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It omits the nearly full, nearly perigee moon that is so insanely bright you can't see another thing in the sky.

Oh, well. I guess I'll look again Saturday or Sunday.

Actual numbers can be found here: at this NASA site

This comet isn't exactly one to get hyped about. It's not that bright. Magnitude 3 is about as bright as the Little Dipper. You won't see it from the city and you have to know where to look to identify it from better conditions.

Of course, naked eye comets always get a brief mention in the news, even when dim, but this one caught attention because of the dramatic increase in brightness. It's all the more surprising when you consider that this is a short period comet in a relatively circular orbit. It makes it's close approach to the sun frequently, so it doesn't tend to brighten much as it makes the approach, and it has no tail. Even more remarkable, it's currently moving away from the sun, so it would normally be expected to dim, not brighten. Why? Well, it may have had an unusual outgassing event or have impacted another object. Beyond that, I don't have any good guesses.

The brightest comet in decades was McNaught, which made a show last winter. Unfortunately, it was very close to the sun, so it rose barely after sunrise and set barely after sunset and was therefore hard to observe. However, it quickly got brighter than Venus and eventually was so bright (M -6) that a clever observer in clear, dry air could spot it during the day, a scant few degrees from the sun.

It was a little more friendly to observers in the southern hemisphere, and its huge, striated tail was spectacular. Here's a picture.

Kohoutek wasn't all that bright. Probably the best observer's comet last century was Hale-Bopp, which was very photogenic and had a remarkable double tail. I wasn't alive for Halley, which has a lot of historical significance, but it's latest pass wasn't very impressive.

i'm talking like this

or this

i'm talking like this

or this

The original designers of all that equipment have either retired or died.

Not completely - I work as a NASA subcontractor, and I work with a few people who were around for the tail end of Apollo (granted, most are looking to retire soon - but they are still very sharp). But the real problem is information rot. Think about it - all the designs and reports from the 1950's and 1960's are written in paper. Fourty year old paper and photographs. Even in the best of storage conditions, these things degrade. I've been shown original documentation from wind tunnel studies in the Apollo era, and you can't glean meaningful data anymore. The Schlieren photograps are so washed out, you can't discern the shock structures anymore. Printed plots are faded. So much data is lost. Not all of it though. A lot of it got scanned a number of years ago, and posted online. In fact, much of it is public, on the NASA Technical Reports Server.

Why bother to design a lander that runs off of sunlight and generates its own oxygen from waste products when it's going to be launched by people who can't tell the difference between yards and meters?

Please, now. Read this report from IEEE Spectrum. It was as much an organizational problem as a units one. FTA:

Even if what ruined the Mars Climate Orbiter mission can be overcome, it should not be forgotten. The analogies with the Challenger disaster are illuminating, as several direct participants in the flight have independently told Spectrum.

In that situation, managers chose to cling to assumptions of "goodness" even as engineers insisted the situation had strayed too far into untested conditions, too far "away from goodness." The engineers were challenged to "prove it ISN'T safe," when every dictum of sound flight safety teaches that safety is a quality that must be established--and reestablished under new conditions--by sound analysis of all hazards. "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat" was the advice given to one wavering worker, who eventually went along with the launch decision.

Similarly, various versions of the trajectory debate in the final days of the flight indicate that in the face of uncertainty, decision-makers clung to the assumption of goodness; assertions of trajectory trouble had to be proved rigorously. Just the opposite attitude should have ruled the debate.

Other complaints about JPL go more directly to its existing style. One of Spectrum's chief sources for this story blamed that style on "JPL's process of 'cowboy' programming, and their insistence on using 30-year-old trajectory code that can neither be run, seen, or verified by anyone or anythin g external to JPL." He went on: "Sure, someone at Lockheed made a small error. If JPL did real software configuration and control, the error never would have gotten by the door." Other sources commented that this problem was particularly severe within the JPL navigation team, rather than being a JPL-wide complaint.

NASA says that Saturn's rings are being pulled into the planet... and if a Lunar Ring isn't properly created, the same would happen here. ...small moons that orbit through the outermost regions of the ring system are gaining angular momentum at the expense of the rings. "During the next few hundred million years," explains Cuzzi, "the outer half of the rings will fall toward the planet, and the little moons -- called shepherd satellites -- will be flung away. This is a young dynamical system."

Saturn's rings are composed from the same amount of material held in Mimas (the Death Star-looking moon). Mimas is around 130 miles wide, and the rings are falling into a safe-for-us gas giant millions of miles away. Our Moon is around 2300 miles wide, and for every fragment that gets flung outwards by gravity, another piece will be flung inwards. And those fragments will eventually be falling on you, me, and everyone else.

If we want a nice shiny ring, may I suggest Chinese toys painted with lead paint? Or maybe your own private Sputnik?

The project may usher in a new generation of balloon-borne scientific missions that cost less than sending instruments into space. Scientists also can test an instrument on a balloon before making a commitment to launch it on a rocket. The balloon, with its gondola of scientific instruments, was launched successfully on the morning of October 3 from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Sounds like someone is a little excited about their balloon flight. First of all, congratulations on a successful flight!

Now telescopes flying on balloons are not new.

HERO (High Energy Remote Observatory) Balloon project flew it's 4th flight last spring from Ft. Sumner. http://wwwastro.msfc.nasa.gov/research/hero/hero_index.html

GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) flew back in 2006.

Caltech's Boomerang balloon http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~lgg/boomerang_front.htm

And many more http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/

I am always happy when a colleague has a successful flight...

The project may usher in a new generation of balloon-borne scientific missions that cost less than sending instruments into space. Scientists also can test an instrument on a balloon before making a commitment to launch it on a rocket. The balloon, with its gondola of scientific instruments, was launched successfully on the morning of October 3 from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Sounds like someone is a little excited about their balloon flight. First of all, congratulations on a successful flight!

Now telescopes flying on balloons are not new.

HERO (High Energy Remote Observatory) Balloon project flew it's 4th flight last spring from Ft. Sumner. http://wwwastro.msfc.nasa.gov/research/hero/hero_index.html

GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) flew back in 2006.

Caltech's Boomerang balloon http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~lgg/boomerang_front.htm

And many more http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/

I am always happy when a colleague has a successful flight...

If Galileo's telescope launched itself, went to Jupiter, circled the moons, took pictures, calculated anomalies (=decided what was mathematically interesting), and corrected its own course and adjusted its own eyepiece to take even more detailed pictures and then sent them back for another researcher to analyze, then yes.

If you read http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/ it's notable that Cassini is a nuclear-powered robot that processes data "in situ" from remote and direct sensing equipment. It's not just a remote-control telescope; it navigates independently (by command, not direct control) and several of the instruments pre-process data and *decide* what's worth looking at prior to data transmission. If the robot sends data and a request to look at some cool anomaly, is the person receiving the message a discoverer?

Only one force in the known universe is capable of unleashing such a devastating blast.

These Cassini images are interesting, too, and I think relate to the main story.

Here's what the previous one looked like for the last go-round - However, it had turbofans, not rockets:

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/movie/LLRV/HTML/EM-0019-06.html

I can only assume they'll be required to carry a certain amount of weight, but the details haven't been released yet.

"Well, if you could do something 40 or 50 years ago, and you can't do it now, that, by definition is slipping."

Fair enough. How about if you could do it 10 years ago?

NASA's Lunar Prospector launched in early 1998 (so a little less than ten years ago today). Are you saying there is no way we could send a satellite to the moon like we did 10 years ago?

Though this sounds like a very interesting project, the use of balloons (and sounding rockets) for instruments that might later fly in space is not new. Cosmic ray studies have been using balloons for since 1912.

What may be new here is using balloons for instruments that need to be aimed precisely. Detectors on previous balloons were usually omni-directional, or could make measurements over large surface angles. Their Sun-tracking technology aiming sounds interesting, and I look forward to reading about their results

I really don't think we are slipping behind..

And not only are we going back to the http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/mmb/why_moon.htmlmoon we are setting up a base there.

What?
Gee what about this Lunar orbiter? http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb.html
Take a look at the date.
Yea it was 40 years ago.
Your right it isn't like the US has done anything recently. Like say a mission to the asteroid belt http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2007-043A
Or a fly by of Mercury http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2004-030A
Or a mission to Pluto...
But what about the moon?
Well there was at least two missions to the moon in the 1990s Clementine and the Lunar Prospector.
Does it look like China is getting interested in space? Yes.
Seems like you are getting a little worked up with the US just having a 40 year lead at this point.

What?
Gee what about this Lunar orbiter? http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb.html
Take a look at the date.
Yea it was 40 years ago.
Your right it isn't like the US has done anything recently. Like say a mission to the asteroid belt http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2007-043A
Or a fly by of Mercury http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2004-030A
Or a mission to Pluto...
But what about the moon?
Well there was at least two missions to the moon in the 1990s Clementine and the Lunar Prospector.
Does it look like China is getting interested in space? Yes.
Seems like you are getting a little worked up with the US just having a 40 year lead at this point.

What?
Gee what about this Lunar orbiter? http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarorb.html
Take a look at the date.
Yea it was 40 years ago.
Your right it isn't like the US has done anything recently. Like say a mission to the asteroid belt http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2007-043A
Or a fly by of Mercury http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2004-030A
Or a mission to Pluto...
But what about the moon?
Well there was at least two missions to the moon in the 1990s Clementine and the Lunar Prospector.
Does it look like China is getting interested in space? Yes.
Seems like you are getting a little worked up with the US just having a 40 year lead at this point.

Yeah, we're falling behind.

China? Yawn...

What the poster was trying to get at is that current electronic noses are designed to detect only a narrow range of chemicals, and are unable to detect anything else. For example, an electronic nose which is able to detect the smell of carrots could be brought into a kitchen where someone is frying up some bacon, baking some bread, and wiping up a spill with lemon scented cleanser, and it would not detect a thing. Of course, that's the way they are made. The most common example would be roadside breathalysers, which detect alcohol.

The Caltech nose is designed to be a broad "spectrum" device. It would be able to smell the bacon, bread, and lemon cleanser. Of course, they are not the first. NASA has one, as does the University of Warwick.

The only question I have is this: If a person who can't see is blind, and a person who can't hear is deaf, what is a person who can't smell called?

Good post. One correction though, it is from NASA the space agency - there is no "National Aeronautics Safety Administration" - at least that I am aware of. Here is the link to the ASRS site, where people can read "CALLBACK", the monthly NASA safety bulletin based on submissions to the Aviation Safety Reporting System.

http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

The ASRS program was set up so pilots could anonymously report safety issues, including those where they might admit to making a violation of regulations, without fear of enforcement action. Since pilots wouldn't trust the very FAA or NTSB that regulates them to keep the anonymous aspect another agency was needed to receive, tabulate, and analyze the reports. NASA was selected.

NASA just released a press statement from Mike Griffin (NASA Administrator) regarding the pilot survey:

RELEASE: 07-230

Statement by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin on Pilot Survey

WASHINGTON - Since becoming NASA administrator, I have been an advocate for openness and transparency in the pursuit of NASA research and analysis. As a general practice, I believe that NASA research and data should be widely available and subject to review and scrutiny.

I have just been made aware of the issue involving information from a NASA survey of airline pilots regarding safety issues being withheld under the Freedom of Information Act.

I am reviewing this Freedom of Information Act request to determine what, if any, of this information may legally be made public. NASA should focus on how we can provide information to the public -- not on how we can withhold it. Therefore, I am asking NASA's Associate Administrator for Aeronautics Research, Lisa Porter, to look into this situation, including ensuring that all survey data are preserved, and report to me as soon as possible.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/oct/HQ_07230_Griffin_NOAMS_statement.html

No, they didn't. Where's the statistics?

Here's your database, fully searchable right on the web. You just can't get any of the info in a non-anonymized format. That's what the news media is actually whining about but they won't tell you that. They want to tie aviation incidents and reports back to individuals and NASA says, no. Anonymous surveys shall remain anonymous and they'd rather destroy the data than allow it to fall into the wrong hands and break the promise of anonymity they gave when gathering the surveys in the first place.

It is my understanding that all this survey information which NASA collected was done so under the same promise of confidentiality that governs the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) Program . Therefore NASA is correct in not releasing it, and the news media are actually the villains here who are trying to put a slanted spin on the story to try and make NASA look like the bad guys. If this data was gathered under a confidentiality rule, then neither the media nor the public has any right to see it, it is not "public info" despite the fact that tax dollars funded the program.

Much of this "information" was gathered from the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) which mandates confidentiality for all pilots, air traffic controllers, mechanics, etc who voluntarily report this info on aviation safety issues and incidents.

As a private pilot, I am glad to hear that NASA is taking this measure to prevent disclosure of confidential data to the public. In the day and age of the federal government spying on its own citizens, and stripping our freedoms away, I find it quite refreshing to find that a federal agency (NASA) is actually standing up to its obligation and sticking to its guns to keep confidential that information which was voluntarily given to NASA under the promise that it would REMAIN CONFIDENTIAL.

And now we have some fucking news media asshats are trying to put a bogus spin on the story to try to make NASA look like a villain here to get their grubby mitts on the confidential portions of non-public ASRS information which they never had any business to see in the first place. But you'll never hear them report the real story why this aviation safety data was gathered in the first place and the whole truth of the ASRS program or even the fact that anyone in the world can get the anonymized report info straight from the website, you just can't get any personal data, or personally identifying data from ASRS, and that's what the media asshats are clammoring to get access to.

NASA keeps a voluntary database of incidents/accidents and safety concerns from pilots. The idea is that it can be totally anonymous. They want pilots to feel free to report safety concerns without fear of being fired or discriminated against by their current airline. The database is fully on-line and you can search it. Look at the facts: The American airline industry completes thousands of flights every day without a single issue. That is friggen AMAZING! The ATC has a very hard job, and they do it well. A big part of why things are so safe is the over-zealous approach pilots (most pilots) take to safety. There are several different ways to report problems. If you are at a major airport and break the rules (in a small plane for example) you can usually expect an FAA inspector to meet you at the tarmac to pull your ticket on the spot. If you don't take safety seriously word gets around fast. Your fellow pilots don't appreciate it.

http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

This program has been going for years and years. It helps make the skies above you safer. If there is an increase it is likely due to one of the major trends affecting aviation today. Fewer airports, more airplanes with smaller passenger sizes, more flights, younger pilots, etc. I highly doubt NASA is trying to deep-six some scary fact, they probably just didn't want to pay to deal with the fallout from a service that costs them dollars. They do it for free in the interest of safety. They should be applauded for their years of service to the aviation industry.

Keep in mind that the ASRS is in ADDITION to the NTSB and FAA programs for saftey (which also has searchable online-database).

Ultimately, economics is far more important than "coolness".

I strongly disagree. Somehow, within the last 50 years or so, there has been a significant shift in this country away from doing science for the sake of science and towards doing it for monetary gain only. To put it in terms a strict economist could understand, the following inventions were a direct result of the shuttle program:
The most accurate topographical map of the Earth, nerf gliders, and new alloys used in golf clubs.

We, as a country that can afford to do so, need to invest in science, art, and culture as a whole as part of humanity's quest for knowledge, experience, and understanding of the human condition and the world around us. Honestly, what would the immediate benefit of ending manned space flight be? That's right, not a fucking thing. And PLEASE do not quote me the dollar figure that would be saved. The money would go nowhere useful and invariable line some rich-prick-trustfund-baby's bank account by way of saved tax dollars. There are countless other useless/wasteful government pursuits (such as the Iraq war) that could be curbed first. Conversely, killing scientific research stifles creativity and constrains the human spirit. Once we have successfully tanked all scientific research (and killed off those branches of science with limited financial benefit, like Anthropology), we'll be able to start focusing on tanking other "non-lucrative" human pursuits, like art. Oh! Just think of the joy of automatons rolling around producing more "units", resulting in more revenue! Now THAT is exciting! Fuck you, and the entire movement of individuals looking to limit scientific research.

Sincerley,
Someone interested in science and the well being of humanity

Do your own homework and research your own subjects.

I've already done so.

You're the one spewing empirically disproved ideas. The last link in particular is extremely pointed, direct and concise in its destruction of your blatantly false assertion.

And you have the audacity to accuse me of posing strawmen. Go back under your bridge, troll.

Space program? You must be kidding right? Check this out: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/log/ ...and that's just the mission log for Mars. They have multiple redundancy for critical systems and yet that doesn't make them immune from failures. No software is ever bug free. The more complex, the more the likelihood of bugs. Once you have reduced the bugs to an acceptable level, the market will demand a new version with more functionality and so more bugs.

This Nasa space shuttle faq lists endeavour's cost at 1.7 billion. Maybe they just rounded off, but a third of a billion seems significant to me.

It also lists the launch costs for a shuttle at about $450 million. I don't know if that's just the launch itself or if that includes the turn around costs. Of course - the article doesn't list similar numbers for the Soyuz - but it seems that while reusable - the shuttle still is exponentially more expensive. Although - I don't know of anything else that can get as much weight to orbit as the shuttle.

should read the story of these two amazing machines. There's a lot that's wrong with NASA but there's so much that's right, too -- and this is proof positive.

I agree wholeheartedly, but most of the "regular" people giving NASA bad rap do it since they are conspiracy freaks. One of my buddies here is such a freak and he constantly keeps bugging me with various suitable entangled plots about how NASA hid a UFO or lied about the rovers or whatever.

The latest thing is that some photo is floating around that apparently makes one of the panels appear is if it has no dust, while the others have. The conspiracy interpretation? Someone on the Mars "set" cleaned *one* of the panels, forgot to clean the other ones, shot it like that, didn't notice only one of the panels is clean, and released the photos like this.

I've not seen the photo but even like that I gave the dude about 10 more likely explanations (the panel was at a different angle, so not reflecting light, so the dust is less visible, or the panel was in a shadow, or behind a part, etc. etc.), but can someone point me to the said photo so I can shut this guy up once and for all.

BTW, for fans of NASA (and users of RSS videocast player like Miro), this is NASA's excellent high-def videocast: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/rss/podfeed-hd.xml

I like to watch what they're working on, and even shed the occasional tear in astonishment about what humanity has achieved as a whole thanks to them and people like them :P ... Ok I'm sentimental like that about science and space exploration...

...and thus they will both have fluid dynamic behaviors when vibrating (waves) at the interface of another fluid.
Wave action happens at the disturbance interface (involving the propagation of and/or transfer of energy) between fluids of different densities.
The Air/Water fluid interface where one observes common "waves" are observed as water waves because the air is transparent (but it too has waves).
The difference here, is that we have two air masses of different temperatures and humidities (thus having differing densities) interfacing as fluids AND one of them happens to be an air mass that contains visible moisture in the form of clouds.
It is likely that this type of air/air fluid "wave action" happens frequently at the interface between differing atmospheric air masses (AKA fronts), but in this example the clouds made it easily visible.
Nice Image too: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/images/undularbore/redgreen_big.gif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave

Well, from what we know there ought to be some electrostatic effects going on... but all the clearing events we've seen so far look like they've been wind events. (Not necessarily dust devils-- some of the clearing events have occurred at night. And we see them on Opportunity, where we haven't seen actual dust devils.) Many of the images--e.g., this one show clear wind tails on the shadow post of the cal target and elsewhere. For terrestrial use, thin-film PV has to be both cheap and also durable-- the Earth envrionment is pretty corrosive. There are a couple of thin film technologies that are coming along, but it seems to be incremental progress, along with incremental increases in manufacturing capacity. I'll bet on the progress continuing, so rather than a breakthrough, we'll just keep seeing better and cheaper panels each year moving progressively into more markets. There really isn't a "tipping point"-- market penetration just happens step by step, as the highest cost of electricity and the highest sunlight availability markets progressively become economically competitive.

1. Your memory is flawed. A few magazines (Time and Newsweek) made a big deal about it, the same way they do about the "Summer of the Shark". That does not make it accepted science. Look to the journals themselves if you doubt me. (I hope you appreciate that it's difficult for me to "prove the negative" here—i.e., the absence of journal articles dealing with the topic.)
2. Here is one site that says 2005 tied with 1998. Here is one that says 2005 is the hottest. Here is NASA's site. The fact that you think it was "during the early 1900's, around the depression era" suggests you've either been (a) reading sites that spread disinformation, or (b) didn't understand that they were talking about US temperatures and not global temperatures. (The US record year happened during the dust bowl—not a coincidence, I'd guess. We've currently come within a couple hundredths of a degree of passing that record.)
3. The land bridge has to do with sea levels, not sea ice. As for the 20% figure, since you seem to doubt it, here's a site for that, as well. As for why the sea levels wouldn't have risen due to significant sea-ice melt, maybe it's because the ice was in the sea already? When an ice cube melts in a glass of water, it does not (significantly) raise the level of water in that glass. You're thinking of the ice melting off of land—e.g., Greenland or Antarctica.

"...100% of 8 PS3s indefinitely is preferable, from what he says, to the costly little slices of "real" supercomputers he tried to rent before."

Actually, it's preferable to me as well. He was getting $5k in NSF grant money for those runs. Which I helped pay for. I've no problem with that, but this is obviously a better deal from my tax-paying perspective.

One of the things he's researching is whether or not gravity waves should actually be detectable. We've already spent large amounts of money searching for them, without success. Then there's LISA, http://lisa.jpl.nasa.gov/WHATIS/intro.html which should fly in 2015.

If he should find that they are undetectable, or that their detection would require technologies we don't yet have, and his results are corroborated, *serious* savings would ensue. Achieving those savings from a corporate equipment donation valued at $3200, and a single researchers' time, would be sweet.

Yes, the models are constantly updated. As far as I know, NASA depends on the NOAA's Space Environment Center for it's historical and predicted solar activity data. The article by D. Whitlock on page 4 of this Orbital Debris Quarterly News (PDF) has some details. I see that the "near term" prediction, usually about two years, is getting shorter and shorter as the SEC hasn't predicted solar flux beyond Dec. 2007.

SOHO isn't predicting the solar minimum until Jan or Mar of 2008. The article seems premature. http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/pickoftheweek/old/05oct2007/

Aaaand ... I was completely of the mark. I was thinking about the Sun doing a "magnetic flip", but apparently I'm a flop: her poles will reverse in 2012. Sorry.

In any case, during reversal the magnetic field does not go away, it only gets weaker and develops several more magnetic poles, at unpredictable locations.

A rebuttal:

a) The amount of incoming radiation DOES change though. The fluctuation does correlate to current trends, better then CO2 levels do. Current hypothesis show a direct link between cloud formation and solar output, and a direct link between cloud levels and energy available for absorption. Given that the highest guess for a doubling of CO2 (some guessed number) results in a increase of 2 wm2 (from 2 wm2 current hypothesis) potential warming, it is strong dwarfed by the change of 120 wm2 that can be the affect of a cloud. To the study concerning the affects of cosmic rays (still understudy, but very interesting, and marks a strong relationship): http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/sky-experiment_2.pdf Calling the Sun and it's actions, especially when Mars, Jupiter and several other planets are experiencing the same thing "irrelevant" kinda of a strong but incorrect statement.

b) Kinda wrong. According to the Global Warming Hypothesis, if CO2 was the major affect warming the atmosphere, it would affect the Troposphere the most, with the Troposphere being warmer then the surface. BUT, after the aforementioned satellite studies, they found that the Troposphere is 1C cooler then the surface. Link: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=1824

c) A large fraction. 14% of the increase. 85% is still natural, and that means a whopping total of 3-4% of the total amount of CO2 is from our fossil fuel release. A good page on the true amounts is laid out here: http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html Before you start trying to chop down the messenger, look at the references. The EPA and the IPCC. And the site adds in the amount of Water Vapor to the affect. Something you have not brought up, even though it is the largest greenhouse gas, amounting to 95% of the total affect.

d) The oceans absorb and release CO2 based on their temperature. There are both the largest absorber and largest releaser of CO2. 20 times what humans produce. And the ocean can easily absorb more CO2 then we, as human, have access to produce through all of our fossil fuels before it becomes noticeable acidic. You claim is correct, but with NO relative reference it is a worthless point. Gif from NASA: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sge/casa/CO2-cycle.gif

e) Right on some, but in all dishonest by omission. Like I posted above, without the relative numbers, you are dismissing one part without allowing anything relative to be mentioned. I would like to see a link to what you say on C12/C14 ratios. Oh, if you google it be careful, because you just end up proving the earth is only 10,000 years old. Bad argument.

Summary:

a) Wrong
b) Wrong
c) Close. BUT: Still dwarfed by all other sources of CO2 emissions. And CO2 is still only the 3% of the total GHE.

Please, if you have some facts to rebut this, lay them down. With links please.

Josh

I'm not a solar physicist, and to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't significantly directly affect weather, unless you count the Aurora Borealis. In fact, they're not even sure sunspot numbers are a good predictor of solar activity.

What solar activity does, however, is things like screw up GPS and other systems that depend on radio signals, kill satellites, and damage the power grid. It can also affect flights that go over the poles, as they try to avoid those routes during high activity.

Exceptionally good. But, even at solar minimum there is still potential for exceptional mass ejections (as we saw last December.)

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