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NASA has a page dedicated to it:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...
> But the paleoclimate record also reveals that the current climatic warming is occurring much more rapidly than past warming events. ... In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

It took me seconds to find. If you really cared, or hadn't already made your mind up, you would know that too.

You know what happens in a tropical environment? Tropical storms. You know what tropical storms plus sea level rise equals? You're fucked. HTH, HAND!

Sea level rise has been estimated to be on average between +2.6 millimetres (0.10 in) and 2.9 millimetres (0.11 in) per year ± 0.4 millimetres (0.016 in) since 1993 Sea level rise

One tenth of an inch a year, I'm just not feeling your sense of urgency here; especially since

new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses

the Antarctic ice sheet is growing fairly robustly.

I KNOW they can do it, because Voyager took lots of true color images back in the 70s. CCD tech has greatly improved since then.

No, you remember very wrong. Voyager didn't use CCD visible light cameras, but vidicon tubes like old TV cameras. Also, both the Narrow Angle Camera and Wide Angle Camera used a filter wheel with 8 different filters.

I KNOW they can do it, because Voyager took lots of true color images back in the 70s. CCD tech has greatly improved since then.

No, you remember very wrong. Voyager didn't use CCD visible light cameras, but vidicon tubes like old TV cameras. Also, both the Narrow Angle Camera and Wide Angle Camera used a filter wheel with 8 different filters.

Please list all of them by name, when they raised their doubts (where you can read about it), give their total number, and then reasonable estimate of the total number of climate scientists on earth. Without this data, it's not possible to make an informed assessment of your claim, especially since a large meta-study showed that 97 or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.

But don't worry. If for some absurd ideological view - why? difficult to find any reason why climate science should be more subject to political debate than quantum mechanics - you do not trust or like the statements of NASA, who brought the first men to the moon, you can rest assured that the agency will probably soon be forced to remove such statements from their websites and no longer study planet earth. So you've already won.

Continuing this sad tale, we saw the loss of a launch because of faulty O-ring design caused by small, but significant, warpage from the weight of the vehicle resting on its side during the O-ring installation.

That's not what caused the O-ring failure, and the vehicle was attached vertically in the VAB, well after the SRBs were fully assembled and mated to the tank. The temperature at launch was below freezing, and about 25 degrees lower than any previous launch. The O-rings lost most of their flexibility due to the cold and failed to seal the joint as a result.

Sort of both and then some more.
The O-rings did fail due to loss of flexibility, but root problem was that the design of the joint was defective.
The joint design parameter was that the O-rings should not come into use - the joint should close and keep the gases from the O-rings. After all, they are "rubber" and rubber does not live long when exposed to hot high pressure gas.
The O-rings were to be backup, and in a perfect design backup doesn't come into play. There was also putty in the gap that should prevent the combustion gases from reaching the O-rings, but maybe failed as well.

When the joint was designed, it was believed that combustion pressure would cause the joint to close and form a tighter seal, but static pressure-testing showed that pressure caused the joint to rotate open and expose the O-ring to combustion gases. O-ring erosion was seen from the very beginning of the flights due to this flaw, (not all flights)

Low temperatures exacerbated the problem, the O-ring worked so long as the gap in the joint was NOT too narrow. Too narrow a gap and the O-rings can't move freely as the SRB and joints are flexing, and with the cold making the O-rings stiff, they failed to move and close in the place where the gap was most narrow.
As rickyslashdot pointed out, the motors were out of round due to shipping constraints, and it by coincidence happened that the place most narrow pointed at the hydrogen external tank. Also, when the main engines are lit before takeoff, the shuttle tilts forward and bends the solid rocket boosters. the assembly then bends backwards and oscillates at 3 cps. Oddly enough, this is when the SRB experiences the greatest mechanical stress. The puff of smoke seen on the pad at ignition happen at 3cps, so there's another factor in stressing the joints and requiring the O-rings to be flexible.

Thiokol began redesigning the joint in 1985, but didn't get it into production in time to prevent the Challenger disaster.

Here's a link to the commission's report. It has much detail and pictures, and fills in the gaps in my over-simplified exposition.
https://history.nasa.gov/roger...

Here's the conclusion from the report:
"In view of the findings, the Commission concluded that the cause of the Challenger accident was the failure of the pressure seal in the aft field joint of the right Solid Rocket Motor. The failure was due to a faulty design unacceptably sensitive to a number of factors. These factors were the effects of temperature, physical dimensions, the character of materials, the effects of reusability, processing, and the reaction of the joint to dynamic loading. "

Sheldon Cooper and Jim Parsons both have asteroids named after them, I can't see how he would be jealous, if anything, he had one first.

The asteroid 246247 Sheldoncooper was named after Sheldon.[69] In 2012, a newly discovered species of bee was named Euglossa bazinga, after the character's noted catch phrase, "Bazinga!"[70]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

He could even rub it in Wheaton's face that he also has the bee.

And 8621 Jimparsons (1981 EK7)
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c...

Surprisingly not mentioned in the summary above, the name of the asteroid is "391257 Wilwheaton".

See http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c... for more details on the asteroid itself.

Huh, I'd expect the asteroid to be called "Wheaton", like they did with asteroids "Takei", "Nichols", "Roddenberry", but instead they went with "Wilwheaton". I guess it's not bad, just a bit strange ;)

They are using lead solder in these things I hope? If not, they could be shorting out because of tin whiskers. NASA even has a site devoted to this : https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/...

Do you have any critical thinking skills whatsoever? Plants consume CO2 and H2O so of course you'll have more plants. Fuck this "citation needed" Wonkypedia shit. I still remember when people used to be able to have critical thinking skills without being spoon fed all the time.
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...

The fact is increased CO2 levels lead to increased vegetation cover and a reversal of desertification.

I'm still to hear one big negative factor of increased CO2 levels and global warming... It would green the planet, make more areas available for manned settlement. Even if the sea levels increase a bit it would be largely offset by the extra available land area in arid and tundra regions. Plus the sea levels have been increasing even back when the human population was a lot smaller than it was today. Also other than with massive geoengineering efforts, which are pointless to begin with taking into consideration what I said before, the CO2 levels won't go back. Nor should they. In fact the present CO2 levels are way too low.

And if you choose other stations the adjustments make the past look warmer.

You can't cherry pick a handful of stations and use the results to impugn the validity of the adjustments. You have to look at the justifications made for the adjustments to decide whether they make sense or not.

There is a time-series of global average temperature, but there is not a description of the error. I'd like a full statistical treatment, including the number of measurements varying as a function of time, as well as an assessment of the quality of the measurements (I'm sure the thermometer technology has changed in the last 100 years).

So, look on their site.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...

Show the raw temperature measurements NASA! We don't want to see those "corrected" data sets from James Hansen et al. anymore.

All of the data is available on the GISS site, which I assume you haven't bothered to look at: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/
The site includes the source code for the analysis and a discussion of what all the data corrections are, why they were done, and what the data looks like before and after corrections.
You might want to start with the FAQ on how the data analysis is done, here: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...

If you don't like the way NASA does the data analysis, there's an independent analysis from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, here: http://berkeleyearth.org/

Show the raw temperature measurements NASA! We don't want to see those "corrected" data sets from James Hansen et al. anymore.

All of the data is available on the GISS site, which I assume you haven't bothered to look at: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/
The site includes the source code for the analysis and a discussion of what all the data corrections are, why they were done, and what the data looks like before and after corrections.
You might want to start with the FAQ on how the data analysis is done, here: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...

If you don't like the way NASA does the data analysis, there's an independent analysis from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, here: http://berkeleyearth.org/

I was disappointed that the article didn't provide links to NASA's and NOAA's findings.

The Goddard Institute for Space Science data is here: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...

A press release from Columbia University about the findings is here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/...

CO2 has increased at a MUCH LARGER RATE than has temperature; moreover the shape of the graphs are not really very similar with an increase in temperature rate of increase where co2 rate of increases show a lull.

I'll let you have the last response because I don't think you are really capable of actually understanding this concept yet. Don't worry, when climate scientists are forced to begrudgingly admit this in ten years or so you can say you knew it before they did.

It must really suck when reality just completely fucks over your moronic claim. I'm going to be generous and assume you're just a fucking idiot ignorant of just about every fact on climate change, and not in fact a dishonorable immoral liar.

even when facts clearly show the opposite

Still waiting for that to be the case.

You haven't cited any facts. So far, all you've done is deny the existing facts - hand-waving them away as "adjusted" without any evidence that this makes them less accurate, and without any challenge to the methodology. Your only justification is that the corrections are "large", and give results you don't like. In what way do these claims constitute "facts"? Sounds like textbook denial to me.

Perhaps take some time to at least learn why the corrections were needed, so your next attempt to discredit them is worth looking at.

even when facts clearly show the opposite

Still waiting for that to be the case.

You haven't cited any facts. So far, all you've done is deny the existing facts - hand-waving them away as "adjusted" without any evidence that this makes them less accurate, and without any challenge to the methodology. Your only justification is that the corrections are "large", and give results you don't like. In what way do these claims constitute "facts"? Sounds like textbook denial to me.

Perhaps take some time to at least learn why the corrections were needed, so your next attempt to discredit them is worth looking at.

However, R. W. Wood in 1909 constructed two greenhouses, one with glass as the transparent material, and the other with panes of rock salt, which is transparent to infrared. The two greenhouses warmed to similar temperatures, suggesting that an actual greenhouse is warmer not because of the "greenhouse effect", but by preventing convective cooling, not allowing warmed air to escape. Greenhouse

No need to deny it, CO2 is now added to greenhouses to fertilize the plants, not add to the heat inside, in fact the entire planet is being ferrtilized.

Umm, what? The biosphere "quite likes CO2"? Are you trolling or just ignorant? We're releasing billions of tons of CO2 that has been sequestered out of the atmosphere for millions of years and you're arguing that's somehow a good thing? Support your (absurd) statement with a viable hypothesis and actual data.

All you had to do was follow his link.

From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.

An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States. Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds

or was that a too inconvenient of a truth?

I get that impression from the fact that plants absorb it and in current times they're starved of it (compared to paleo history). That's why people who run greenhouses artificially increase it to between 1 and 2,000 ppm. I think NASA did a study about biosphere greening didn't they? It concluded the biosphere is... greening. But nobody really discussed it all that much because it doesn't fit the catastrophic global warming narrative. I mean it's a very positive indicator. This is all about narrative isn't it. Narrative = Rent for all those concerned.

I think the only thing you can accuse me of here is cherry picking. I think Schmidt's "adjustments" of instrumental records are bollocks but then I'm quite happy to select the greening article for the very same NASA to prove my point.

How about the MIT paper - written in 2005, so before Al Gore and other's claim that GW is causing them

So? What does that have to do with the causes of increasing hurricane intensity? You still think nobody knew about AGW until Gore's movie? The MIT paper is about global hurricane intensity, not the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the US, so that NOAA page you cite is irrelevant (current research on AGW suggests hurricane frequency is not affected much, only intensity).

You looked at the graphs, saw the data was different and that didn't concern you?

Unlike you - or the deniers at WUWT et al - I took the time to find out why those corrections were made. I didn't leap straight to assuming they must have been faked.

Anyone making judgements about the accuracy of science based purely on the results is guaranteed to introduce bias. Methodology is king. Changes are expected - corrections are of course required if past inaccuracies are discovered, and are absolutely justified if the methodology is peer-reviewed, regardless of whether you like the results.

The "adjustments" are always in favor of GW.

Prove it. You don't even know what adjustments were done, let alone why, so you're making up your own bogus motives instead. Let me enlighten you.

Hansen's page ... where he admits in 2007 that the 1930s was the hottest decade on record.

You mean the paragraph where he says, "Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934"? Bolding mine, because you're apparently unable to spot the difference between the US and the globe. That paragraph is unchanged in both versions BTW, which you could've verified for yourself.

It wasn't just Greenland, it was global.

And this is where you need to cite a peer-reviewed study to back up your claim (presuming you remember what "global" means).

Now, about concensus[sic]? [WSJ commentary snipped] Yea, not so much.

So you're happy to accept as gospel truth a newspaper commentary citing no peer-reviewed studies, yet you reject the conclusions of seven independent scientific studies listed here. Why, because one fits your pre-existing beliefs and the other doesn't? Certainly doesn't seem to be evidence-based.

I understand I'm asking a lot because a great deal of money has been spent to make you believe, change data, and so on. MMGW is all about making a bunch of money and control.

Oh the irony. Did you miss the part where I cited numerous reports of hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by the fossil fuel industry specifically to sway public opinion and protect their revenue? Where's your own evidence? Missing as usual.

How does paying Al Gore (among others) a bunch of money fix that?

Who's suggesting that? What does that have to do with the science? I haven't proposed any solutions here, because they're irrelevant to the science describing the problem. If you're really curious read my post history, but whatever action or inaction we take, AGW isn't going away - we'll have to deal with it one way or another. The science is very clear on that.

How about the MIT paper - written in 2005, so before Al Gore and other's claim that GW is causing them

So? What does that have to do with the causes of increasing hurricane intensity? You still think nobody knew about AGW until Gore's movie? The MIT paper is about global hurricane intensity, not the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the US, so that NOAA page you cite is irrelevant (current research on AGW suggests hurricane frequency is not affected much, only intensity).

You looked at the graphs, saw the data was different and that didn't concern you?

Unlike you - or the deniers at WUWT et al - I took the time to find out why those corrections were made. I didn't leap straight to assuming they must have been faked.

Anyone making judgements about the accuracy of science based purely on the results is guaranteed to introduce bias. Methodology is king. Changes are expected - corrections are of course required if past inaccuracies are discovered, and are absolutely justified if the methodology is peer-reviewed, regardless of whether you like the results.

The "adjustments" are always in favor of GW.

Prove it. You don't even know what adjustments were done, let alone why, so you're making up your own bogus motives instead. Let me enlighten you.

Hansen's page ... where he admits in 2007 that the 1930s was the hottest decade on record.

You mean the paragraph where he says, "Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934"? Bolding mine, because you're apparently unable to spot the difference between the US and the globe. That paragraph is unchanged in both versions BTW, which you could've verified for yourself.

It wasn't just Greenland, it was global.

And this is where you need to cite a peer-reviewed study to back up your claim (presuming you remember what "global" means).

Now, about concensus[sic]? [WSJ commentary snipped] Yea, not so much.

So you're happy to accept as gospel truth a newspaper commentary citing no peer-reviewed studies, yet you reject the conclusions of seven independent scientific studies listed here. Why, because one fits your pre-existing beliefs and the other doesn't? Certainly doesn't seem to be evidence-based.

I understand I'm asking a lot because a great deal of money has been spent to make you believe, change data, and so on. MMGW is all about making a bunch of money and control.

Oh the irony. Did you miss the part where I cited numerous reports of hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by the fossil fuel industry specifically to sway public opinion and protect their revenue? Where's your own evidence? Missing as usual.

How does paying Al Gore (among others) a bunch of money fix that?

Who's suggesting that? What does that have to do with the science? I haven't proposed any solutions here, because they're irrelevant to the science describing the problem. If you're really curious read my post history, but whatever action or inaction we take, AGW isn't going away - we'll have to deal with it one way or another. The science is very clear on that.

How about the MIT paper - written in 2005, so before Al Gore and other's claim that GW is causing them

So? What does that have to do with the causes of increasing hurricane intensity? You still think nobody knew about AGW until Gore's movie? The MIT paper is about global hurricane intensity, not the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the US, so that NOAA page you cite is irrelevant (current research on AGW suggests hurricane frequency is not affected much, only intensity).

You looked at the graphs, saw the data was different and that didn't concern you?

Unlike you - or the deniers at WUWT et al - I took the time to find out why those corrections were made. I didn't leap straight to assuming they must have been faked.

Anyone making judgements about the accuracy of science based purely on the results is guaranteed to introduce bias. Methodology is king. Changes are expected - corrections are of course required if past inaccuracies are discovered, and are absolutely justified if the methodology is peer-reviewed, regardless of whether you like the results.

The "adjustments" are always in favor of GW.

Prove it. You don't even know what adjustments were done, let alone why, so you're making up your own bogus motives instead. Let me enlighten you.

Hansen's page ... where he admits in 2007 that the 1930s was the hottest decade on record.

You mean the paragraph where he says, "Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934"? Bolding mine, because you're apparently unable to spot the difference between the US and the globe. That paragraph is unchanged in both versions BTW, which you could've verified for yourself.

It wasn't just Greenland, it was global.

And this is where you need to cite a peer-reviewed study to back up your claim (presuming you remember what "global" means).

Now, about concensus[sic]? [WSJ commentary snipped] Yea, not so much.

So you're happy to accept as gospel truth a newspaper commentary citing no peer-reviewed studies, yet you reject the conclusions of seven independent scientific studies listed here. Why, because one fits your pre-existing beliefs and the other doesn't? Certainly doesn't seem to be evidence-based.

I understand I'm asking a lot because a great deal of money has been spent to make you believe, change data, and so on. MMGW is all about making a bunch of money and control.

Oh the irony. Did you miss the part where I cited numerous reports of hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by the fossil fuel industry specifically to sway public opinion and protect their revenue? Where's your own evidence? Missing as usual.

How does paying Al Gore (among others) a bunch of money fix that?

Who's suggesting that? What does that have to do with the science? I haven't proposed any solutions here, because they're irrelevant to the science describing the problem. If you're really curious read my post history, but whatever action or inaction we take, AGW isn't going away - we'll have to deal with it one way or another. The science is very clear on that.

Wow. Just wow. Where do I start? How about the MIT paper - written in 2005, so before Al Gore and other's claim that GW is causing them. Never the less, we have a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere and we have fewer. You like NOAA's stuff - http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/ . Look towards the bottom for a bar graph. If I were to take 2000-today by year and mix it up the years by that decade with say the 1950s randomized in the 1950s (so it's not obvious which one is which, however with correct data for that decade) and see if you can tell which one is which, I bet you'd lose that one. Unless you really studied the data carefully. I honestly don't understand how you can say there are more and they are worse. The NOAA graph just doesn't show that, at least not yet. Maybe next month it will after they "adjust" it so it's not a problem anymore like they're doing with the other stuff.

(previous stuff I showed you) You looked at the graphs, saw the data was different and that didn't concern you? The "adjustments" are always in favor of GW. If you're a TA or a Professor going over someone's scientific work, that is one of the things you look out for. Faked or wrong data. The fact NASA has been caught red handed changing this stuff REALLY should bother you.

Here are some references, but look below
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
You like the telegraph?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Here's one for you and you can see it with your own (as the Eagles would say - lying) eyes - Hansen's page (He no longer works for nasa BTW)- http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... . Not as I remembered it. That's because they keep changing it - http://web.archive.org/web/*/h... Check out the 2007/2/24 version to today. Wow, same page where he admits in 2007 that the 1930s was the hottest decade on record. Now 1930s looks a lot colder. I don't think anyone would say the 1930s was the hottest on record as Hansen had to admit to in the early 2000s looking at the new graph. He claimed 1990s were until he was shown to be wrong. He claimed it was a Y2K bug. I don't think anyone believed that one.

Greenland - what about Venice Italy? It wasn't just Greenland, it was global.

To me this captain obvious moment (shown by the documented change in web page above) really should concern you, and make you mad that you've been lied to all of this time. Could go on and show you page after page or as that other site did, he overlaid them for you. Not that you seem to care, or perhaps you don't understand the material. I'm reminded a lot that other people aren't like me. Things that are painfully obvious to me aren't obvious to others.

Now, about concensus? http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... Yea, not so much.

Well I've enjoyed going down memory lane a bit here if you're not persuaded by the very definitive evidence I've shown you, you probably never will be. I understand I'm asking a lot because a great deal of money has been spent to make you believe, change data, and so on. MMGW is all about making a bunch of money and control.

The comparison to tobacco is disingenuous BTW. I was a scientist back in those days, in the 1970s. I felt it was clear. Again, I could find where the tobacco industry had faked data and weren't being honest. It wasn't hard even without something like the Internet. This in a time when science wasn't so good, calling a lot of things cancer causing that weren't. Showing other people without something like the Internet was just about impossib

Fuck you

No. Fuck, you.

That, ladies and gentleman, is what should have been the inscription on Voyager; there is no better representation of Humanity.

So the mountains of scientific evidence and the confirmation by every major climate institution on the planet, and every major scientific organisation are all meaningless to you - but the science-free claims in a youtube video by a TV personality with no experience or credentials in climatology convinced you completely?

Sorry, I can't help anyone so doggedly determined to ignore all the inconvenient parts of reality.

> Take for example asteroid mining, how long have we heard about that?

It's been a feature of science fiction since the early days. But making a serious effort at it depends on several things that are more recent:

* The discovery of 15,000 Near Earth asteroids, 90% of which have been found in the last 15 years : http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ The Near Earth group are much easier to reach than the Main Belt asteroids. The more of them you find, the better the chance of some of them being the right composition and right orbit to mine.

* The development of higher power electric propulsion (ion and plasma) and high efficiency solar arrays, in order to power space tugs to bring back asteroid rock to a high Earth orbit. This has also happened over the last 15 years.

* Improvements in space robotics and high-bandwidth communications, which would allow real-time control of a processing plant in high orbit from the ground. This reduces the need for astronauts on site and lowers the cost.

* Growth of a market for the products of asteroid mining. There are now about 1400 active satellites in space : http://www.sia.org/wp-content/... (see page 8) and the number is growing. Without a way to refuel or repair them, they have to be replaced at great cost. Asteroid mining can supply fuel, both for the satellite itself, and to bring them to a repair station. That market is worth billions a year, but again, 15 years ago it was much smaller.

Not surprisingly, now that the pre-conditions exist, people are making serious efforts to develop asteroid mining.

No, you're confusing youself. The lux measurement is the perceptual one, you know, the one that ignores wavelengths that humans can't see, and weights the wavelengths that we can see with peaks at the idealized human visual response. The actual radiant intensity at any given moment is going to be much greater. Measuring light levels in lux is completely useless unless you're a lighting director. It is a statement about human eyeballs, and should not be used when talking about things that are not human eyeballs.

Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close

As it turns out, human visual response looks nothing likethe response of solar panels. Do note that, consistent with our other conclusions, the absorbed spectrum and peak are wider and differently located respectively. As far as I am aware, there isn't really a reason why we would expect people to try to build a solar cell that is less efficient than the human eye, especially since, as you say, clouds happen.

This was an easy mistake to make. Easy to the point where it's a little suspect why you're repeating it. The appropriate units would be watts per square meter, which is standard across the solar energy industry. I hope you are not using one cherry-picked (wrong) factoid as the basis for your anti-solar-energy stance. For anyone interested in some actual numbers, this calculator given an equation and computes the effective solar insolation (in W/m^2) for a given lat/long/percent cloud cover. Here's a calculator from NASA with many more parameters.

Well, at least NASA's site still says its humans.

see here

and to be honest I think more people would trust NASA than the State of Wisconsin or whatever.

To be honest I'm a little surprised and a lot pleased that the NASA site clearly lays out its humans that are the cause. Yeah, yeah, we'll see what happens with the new administration, but no matter what a lot of Slashdotters think I still have a lot of respect for the individual scientists and engineers at NASA.

The original point was that the user had not received any federal benefits. The counterpoint was that he had (highways, judges, military protection, the internet). Your point addresses a point that nobody made.

Regarding the internet being invented faster, my understanding is that these prohibitions you're talking about were based on who could use arpanet. They did not prohibit companies from building their own data networks.

Regarding ISS benefits see https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... . They're not going to list two benefits I think we have from ISS: They give (some of) us hope for the future, and it brings us closer to spreading our civilization to other planets some day.

well, then we need another kind of connector with much tighter tolerances/mroe expensive manufacturing processes

Cray (reportedly) did this with their systems. For example, they would measure individual chip speed when building their memory boards and put faster chips farther from the connector and slower chips closer. Of, course the Cray 2 cost about $17 million back in the day -- I was one of the admins on voyager at NASA LaRC in the late 1980s. '88 Cray Too Old For Nasa

To be useful the probe has to send back some telemetry via radio. Otherwise how do you know it landed? And anyone can receive that telemetry, so you can't really do a sneaky moon landing

Not to feed the conspiracy theorists, but the Lagrange L1 and L2 points lie outside the Earth-Moon system and see the back side of the moon half the time. They are/were occupied by SOHO, WMAP (first link), and Planck. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be parked at L2 as well.

Theoretically, any of them could be used to relay transmissions from the back side of the moon undetectable from Earth. For that matter, you could turn SOHO around to photograph the back side of the moon if you wanted to. (So could JWST, but it wouldn't have the benefit of sunlight lighting up the half of the moon it sees.) A few missions have been sent into orbit around the moon as well.

Say you do somehow land a robotic probe there for no reason at all, how would you conceal it from orbiting satellites that are photographing the surface? We can see the Apollo and Surveyor and various Russian probe landing sites on those photos, taking by various different countries.

Concealing something on the entire surface of the moon is easy. LRO produces the highest resolution images of the moon's entire surface, but the Apollo landing sites still barely show up. We know where to point the camera because we know where the sites are. If we didn't know where, well the moon's surface area is 38 million km^2, so the back side is 19 million km^2. If the lander you're trying to find is 1 square meter, that's like trying to find one special grain of sand 2 mm^2 sitting on top of 38 km^2 of beach. Good luck.

To be useful the probe has to send back some telemetry via radio. Otherwise how do you know it landed? And anyone can receive that telemetry, so you can't really do a sneaky moon landing

Not to feed the conspiracy theorists, but the Lagrange L1 and L2 points lie outside the Earth-Moon system and see the back side of the moon half the time. They are/were occupied by SOHO, WMAP (first link), and Planck. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be parked at L2 as well.

Theoretically, any of them could be used to relay transmissions from the back side of the moon undetectable from Earth. For that matter, you could turn SOHO around to photograph the back side of the moon if you wanted to. (So could JWST, but it wouldn't have the benefit of sunlight lighting up the half of the moon it sees.) A few missions have been sent into orbit around the moon as well.

Say you do somehow land a robotic probe there for no reason at all, how would you conceal it from orbiting satellites that are photographing the surface? We can see the Apollo and Surveyor and various Russian probe landing sites on those photos, taking by various different countries.

Concealing something on the entire surface of the moon is easy. LRO produces the highest resolution images of the moon's entire surface, but the Apollo landing sites still barely show up. We know where to point the camera because we know where the sites are. If we didn't know where, well the moon's surface area is 38 million km^2, so the back side is 19 million km^2. If the lander you're trying to find is 1 square meter, that's like trying to find one special grain of sand 2 mm^2 sitting on top of 38 km^2 of beach. Good luck.

To be useful the probe has to send back some telemetry via radio. Otherwise how do you know it landed? And anyone can receive that telemetry, so you can't really do a sneaky moon landing

Not to feed the conspiracy theorists, but the Lagrange L1 and L2 points lie outside the Earth-Moon system and see the back side of the moon half the time. They are/were occupied by SOHO, WMAP (first link), and Planck. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be parked at L2 as well.

Theoretically, any of them could be used to relay transmissions from the back side of the moon undetectable from Earth. For that matter, you could turn SOHO around to photograph the back side of the moon if you wanted to. (So could JWST, but it wouldn't have the benefit of sunlight lighting up the half of the moon it sees.) A few missions have been sent into orbit around the moon as well.

Say you do somehow land a robotic probe there for no reason at all, how would you conceal it from orbiting satellites that are photographing the surface? We can see the Apollo and Surveyor and various Russian probe landing sites on those photos, taking by various different countries.

Concealing something on the entire surface of the moon is easy. LRO produces the highest resolution images of the moon's entire surface, but the Apollo landing sites still barely show up. We know where to point the camera because we know where the sites are. If we didn't know where, well the moon's surface area is 38 million km^2, so the back side is 19 million km^2. If the lander you're trying to find is 1 square meter, that's like trying to find one special grain of sand 2 mm^2 sitting on top of 38 km^2 of beach. Good luck.

To be useful the probe has to send back some telemetry via radio. Otherwise how do you know it landed? And anyone can receive that telemetry, so you can't really do a sneaky moon landing

Not to feed the conspiracy theorists, but the Lagrange L1 and L2 points lie outside the Earth-Moon system and see the back side of the moon half the time. They are/were occupied by SOHO, WMAP (first link), and Planck. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be parked at L2 as well.

Theoretically, any of them could be used to relay transmissions from the back side of the moon undetectable from Earth. For that matter, you could turn SOHO around to photograph the back side of the moon if you wanted to. (So could JWST, but it wouldn't have the benefit of sunlight lighting up the half of the moon it sees.) A few missions have been sent into orbit around the moon as well.

Say you do somehow land a robotic probe there for no reason at all, how would you conceal it from orbiting satellites that are photographing the surface? We can see the Apollo and Surveyor and various Russian probe landing sites on those photos, taking by various different countries.

Concealing something on the entire surface of the moon is easy. LRO produces the highest resolution images of the moon's entire surface, but the Apollo landing sites still barely show up. We know where to point the camera because we know where the sites are. If we didn't know where, well the moon's surface area is 38 million km^2, so the back side is 19 million km^2. If the lander you're trying to find is 1 square meter, that's like trying to find one special grain of sand 2 mm^2 sitting on top of 38 km^2 of beach. Good luck.

There are other effects. I'd have to dig up the NASA articles on it. There is a high altitude cloud formation, plasma clouds, that is caused by the plasma that the CME's produce when they leak in. I took one of the local formations a few months back. We actually did see a lot more of these, and NASA predicted it when they started seeing weird things from Cycle 24. Like the entire ionosphere ripping open exposing the day side of the earth to higher levels of solar radiation. Northern lights are complex phenomena that you may not even see unless the conditions are right. Plasma clouds are a lot easier to detect, and just require high energy plasma in the upper atmosphere.

If the research is that important, then publish it and get libraries and other 3rd parties archiving it after the data is collected ---
this is also a good thing as it means observation datasets can no longer be tampered with in the future to support new models.

This tampering thing is a myth. Datasets do need to be normalized and massaged before you draw any useful conclusions from them, but you can get the raw data if you're interested -- for example the station data in the instrumental record. The myth persists because people want to believe it and don't even make rudimentary efforts to see if it is true.

I've been reading a lot of this bullshit, and it's clear the people spreading them have never bothered to look for the data or go to the papers which published the data, or to even figure out what the data means. For example I have been hearing a lot from denialists about how the "unadjusted radiosonde" data shows there's no warming, so I tracked down the paper which is the source of that claim. To understand the data you have to understand what a radiosonde is: it's balloon-borne instrument that takes a cross section of measurements from the troposphere -- which warms under AGW -- into the stratosphere -- which cools under AGW. So adding up all the measurements can't tell you whether or not the lower levels of the atmosphere have gotten warmer, you have to select just the relevant data.

I doubt that Trump's team is going to say "delete the research data", anyways.

Of course he hasn't said he's going to do it, but neither did the Harper government in Canada. In that case the advance notice was sent out in August when many of the library staff was on vacation stating there was going to be a consolidation of services and a move toward electronic distribution. That sounded innocuous, but three weeks later a hundred years worth of journals, technical reports and datasets were in the landfill.

Nope. Drawings for the Apollo program are on file at the Data Repository at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, AL, all two million of them. I've seen them myself. They are on IBM aperture cards, which are punch cards with a square of microfilm inserted into them. More compact and lasts longer than the original blueprints. At the time I was working for Boeing on the Space Station program, and we were using an MSFC building just down the road.

There are lots of things the government isn't very good at, but storing records forever is one they are. Von Braun had the foresight in the early days of NASA to instill a strong recordkeeping ethic for engineering. On the Space Station we had a whole frikken basement in one of our buildings for document storage. It used to be a running joke in aerospace that when the documentation exceeds the mass of the vehicle, it's ready to fly. On Space Station it was literally true.

You can find about half a million NASA technical documents online: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.j... That doesn't include all the Apollo documents, but it does have a fair number of them.

And you are wrong on all regards anyway. When the ISS can support half a dozen astronauts for month, then we obviously have the life support system.

The life support systems for the ISS are different than those for a trip to Mars. We understand basically how to go about it but that's a far cry from actually building a working one that is ready for a mission to Mars. We've never built one designed to survive and perform outside of the Earth's magnetic shield for more than a few days. (The moon is inside the Earths magnetic tail for a significant portion of every month) Though it sounds like a tautology you don't know if you can do something until you actually do it. We haven't done it and we haven't even built the prototypes yet. We just have some technology that we know will go into the prototypes.

A ship is the least problem ... and the return trip only requires a ship in orbit of Mars and a landing/relaunch system.

Oh is that all? Well NASA should be able to whip that up in by Christmas. Did you actually say that out loud? You should because it's an absurd statement. That isn't a trivial either from an engineering or an economic standpoint. It took us the better part of a decade on a huge crash budget to build an incredibly flimsy lunar lander for a far easier and shorter mission. A Mars lander is a MUCH tougher engineering challenge. Mars is farther away, has a much stronger gravity well, has an actual atmosphere, cannot be communicated with in real time, etc. Those are all problems that can (probably) be solved but we don't have the solutions today and it will take a decade or more plus a huge dedicated budget to make it happen.

And radiation shielding is super simple: put the water tank and other stuff between the crew and the sun ... done.

The radiation shielding isn't that simple at all. You are misinformed. People smarter and better informed than either of us have looked at this problem closely. There are two major sources of radiation of consider and the solar wind is actually the less dangerous of the two as it mostly can be shielded by the hull of the craft itself with materials we have access to today. The other is galactic cosmic rays from our galaxy which comes from all directions, not just the sun. So you can't just shield in the direction of the sun. So you need omnidirectional shielding and it needs to be light weight to be practical and affordable.

Do you have the foggiest idea how much it would cost to get that much water just into low earth orbit much less move it to Mars? Even for a the smallest imaginable spacecraft (far smaller than ideal) we're talking many tens of billions of dollars just to get the water into low earth orbit. But then you have to also launch the propellant and the now bigger ship to move that huge mass to Mars which hugely increases the cost. NASA has looked at this and the cost of doing it is economically prohibitive. So like I said, any solutions available to us today are economically unviable. We need a solution that is light weight and ideally not bulky. Water is not a practical solution.

As I mentioned in my other post: we lack know how. We don't know why so many landings are failing

We know perfectly well why the missions failed in almost every case. What you are failing to appreciate is the difficulty of actually achieving the missions with high reliability. The engineering involved is really really hard even with the best resources and smartest people. Failure is not only an option, it's almost inevitable.

To (1), see this and this and this and the obligatory xkcd. Important take home message - it's not just the raw scale of increase, but the rate of increase. It's well outside of a natural timescale which those same historical records indicate is on the order of thousands of years. What's happening now is 8x faster. Also, we know what natural causes drive global temperatures (Milankovitch cycles, ninos, volcanic eruptions, and other things) and can model that. When we take those into account, the observed warming is NOT recovered. Only including the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 levels accounts for the observations.

To (2), see this, and this and a lot of other refs if you google it. Main take home point: in the past, natural global warming (which should take place over thousands of years, see above links), has lead to the further emission of CO2 coming out of the oceans and other places (see here, hence the lag. This was predicted to be the case by Hansen et al before the lag was discovered.

To (1), see this and this and this and the obligatory xkcd. Important take home message - it's not just the raw scale of increase, but the rate of increase. It's well outside of a natural timescale which those same historical records indicate is on the order of thousands of years. What's happening now is 8x faster. Also, we know what natural causes drive global temperatures (Milankovitch cycles, ninos, volcanic eruptions, and other things) and can model that. When we take those into account, the observed warming is NOT recovered. Only including the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 levels accounts for the observations.

To (2), see this, and this and a lot of other refs if you google it. Main take home point: in the past, natural global warming (which should take place over thousands of years, see above links), has lead to the further emission of CO2 coming out of the oceans and other places (see here, hence the lag. This was predicted to be the case by Hansen et al before the lag was discovered.

To (1), see this and this and this and the obligatory xkcd. Important take home message - it's not just the raw scale of increase, but the rate of increase. It's well outside of a natural timescale which those same historical records indicate is on the order of thousands of years. What's happening now is 8x faster. Also, we know what natural causes drive global temperatures (Milankovitch cycles, ninos, volcanic eruptions, and other things) and can model that. When we take those into account, the observed warming is NOT recovered. Only including the effects of increased CO2 and CH4 levels accounts for the observations.

To (2), see this, and this and a lot of other refs if you google it. Main take home point: in the past, natural global warming (which should take place over thousands of years, see above links), has lead to the further emission of CO2 coming out of the oceans and other places (see here, hence the lag. This was predicted to be the case by Hansen et al before the lag was discovered.

The word is "adjusted".
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

The tunnel crack problem was discovered in Jan 2015 so they have had awhile to work on it. This was first revealed on 1 Sept 2016 in the Commercial Crew program update.

'NASA Program officials anticipate SpaceX will encounter additional delays on the path to certification. For example, in January 2015, the tunnel that provides a passageway for astronauts and cargo between the Dragon and the ISS was reported to have cracked during the heat treatment phase of the manufacturing process. As a result, SpaceX delayed qualification testing by approximately one year to better align the tests as SpaceX moves toward certification. SpaceX has also experienced ongoing issues with stress fractures in turbopumps that must be resolved prior to flight.23 Additionally, SpaceX has not yet completed parachute system level testing which may reveal issues that would require redesign that could further delay the test flights. Accordingly, we anticipate additional schedule slippage and do not expect certified flights by SpaceX earlier than late 2018.'

My wife and I got a chuckle out of the young security guard that was with him. When people asked who he was, he said that he was the worlds oldest astronaut.

You misunderstood what the security guard meant. Glenn was the oldest person to ever go into space when he flew aboard Discovery on STS-95 in 1998. He was 77.

Microseconds, not milliseconds. Here's a good read about the impact of major quakes on the Earth's rotation

It's too bad the sort of service described isn't likely to extend to craft way out there like STEREO-B (nearly the other side of the sun). Even if systems wit issues weren't fixed, simply being able to grab it and getting the position set for full solar power and Earth communications would likely be enough to bring it back to service watching space weather. If it could be gassed-up and maybe have an issue or two fixed, so much the better.

https://stereodata.nascom.nasa...

The STEREO craft are either side of Earth orbit, but not the part where the Earth is. Their value is in providing over the solar horizon data to see how soon-to-be-seen-by-Earth solar conditions are shaping up. The craft are pretty far out there for a service call.