lighter gravity of mars, it would be expected to find even bigger caves. And then there are cave systems with hundreds of kilometers of passages.

It's also time to hit the fools with some hard facts:

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct | Motherboard

Acid Test: Rising CO2 Levels Killing Ocean Life | Conservation Climate

Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Deaths in China - NYTimes.com

Full Cost of Coal $500 Billion/Year in U.S., Harvard Study Finds | CleanTechnica

Coal's hidden costs top $345 billion in U.S.-study | Reuters

I don't care if people believe in global warming or climate change, fossil fuels are still killing us and this planet regardless.

Hmm.. the original article only seems to claim that the underground water is suitable for life, not that it was found.

Here is another source that does actually mention the type of life found: http://www.livescience.com/506...

Here is another article that actually mentions the life found: http://www.livescience.com/506...

A nation of "cyberchondria"s probably do bad to themselves, but, more importantly, feed a cyclic loop of social/economic behaviors encouraging self-diagnosis.

create a pipeline from the PNW down to southern CA. done.

of course it'd be expensive, but this is either an emergency, or it isn't. at least there aren't (as many) environmental concerns as there are for oil pipelines. if it leaks / breaks you get a ... water spill?

Anyone think to ask the PNW if this was okay?

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com...

http://www.livescience.com/469...

Seeing what the southwestern states have done to the Colorado river, you might not find the Pacific Northwest all that cooperative with that plan.

Because Climate Change stopped the controlled burns and built houses in wildfire prone areas.

And worse than the Dust Bowl? I'm afraid not.

Most of California's problems are caused by California.

But Afghanistan does have a lot of other resources, not including poppies.

http://www.livescience.com/476...

And you kept both completely shielded from any forms of media so that there was no way that they ever would associate cars with boys?

The female vervet monkey in this picture prefers to play with dolls. The male vervet monkey prefers cars. Do you think they were influenced by the media?

Men are told they can't get into child care, ok not because they, stupid but because they are not capable of controlling themselves.

Ever heard the sayings:
Men can't multitask?
Men don't ask for directions?
what about this article that described how women better at certain tasks:
http://www.livescience.com/470...
or this one https://www.americanexpress.co...

I have never thought women where less smart than men, in fact I was of the opinion that the where smarter.

Men are often portrayed in media as beer swilling, sex crazed, idiots that can't be pried away from watching sports.

To reference the Simpsons, which was mentioned in the last thread, rank the family in order of intelligence.

My guess would be:
Lisa, Marge, Maggie, Bart, Homer.

Giant Tesla Coils mounted on top of the high voltage cross-country transmission line towers.

The ONLY reason that it flatlined is because china's growth has slowed way down, combined with the west making massive cuts.

However, america's economy may actually lift china's, which will mean massive increases continue.

For those of you who do not understand this, this is REAL values as opposed to the assumed numbers for this article.

There may have been some individual station records broken in February 2015 but overall it was a warm winter across the US.

If you think that is how science is done, you probably need to go back to watching lady gaga and let the adults talk.

Here is what the real study would be. People notice lung cancer incidents are on the rise and people with cancer admit to being smokers. Someone analyzes the data and draws the correlation between people with lung cancer and smoking. They find a connection in the data and make policy accordingly. Someone gets a hold of the data and does their own analysis and says Yep, they are right or no they are wrong.

But here is some interesting facts for you that make smoking and cancer not as cut and dry as you think it is. In today's pop culture, it seems it is a given that if you smoke you will get cancer. "Fewer than 10 percent of lifelong smokers will get lung cancer". "In the game of risk, you're more likely to have a condom break than to get cancer from smoking." but from an analysis perspective " Smoking accounts for 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of lung cancer deaths; the risk of developing lung cancer is about 23 times higher in male smokers compared to non-smokers; smoking is associated with increased risk of at least 15 types of cancer".

So lets stop pretending that something like smoking and cancer is so obvious that the tobacco company's denials were baseless.

The G.O.P. is the party of stupid

The G.O.P. even introduced the term

http://thehill.com/video/in-th...

But among Jindal's most provocative suggestions was the demand that the GOP needed to "stop insulting the intelligence of voters" — and display more intelligence itself. Jindal's comments seemed targeted squarely at conservative candidates in Senate races whose comments on rape and abortion appeared to torpedo their electoral chances.

"We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments," Jindal said.

The Louisiana governor also warned that Republicans were too associated with "big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes."

"We must not be the party that simply protects the well-off so they can keep their toys," Jindal said. "We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive."

it's a good strategy: identify something rich people need and want, then wrangle the idiots with fearmongering into supporting that agenda, even if it hurts the poor idiots. they're idiots, they can't even understand they're hurting themselves. so you have people without adequate healthcare for example, screaming low iq fears about obamacare

this doesn't mean there are no intelligent conservative people, they do exist. stupid liberals also exist

but it's just that if you meet a stupid person, they are more likely to be a conservative, because their simplistic dimwitted way of thinking about the world matches conservative ideology more closely

http://www.livescience.com/181...

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

Far left continues to blame the west while ignoring the fact that china's production is more than the entire west. see for yourself.
As long as everybody points elsewhere and screams about per capita while ignoring the bulk of CO2, we have no chance.

An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.

Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.

The earth's internal core is about 6000 C (source), and carbon in diamond form boils at 4027 C (source).

So, yes, diamond is still a known material.

The Sahara as we know it now exists mainly because during 'roman times' (+/-500 years) the woods there got lumbered down.

Here is the timeline — already linked to once before:

• 22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended 250 miles further south than it does today.
• 10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers.
• 9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation growth, and animal migrations lead to well established human settlements, including the introduction of domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats.
• 7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides with population return to the Nile Valley and the beginning of pharaonic society.

Then there is this article, in which a NASA scientist explains the climate-change with changes in Earth's orbit. It also dates the end of the "Green Sahara" at about 5500 years ago. Or, roughly, three thousand years before the nameless momma-wolf suckled the fateful human twins...

Can one get any more wrong than blaming Roman lumber industry for Sahara's climate-change? I suppose, one can. But you are certainly within the top 1% territory...

Lots of other stuff on the subject is along the same line, but nothing blames the humans today. Whether the humans of the times blamed each other, was my original question.

I wonder, on what the changes of climate, that eventually turned Sahara into an inhospitable desert, were blamed by the shamans of the time...

Could it possibly have been the burning of too much of the wrong fuels by the selfish population? Or some other sacrilege?

Given that even some animals engage in fellatio I'd be surprised if it didn't occur amongst humans well before recorded history started. The best historians could do is find the earliest evidence for it, I don't see how anyone could reasonably say it didn't happen earlier though.

The last time CO2 levels were this high we had a massive die off.

CO2 levels have not been this high in any time period we've been able to provide an estimate for. Look at the historical CO2 levels against temperature.

Yow! That graph is pretty frightening. CO2 basically goes off the chart in the present, way above anything in the past..

That's beside the point: the thing to observe is that that graph clearly indicates that climate temperature is not significantly tracking CO2 levels. While there may be some effect, it's demonstrably not what drives temperature in the graph.

We can reach this conclusion because in the graph, historically speaking, temperature and CO2 track each other very well; but when CO2 was pushed separately consequent to our emissions, temperature did not follow.

Sorry, not enough information in that graph to draw that conclusion. This is a graph where the smallest division on the time axis is 10,000 years. It's clear that carbon dioxide and temperature correlate together very well, but it's impossible to tell which drives which-- note that there's also the possibility that they both feed back into each other, and that higher temperatures increase carbon dioxide AND higher carbon dioxide drives higher temperature.

In any case, you'd want measurements from more than just Antarctic temperature.

Here's a lecture from University of Barcelona pointing out what you just said, but with better graphs and drawing the conclusion that you can't draw a conclusion: http://www.am.ub.edu/~jmiralda...

And here's an article from 2012, on the other hand, saying that newer studies show that in fact higher carbon dioxide did cause the rising temperatures at the end of the ice age: http://www.usnews.com/news/art...
With a nice graph here: http://www.livescience.com/194...

There are changes when you have kids, I suspect women change more than men:
http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...
http://www.livescience.com/363...
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...

The other thing is men can have kids at an older age, and many of these "brilliant" ones don't have kids till later if at all. If women wait till later to have children, many of them end up not being fertile enough or have problems finding a mate (coz more males prefer the prettier younger more fertile ones, while females seem fine with higher status older and uglier males).

He was also against waste in government. Granted, some of his positions on waste were not well founded, see http://www.livescience.com/484..., but a lot of the things he pointed to were wasteful and unnecessary. Who can be for government waste? Is government waste a humanitarian thing? Paying people to do stupid stuff? I agree that cutting food stamps to keep tax breaks for the uber wealthy is morally, ethically, and economically wrong, but there is more to Dr. Coburn than his party line votes.

Or, maybe your understanding of the history of our political parties isn't so strong. Sorry for the not so technical reference but it gives you an idea of what I'm mean. Or political parties believe systems swapped slowly over time.

http://www.livescience.com/342...

There is no such evidence

Yes, actually, there is.

http://www.livescience.com/430...
http://www.genome.gov/27556491

under same circumstances in our days the death toll would be the same

No, the existence of antibiotics would change the outcome dramatically.

And as that IF does not exist,

Your unsourced, un-cited assertions do not eliminate the data suggesting that some heritable resistance to Y pestis exists, or that the Black Plague outbreaks in the 1300's had noticeable effects on the genetic makeup of the population of Europe.

They're more common than you'd think. This isn't the first movie to be sent to North Korea. These groups (many of them staffed and financially backed by North Korean defectors) have been sending a steady diet of South Korean dramas and K-pop to North Korea for several years now. It's actually what convinced many of them to defect - it made them realize their government had been lying to them about South Korea being a pauper nation.

This year is likely the warmest year on record with the rate of Antarctic ice loss tripling in the last decade and Greenland's ice loss worse than predicted. But believe whatever you want to believe, no matter what the facts.

http://www.livescience.com/105...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Probably because it has some basis in fact.

Michael Mann
http://m.livescience.com/41331...

Read, don't read, I don't care.

http://m.livescience.com/41331...

Michael Mann

Do you even read?

Climate alarmist say the frenquency will increase quite often.

We dont need the make up predictions. They do that on all their own.

John Cook
http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Michael Mann
http://www.livescience.com/414...

James Hansen
http://www.c-span.org/video/?3...

As asked.

John Cook
http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Michael Mann
http://www.livescience.com/414...

James Hansen
http://www.c-span.org/video/?3...

And this is just one link each, there are many many many more.

John Cook
http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Michael Mann
http://www.livescience.com/414...

James Hansen
http://www.c-span.org/video/?3...

I hate to break the news to you, but these so-called "Millenials" you keep ranting about do not exist. And if they existed, theyd' all be 14 years old.

I hate to break it to you but the group called the "Millennials" are not called that because they were born at the beginning of this millennium but because they were born at the end of the last one. Generally that means from early/mid 1980's to 2000.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Millennial
http://www.livescience.com/38061-millennials-generation-y.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/millennial+generation

I'm just a lowly engineer, but for me "dark matter" has never passed the sniff test. It's a kludge factor thrown in to make equations balance. And a kludge factor so huge that "dark matter" is supposed to outweigh all of the observable matter in the entire universe. The only reason this doesn't sound ridiculous is because we've been hearing it for so long.

If you need a kludge factor that big, it is far more likely that the equations are wrong.

There are other possible explanations. For example, if the speed of light were a function of space and time, then the situation changes completely. All observations of the distant/ancient universe are suddenly thrown into question; the interactions within that distant/ancient universe were also different from what we see locally, today. This particular theory (variability of C) is one that crops up periodically, most recently in 2013. It is difficult to prove, but really, it's no more unlikely than the existence of huge amounts of dark matter that stubbornly refuse to interact with the known universe.

Yes, but Variable c would open up many, far far more dire problems than Dark Matter.

Scientists aren't suggesting that dark matter is definitely a particle. That's one guess, but it could very well be some artifact of some underlying physical reality that we just don't understand yet just like you suggest. But the speed of light isn't variable.

I'm just a lowly engineer, but for me "dark matter" has never passed the sniff test. It's a kludge factor thrown in to make equations balance. And a kludge factor so huge that "dark matter" is supposed to outweigh all of the observable matter in the entire universe. The only reason this doesn't sound ridiculous is because we've been hearing it for so long.

If you need a kludge factor that big, it is far more likely that the equations are wrong.

There are other possible explanations. For example, if the speed of light were a function of space and time, then the situation changes completely. All observations of the distant/ancient universe are suddenly thrown into question; the interactions within that distant/ancient universe were also different from what we see locally, today. This particular theory (variability of C) is one that crops up periodically, most recently in 2013. It is difficult to prove, but really, it's no more unlikely than the existence of huge amounts of dark matter that stubbornly refuse to interact with the known universe.

Perhaps it came from a mineral called ringwoodite which is an ocean of water locked up deep in the earth. During period of vulcanism, the mineral outgases water to the surface.

I find it much more plausible that our oceans were derived from internal water than that asteroids deposited it. I mean, really, how much water could your average meteor deposit? Looking at the amount of water on our planet's surface, we would have to assume a long, horrendous bombardment. Asteroid material would then account for a large percentage of the earth's crust, and I don't hear anyone suggesting that.

And don't get me started on that whole "Theia" hypothesis. The only evidence for a planetary impact is the fact that we have a moon, and it's larger than one would expect. Very weak argument.

Where do you get this "end of the world" thing? As for the claim of "alarmism", do you not remember the flu strain several years ago that tended to kill healthy people in the prime of their life, rather than "immunocompromised hosts"?

It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.

Pro tip #2 - Understand what you are talking about.

Do you know what does predict lower IQ more meaningfully?

believing racist shit

even mining gold on Earth is cheaper than an on asteroid.

You are aware that many of the mineral deposits on the Earth that have high quantities of rare minerals likely have an extra terrestrial origin. In other words, companies have been mining asteroids for decades already.

What you miss in your presumption that it is so easy to get minerals from the crust of the Earth is that you have to deal with a constant 10 m/s^2 acceleration for stuff you do here on the Earth. Most of the really easy to reach deposits have already been exploited on the Earth, so what is happening now are activities to extract those resources by digging down deeper into the crust or literally removing whole mountains to get at that stuff. It isn't cheap or nearly so easy as you are suggesting.

Rio Tinto, to give an example of an existing mining company here on the Earth, already spends many billions of dollars simply to open up a basic mining operation to extract simple resources like copper or gold. Such deposits that can be done productively in that same manner are increasingly hard to find as well I might add. No doubt there are still as of yet undiscovered major deposits of some of these minerals, but surface minerals that can be easily mined and sorted out to various elements in not nearly as easy as you are suggesting either. If you can find a deposit of iron that is 5% or so in concentration, there are several companies I could point to right now that would buy that land and dig it up.... if that was easily obtained from surface extraction methods.

My point is that building a mining operation on an asteroid with current technology for spaceflight is on roughly the same scale of costs as is needed now for doing a terrestrial mining operation for much poorer quality of raw materials. Many of the asteroids that can be mined practically pass right by the Earth, and in a few cases even pass between the Earth & the Moon. Those can be efficiently mined in total, where some of them definitely have minerals far more concentrated in some rare elements than is the case on the Earth. Those will be the first extraterrestrial mining targets.

Of course one of the most valuable minerals in space right now is simply ordinary water, usually in the form of ice. It is cheaper and easier to capture ice from the outer Solar System or even from passing comets than it is to launch it from the Earth. That happens to be the business plan for Planetary Resources, who unfortunately lost their first spacecraft in the explosion of the Antares rocket built by Orbital Science. They have actual hardware going into space, which should show they are serious about the idea and are willing to spend some big bucks to get there.

It will really be the market place that will decide if it is worth the cost of mining asteroids or not, and I will find it interesting to see what people pontificating about this concept will say a century from now. I don't think those space-based mining operators need to be subsidized either, and some people with money are trying to make it happen regardless of what you think about the idea.