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You're talking about decimal time as proposed by Poincaire. Although the entire system was not adopted, we do use decimal days See the Near Earth Object Impact Hazards Table for instance: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ Look at any of the objects' data and observe the date/time stamp used. Time as date point xx more compact than date/hour/minute/second

The "metric angle stuff", most commonly known as gradians (400 per circle, 100 per right angle) is commonly used in surveying. Theodolites have 100 divisions per right angle. They call them "gons". They are the primary reason that trig capable calculators still have DRG (degree/radian/grad) conversion buttons.

I was being humorous. You were being pedantic and wrong, no matter what day it was.

"Or his ludicrous suggestion that we only have 10 years to turn things around, or it will be too late"

This "ludicrous suggestion" can also be attributed to James Hansen, Hansen is a world renown scientist who is the head of a government department you may have come across while checking Gore's facts. Naturally this kind of "minor" political interference has nothing to do with the funding for monitoring the biosphere being redirected to putting a couple of daiper wearing adults onto the surface of Mars.

The senario you "paraphrased" for sea level rise - It was made clear by Gore he was refering to the "worst case" senario, I suggest you have not watched the presentation or maybe the cavetes somehow eluded you.

Al Gore has science firmly on his side even if some of his speculation proves incorrect.

The camera array on NASA's ER2 is a tad more sophisticated than simply a DSLR or two. The relatively limited and older IRIS system covers a strip approximately 40 nautical miles wide: exactly what kind of setup could accomplish this on a turboprop? I am not saying it could not be done, but it would take more than a few days of work. The possible selection of cameras on the ER-2 is listed in the first link, the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scales for civilian and military usage are 2nd and 3rd:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/AirSci /ER-2/cameras.html
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/niirs_c/guide.htm
http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/niirs.htm

The more important issue is that there is no force between the runner and the treadmill so you have to be strapped down http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/ eZLS_treadmill_010306.html

Population density doesn't matter. The Gini coefficient of the population distribution does.

Consider US vs Canada http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content /94116main_usa_nightm.jpg

Canada has a much lower population density, but it's far cheaper to lay fiber to 95% of the Canadian population than to 95% of the American population, because the average distance between two random Canadians is far less the average distance between two Americans.

Countries like the US/Britain/France/Germany, which are more evenly populated will simply require much more fiber/area for a given broadband penetration than countries like Canada/Australia/Brazil, which have huge clumps of people and vast areas of sparse population.

And if we're talking about hardware simulation, the first significant use of evolutionary computation (GAs etc.) was Larry Fogel's work on evolving finite state automata machines in the 1960s. In the 1990s John Koza was using genetic programming to evolve patentable computer circuits in SPICE.

Well, look what a little Googleing brought up:

West explains: "This dark spot is trapped by a polar vortex--a jet stream that encircles Jupiter's north pole." Fast-moving winds in the vortex act like an atmospheric wall, keeping the Dark Spot corralled at high latitudes. Similar vortices encircle Earth's polar regions. Our planet's Arctic vortex is disrupted somewhat by northern land masses, but the Antarctic vortex is better organized. It plays a key role in confining the ozone hole--much as Jupiter's polar vortex confines the Great Dark Spot.

"We have no idea what it is, and we certainly didn't 4 years ago. I swear."

Human skin is fairly resistant to vacuum. Abrasion, radiation protection, thermal insulation are more important considerations

If you *don't* try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute of so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.

I don't think we will be able to overcome these (and many other) problems in my lifetime.

Here are four examples [large graphic] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey. Well....If you use chemical engines like those that are on the Shuttle, well..., sorry, there isn't enough mass in the universe to supply the rocket propellant you'd need. So let's step up to next possibilities, nuclear rockets with a predicted performance that's 10 to 20 times better! Well...it's still not looking all that good. For a fission rocket you would need a BILLION SUPERTANKER size propellant tanks to get you there, and even with fusion rockets you would still need a THOUSAND SUPERTANKERS! Even if we look at the best conceivable performance that we could engineer based on today's knowledge, say an Ion engine or an antimatter rocket whose performance was 100 times better that the shuttle engines, we would need about ten railway tanker sized propellant tanks. That doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that we didn't bring along any propellant to let us stop when we get to the other star system...or if we want to get there quicker than 9 centuries. Once you add the desire to actually stop at your destination, or if you want to get there sooner, you're back at the incredible supertanker situation again, even for our best conceivable rockets. In conclusion, we'd really like to have a form of propulsion that doesn't need any propellant! This implies the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of spacetime itself.

Here are four examples [large graphic] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey. Well....If you use chemical engines like those that are on the Shuttle, well..., sorry, there isn't enough mass in the universe to supply the rocket propellant you'd need. So let's step up to next possibilities, nuclear rockets with a predicted performance that's 10 to 20 times better! Well...it's still not looking all that good. For a fission rocket you would need a BILLION SUPERTANKER size propellant tanks to get you there, and even with fusion rockets you would still need a THOUSAND SUPERTANKERS! Even if we look at the best conceivable performance that we could engineer based on today's knowledge, say an Ion engine or an antimatter rocket whose performance was 100 times better that the shuttle engines, we would need about ten railway tanker sized propellant tanks. That doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that we didn't bring along any propellant to let us stop when we get to the other star system...or if we want to get there quicker than 9 centuries. Once you add the desire to actually stop at your destination, or if you want to get there sooner, you're back at the incredible supertanker situation again, even for our best conceivable rockets. In conclusion, we'd really like to have a form of propulsion that doesn't need any propellant! This implies the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of spacetime itself.

>> Building a space elevator using carbon nanotubes...that's advanced. Magnetic field
>> drives...that's advanced. Solar sails, antimatter engines, gravitational drives...all
>> advanced.

> All *fictional*. With the possible exception of solar sails, based on my understanding
> of those "technologies", they are not at a point where time might be usefully spent on
> them by engineers as opposed to SciFi writers.

It is not necessarily true that currently fictional technologies are unlikely to be near-term realities. Science fiction and genuine science are not entirely disconnected; the best science fiction is grounded in at least some form of true science, and then takes off from there. Many scientists are curious about the kinds of "science" that appears in fiction, especially if there is enough of a framework to make it at least plausible.

Manned space flight was fictional from pre-1900 until 1961. The concept of geosynchronous communications satellites was largely invented by Arthur C. Clarke several decades before they were engineered into reality.

Space elevators are complete fiction--except that the research and engineering to actually *build* one is going on right now, and the discovery/creation of carbon nanotubes is a likely candidate for the material needed. Ion drives were theoretical, then fictional, and are now used in actual satellites and probes. I've just recently read about some proposed magnetic field propulsion--that might lose funding with the elimination of NIAC. The Star Trek transporters of the 1960s, originally 'invented' to avoid wasting air time on landing/takeoff, were pure fiction...but controlled quantum teleportation is now a (limited) reality.

Gravitational drives (or 'warp drive') are still well into the realm of fiction, *but* there are two active research programs looking for gravitational waves (LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) and LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory).

Is it possible that discoveries in gravitational wave physics might make gravity-based drives possible? I don't know, but if we are already doing the background work to evaluate it, we'll be better prepared to capitalize on any future discoveries.

>> Building a space elevator using carbon nanotubes...that's advanced. Magnetic field
>> drives...that's advanced. Solar sails, antimatter engines, gravitational drives...all
>> advanced.

> All *fictional*. With the possible exception of solar sails, based on my understanding
> of those "technologies", they are not at a point where time might be usefully spent on
> them by engineers as opposed to SciFi writers.

It is not necessarily true that currently fictional technologies are unlikely to be near-term realities. Science fiction and genuine science are not entirely disconnected; the best science fiction is grounded in at least some form of true science, and then takes off from there. Many scientists are curious about the kinds of "science" that appears in fiction, especially if there is enough of a framework to make it at least plausible.

Manned space flight was fictional from pre-1900 until 1961. The concept of geosynchronous communications satellites was largely invented by Arthur C. Clarke several decades before they were engineered into reality.

Space elevators are complete fiction--except that the research and engineering to actually *build* one is going on right now, and the discovery/creation of carbon nanotubes is a likely candidate for the material needed. Ion drives were theoretical, then fictional, and are now used in actual satellites and probes. I've just recently read about some proposed magnetic field propulsion--that might lose funding with the elimination of NIAC. The Star Trek transporters of the 1960s, originally 'invented' to avoid wasting air time on landing/takeoff, were pure fiction...but controlled quantum teleportation is now a (limited) reality.

Gravitational drives (or 'warp drive') are still well into the realm of fiction, *but* there are two active research programs looking for gravitational waves (LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) and LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory).

Is it possible that discoveries in gravitational wave physics might make gravity-based drives possible? I don't know, but if we are already doing the background work to evaluate it, we'll be better prepared to capitalize on any future discoveries.

Here's a NASA doc(Spinoff) published each year with some of the things which have come from NASA research.
They have been producing this document yearly since 1976.

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/

To any other agency that wades into the global warming

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/

NIAC has been involved in looking at much larger space and lunar based telescopes. With much of the on the books missions now already off the books, one could see why planning for the future would be getting a lower priority. If you're not really planning on flying the missions you've already spent money on, why dream up new ones. NIAC has also been involved in evaluating some pretty novel propulsion systems as well. Here are a couple http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004AIPC..699..553M and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/mmb/ antimatter_spaceship.html.
--
Aim for the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Funny how people forget..

When Galaxy 4 died it took out 80% of the pagers in the US plus several video feeds used by the major networks (I worked for CBS at the time)

This was 2 years before the 2000 Solar max when solar activity was ramping up.
More storms in 2003 took out power in parts of Switzerland and killed 2 Satellites

There were several solar flare warnings around that time.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast14jul_2 m.htm

July 14, 2000 -- This morning NOAA satellites and the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded one of the most powerful solar flares of the current solar cycle. Space weather forecasters had been predicting for days that an intense flare might erupt from the large sunspot group 9077, and today one did.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/power_outage _031031.html

The sixth in an unprecedented series of strong space storms dished out by the Sun over a 10-day period plowed past Earth Thursday, apparently cutting power to 20,000 Swedish customers. The powerful series of outbursts also claimed two satellites as casualties while fueling a host of minor disruptions to radio broadcasts and airline flight plans.

http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/articles/eisbaker.html

A very intense flux of electrons, evident in the magnetosphere earlier this year, may have caused a satellite failure (or at least exacerbated the situation) leading to the loss of telephone pager service to 45 million customers, research has shown. The electrons, known as highly relativistic electrons (HREs), were especially numerous in the weeks preceding the failure. Researchers say HREs have triggered spacecraft anomalies in the past when fluxes are elevated. They therefore believe this energetic electron event could have been behind the failure of the attitude control system of the Galaxy 4 spacecraft at 2200 UT on May 19, 1998. A backup system also failed, either at the same time or earlier, so operators were unable to maintain a stable Earth link.

Galaxy 4 is a heavily used communication satellite at geostationary orbit*. Its sudden failure caused not only widespread loss of pager service but also numerous other communication outages. Using a wide array of datasets, our team of scientists analyzed the space environment for the times in question and found evidence of highly disturbed solar, solar wind*, and geomagnetic conditions in late April and early May. The combination of coronal mass ejections*, solar flares*, and high speed solar wind streams led to a powerful sequence of interplanetary disturbances that hit the Earth. These disturbances produced a deep, powerful, and long-lasting enhancement of the HRE population throughout the outer Van Allen radiation zone. The kinds of disturbances witnessed are indicative of the types of events that may commonly occur during the approaching peak in solar activity in the years 2000 and 2001. It will be most important to determine how well space systems can stand up to the multifaceted effects of the space environment over the next several years.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ cell_phone_020306.html

Next time your cell phone drops acall, don't rush to blame your service provider. The culprit may well be anangry Sun.

A new study of 40 years of solardata shows that during peaks in activity, bursts of energy from the Sun canpotentially cause dropped calls for some cell phone users across wide areastwice per week. The problem is caused when radio waves associated with thebursts hit cell phone towers, creating static that overwhelms the signal at thetower, where calls are relayed.

T

"So will an increase in sunspot activity affect us?"

I'm not a climatologist, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. That said, I tend to doubt one slightly higher than average solar cycle maximum is going to have an noticeable effect on climate.

What's more interesting, to me, is the behavior over multiple cycles. For instance, a long-term disappearance of sunspots in the 17th century corresponded with the Little Ice Age:

http://www.ucar.edu/research/sun/climate.jsp

If you look at the cycles of the past century or so, the predicted cycle 24 peak isn't really all that impressive compared to those of the past 60 years.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/144063main_Pred ictionPlotLG.jpg

However, comparing cycles 12-16 to subsequent cycles is interesting. The sun does seem to have become more active in general. Has this had a global effect? More importantly, if there has been a global effect, is it detectable against local effects on climate? Keep in mind that even the Little Ice Age was largely regional.

Oblig. links:

http://www.sec.noaa.gov/Education/index.html
http://www.ucar.edu/research/sun/
http://spaceweather.com/
http://www.spacew.com/

This article from NASA JPL is very informative on the subject.

The researchers found some clear links between the sun's activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common - one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.

I think we need to take a look at the hysteria. It is turn our attention away from what we can do to better this planet. And, the idea of carbon offsets just makes people feel better for their polution levels.

Global Warming has become the new Medieval Church and anyone who does not walk a precise line on the message faces the New Inquisition.

We do need to live more green, more clean, and more simple. But, the public won't buy off on that message if we keep tying it to the Holy Church of Global Warming Hysteria. If we can show more immediate effects of living green and clean the public will follow.

We need to separate those whose real agenda is socio-economic change from the environmental argument. They aren't really interested in the environment, anyway. We need to remove the scammers, like the "carbon offset" (unregulated, uncertified, non-verifiable) companies to improve public perception.

We need to substitue Ed Beagley Jr. for Al Gore. Ed lives, breathes, talks, and walks the environment. Al Gore, while talking about it, still jets around the world, when he could use his own invention, the Internet, to show up at appearances, he maintains a house in Tennessee that uses 20 times the amount of energy as his neighbors, he is a glutton who preaches about the wonders of a diet.

To clarify my last post a bit:

Venus likely had a very strong magnetosphere similar to Earth's early in it's lifetime, but it's core has since solidified or undergone other changes that caused it to lose that magnetosphere.

Venus's current magnetic field doesn't come from the core, like Earth's does, it comes from the interaction of the solar wind with Venus's ionosphere. This produces a much smaller and weaker magnetic field, but still produces a barrier at an average of 300km above Venus's surface. Venus is currently losing it's upper atmosphere to the solar winds, but this magnetic field is offering some protection, and it probably had much more protection in the past.

Mars's magnetic field is weaker than that of Venus, producing a barrier below the 300km altitude, exposing more of it's atmosphere to the solar winds.

Once again, links:
http://www-spc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/pap ers/venus_mag/
http://www-spc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/pap ers/mars_mag/
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1 .htm

Actually, there are teams of people that have been studying mergers (collisions) of two black holes for quote some time, and for awhile they could only solve the initial and final states of the system. Eventually their simulations got better and better and now they have pretty good understanding of the intermediate states of the collision too.

It's an interesting problem, and it deals with the generation of huge amounts of gravitational waves. The hope is that these simulations will now pave the way for what kind of gravitational wave signatures we can hope to pick up with such gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and LISA.

This lady just gave a colloquium at my school regarding this very subject. Her talk was interesting, she described the history of attempts to study black hole mergers. It took awhile before the computer simulations could get sophisticated enough to model the actual interactions and dynamics of the two rotating colliding black holes. The gist is that they attract, then combine quite spectacularly releasing 'radiating' TONS of gravitational waves in a characteristic distribution, and then spin down. The end result is basically one bigger black hole. They expect a handful of these events to occur each year, so hopefully LIGO and LISA can pick up on them.

Collecting this in a mechanical way could throw up lots of dust that could harm equipment and astronauts health, as well as ruining the view.

Actually, a huge component of the Moon mission is learning and planning for a Mars mission:

Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator: "NASA is moving forward with a new focus for the manned space program: to go out beyond Earth orbit for purposes of human exploration and scientific discovery." Administrator Griffin makes the case for completing the International Space Station, "the most complex construction feat ever undertaken," as a stepping stone to future exploration.

"Using the space station and building an outpost on the moon to prepare for the trip to Mars are critical milestones in America's quest to become a truly spacefaring nation," Griffin writes. "I think that we should want that. I want that. I want it for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great-grandchildren."

RThisFM for more detail: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/mmb/ why_moon.html

At any rate, the models today are still not fundamentally different than they were two decades ago. They are gross simplifications based on a set of assumptions.

That's a bit like saying that computer graphics aren't fundamentally different than they were two decades ago. Sure, modern graphics cards push around a few more triangles, and maybe the physics models have improved a bit. But the output is still a far cry from the real world, so are the results really any more useful now?

[Note: the preceding is an "argument from analogy," and a sucky one at that.]

That said, in order for someone to "plug in" their data, they would need access to the precise program that ran the model. To my knowledge none of the code behind these simulations has been published as open source.

Technically, you don't need the source to know that you have the exact program that ran the model. More important, having the same program and the same data allows for a great deal of outside verification. It means others can perform the trivial check of ensuring that data set X does produce result Y, but also that they can see how dependent the results are on that data set. Finally, the data can also be run on other models, which presumably shouldn't share all the same assumptions. I agree that open models would be a vast improvement, but I don't consider it the fatal flaw that you do.

EdGCM is based on NASA's GCM models, which is public domain. But it's written in FORTRAN, so it's dead to me.

But let us assume they [global temperature reconstructions] are reasonably close, say accurate to within a few degrees C. I think that's generally reasonable. What are the modelers predicting? A change of a few degrees C. ...

Personally I have not seen any reasonable certainty that the margin of error is less than a degree or two.

And yet this graph (to my untrained eye, at least) shows several reconstructions all agreeing to within about a half degree (usually less). If each of the individual reconstructions has a margin of error of +/- 1.5C, that level of agreement would be absolutely stunning, even if there were assumptions in each that allowed you to move the whole graph up and down.

Based on that, I'm choosing to doubt your claim that predicted warning trends lie within the reconstructions' margin of error.

Perhaps you take biodiversity increase to mean new life forms. If so, you are entirely incorrect. Biodiversity is specifically the amount of different species of life (plants, insects, bacteria, animals) in a given area.

When I said "biodiversity," I was (corre

Didn't I hear somewhere that Mars has very high speed winds?

If that is the case then, despite the thin atmosphere, paragliding might be possible. It looks like there might be some nice terrain for soaring. Obviously you'd need some pretty solid gear to withstand all the sand (ferrous dust) flying about, not to mention a space suit.

Well, the inverse square law plus the low albedo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo/) of http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2002/39/aah3 638/aah3638.right.html/ most asteroids would necessitate an incredibly bright "light". Anyone feel like whipping out a napkin to do some calculations? I doubt if the visible spectrum would be better than radio wavelengths (after all, we're mainly after large objects, right?). I wonder what the design restrictions would be for a radar which has to wait several hours for an echo would be: I'd guess a fluorescent screen wouldn't be optimal! :-)

To improve results, you'd like to have at least two or preferably more observation points. Looking at NEO asteroid orbits http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits// projected onto the ecliptic is a scary sight. Looking at them in three dimensions is rather more reassuring.

Right now, I'd guess that Earth-based telescopes are the more economical alternative: easier to service, no pesky problem with energy supply or orbital station keeping. One drawback is that we need longer series of observations in order to resolve asteroidal orbits: hence the recurring "alarm bells" when a newly discovered asteroid rates high on the Palermo or Torino scales, only to be downgraded once more observations are matched to it.

Take a look at a photo of Victoria Crater, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter (look close and you can actually see Opportunity sitting atop a ridge overlooking Duck Bay). Notice the sand dunes in the bottom of the crater. Aeolian features like these aren't probable in the absence of wind. Additionally, I doubt Dr. Squyres, et al., would bet the life of their mission on something like this w/out a clear understanding of his target, and the probability of making it out alive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_belts

Due to its lack of a magnetic field, the solar wind pushes gases off Mars, resulting in an atmosphere which is much thinner than it would be otherwise.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1 .htm

"Just park the damn thing under a roof for once."

Is this a joke or does this person not know not know about the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)?

Of course they keep it indoors. But of course they take it outside before they light off the big rockets and launch it into space. Makes a mess of the building if you try doing the inside. What happened was they chaecked the weather, it looked good so they took the think outdoors and then unexpectedly they got hailed on.

The VAB is quite famous. It was built in the 1960's and was and still is the largest enclosed space in the world. It was designed to house a fully assembled Appolo era moon rockets, (A Saturn V with all the upper stages)

See here for more info on the VAB
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/vab.html

From: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
"World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."

I am not here... really.

Live weather radar would be cool in Google Earth.

You can do this with NASA's World Wind...

The link is http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/.

Within this sphere there is almost no electric field -- filaments can be seen as a kind of lightning rods, except there is no lightning because they are in vacuum.

Space is not as empty as people think. The near-Earth space environment, and the space environments of any planet with a magnetosphere, are full of plasma. As a result, spacecraft charging and electrical discharges (think lightning) are a problem for spacecraft. This problem has been studied by a lot of people, including NASA's Electromagnetic Effects & Spacecraft Charging Working Group.

As for usefulness of the whole thing, I guess, you can use this for steering the spaceship, however the analogy to surfing is very poor.

I admit that I didn't really understand this article or how this spacecraft design is supposed to work. The people working on this have probably published something a bit more technical that would do a better job of explaining it. However, the idea of using magnetic fields in space to "steer" spacecraft is not new. Interactions between the Earth's magnetic field and magnetic torquer coils are already being used for attitude control and spin rate control on satellites.

Other factors can cause a temperature change - e.g. solar intensity variation. All the lag proves is that the previous temperature fluctuations were caused by solar intensity or other factors such as Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns. The solar intensity has been long-term decreasing over the past few cycles, and we are only year out from the last solar minima. However, the temperature is still increasing.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/06 mar_solarminimum.html
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/zurich.gi f
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

Other factors can cause a temperature change - e.g. solar intensity variation. All the lag proves is that the previous temperature fluctuations were caused by solar intensity or other factors such as Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns. The solar intensity has been long-term decreasing over the past few cycles, and we are only year out from the last solar minima. However, the temperature is still increasing.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/06 mar_solarminimum.html
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/zurich.gi f
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

Chuckle, chuckle chuckle.

If any of you care to do any of the most basic research on the history of climate studies, you will find some very strong "opinions" with regards to human induced climate change.

I do not think, or at least I haven't found one scientist yet that doesn't think the climate is changing.

Everyone agrees on that.

The human part is the sticky issue. I don't believe for example burning fossil fuels is making the sort of climate changes I have witnessed.

I DO know that when you follow THE MONEY on the issue here is what I come up with:

1) Hollywood has made millions off the idea.
2) Al Gore, has made a VERY comfortable living proclaiming it to be so, with a carbon "footprint" even George Bush would be impressed with, even though he has absolutely no expertise scientifically as a proponent of the idea.
3) Every major university institution is giving position and power to those who "TOW THE LINE" about human induced climate change based on Federal funding and NSF grants, which is very lucrative.
4) Every major prediction proclaimed since this idea has come about has been revised every year. Nobody it would seem can predict climatic change, even though, everyone working on the very lucrative professionally and financially idea of human induced climate change, has got the "research numbers down pat" they all assure us.

Contrast that sort of "fish bowl" science research with those in the astrophysics/solar weather fields that say our sun has/is going "berzerk" in the past 30 years.

http://www.intellicast.com/DrDewpoint/Library/1186 /
http://www.dxlc.com/solar/
http://physics.gmu.edu/~jevans/astr103/CourseNotes /sun_activity.html
http://www.spacew.com/astroalert.html

The solar cycles are completly out of "whack" right now.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/15sep_sola rminexplodes.htm

The suns behavior is anything but predictable and just this past January I was looking at beautiful aurora while I was visiting Chicago, IL.

Every major planet in the solars system is ALSO experiencing a warming trend.

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/3 434

That could be due to all of the human colonies we have on mars for example as well as Jupitor's moons.

There is plenty of evidence for alternative explanations to climate change.

So why are we not hearing them?

ANSWER: No money to be made.

I mean look at some of the truly outrageous projects given considered SERIOUS thought by proponents of global warming:

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=8897

HOW MUCH do you think a project like that would cost and WHO DO you think is going to get the money for it?

It sure isn't the third world countries who are being asked to starve to death and endure this climate change.

There is no suggestion of planting more trees either as you can't make money off of planting trees. It costs too much.

I SEMLL A RAT.

-Hackus

-Hackus

Oh, I'm very aware of all sorts of data, and actually your guess as to my position in the 70's is incorrect. That's called a "straw man argument". Nice that you mention the ozone hole. Keep in mind, there were multiple ozone holes. The hopeful (not done yet) closing of the Antarctic one isn't totally explained yet, but the others seem to have responded to the change in CFC production put in place 25? years ago. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/26may_ozon e.htm Brought to you by the same whiny people that are putting forth solutions to warming. Oh and it's perhaps the same cause-- man's activities, interacting in synergy with solar events. There are two things to keep in mind here: 1) warming 2) are man's activities the sole cause. Only a bought and paid for shill will pretend that (1) warming is not happening. Just like the bought and paid shills cried out for years that there was no link between tobacco and cancer. You can still find energy company shills who will say there is no link between PCBs and negative outcomes in people, too. IIRc, stats from a month or so ago showed Europe is 9F warmer than average, the N areas of Canada are 5F warmer, we all know what is going on with gigantic ice fields turning to nothing, and the only industrialized nation where the average hasn't changed much yet is the USA- which is where the non-believers happen to live. Coincidence perhaps? As for (2) this is the interesting question. There have been changes in climate before, Mars seems to be warming, etc. But the RATE here seems hugely faster than anything seen in many different types of data and many types of analysis. The data really piles up. We *know* that CO2 and other emissions can make this a lot worse- and indeed it seems to be doing so. Are our various activities the sole cause? It is a solar cycle? A combo of both with or without other factors? I don't know, I think we'll find out, but to look at the effects of what we do *know* about and pretend that it isn't happening (Bush and Co's position) or to not bother to do anything about the part we *can* control, is just not sensible thinking. To my way of thinking.

The "stuff left around by people" definition is just a specialization of a more general meaning, which is "stuff left around by some activity" which can include geological activity, biological activity, collisions between planetary or stellar bodies, etc. Here's a pretty picture of Stellar Debris in the Large Magellanic Cloud for you to contemplate while you're plotting your theft of this term from multiple scientific disciplines. ;)

You originally used the term "artificial debris"; qualifying it like that seems fine to me. So I'm not clear why any redefinition is needed here.

NASA leases facilities and performs contract work routinely. This is how they keep valuable people and justify maintaining plant and equipment for which they have no immediate need. The classic case is wind tunnel time; both the facility and the staff can be leased by private parties.

Griffen was recently lobbying Congress (see pages 7-8) about this; apparently he would like some red tape cut to permit NASA to do this with certain Shuttle facilities where it currently isn't allowed.

Another possibility is that moondust "burns" in the lunar lander's oxygen atmosphere. "Oxygen is very reactive," notes Lofgren, "and would readily combine with the dangling chemical bonds of the moondust." The process, called oxidation, is akin to burning. Although it happens too slowly for smoke or flames, the oxidation of moondust might produce an aroma like burnt gunpowder. (Note: Burnt and unburnt gunpowder do not smell the same. Apollo astronauts were specific. Moondust smells like burnt gunpowder.)

So, if Google takes the raw data and does that color assignment itself, well, the result is theirs.

I went to a lunch presentation on returning to the moon. One of the ideas for longer term use like colonization was to make roads by microwaving the regolith.

The iron melts into a continuous crust instead of being so abrasive and sharp

I went to a lunch presentation on returning to the moon. One of the ideas for longer term use like colonization was to make roads by microwaving the regolith.

The iron melts into a continuous crust instead of being so abrasive and sharp

You are probably right. The stuff may be dangerous.

Here is an article describing the smell of moon dust..

Breathing hard vaccuum is a really bad idea, so most space suits likely to be worn will be 100% isolated from the outside. This means that the only possible place for dust to get into lungs would be in the landing capsule - if the helmets are removed. Let's say, however, that they are not. That the astronaut simply connects to a piped oxygen supply when in the capsule. Then the risk of contamination is greatly reduced. Not eliminated, but reduced.

You should read the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Sleeping in the suits was found to be very uncomfortable, even for the short missions (Apollo 11-14). Even then they had to take their helmets off to eat and drink.

Lunar dust is so fine it sticks to everything and gets into everything. Even Armstrong and Aldrin, who were only out for just over two hours, were absolutey covered with the stuff.

The longer missions being planned for the future will need to have a proper airlock area where the crews can strip down to their skin, shower, and only then enter the living area. The airlock would also be used to maintain suit fabric and seals, which are the real problem IMO because the dust is so abrasive.

If there is a life on earth ending event occurring from some asteroid they COULD find, does it matter at all? There is nothing we can do about it anyway.

Like any other agent, NASA actively campaigns and seeks a more significant roll for itself. As an agency, NASA's core income is government funding for its manned space exploration program. I believe that NASA intentionally selects programs to fund that are part of its overall strategy of manned space exploration, and avoids unmanned space programs and ground based monitoring, which represent a threat to the justification that we need people in space.

So, if Congress wants NASA to monitor asteroids, it's going to have to force the issue by putting a special line item in the budget, and I bet that NASA will campaign against it, saying that it's taking money from the ISS.

Nasa does keep a thorough survey of NEOs
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

They (try to) keep track of any asteroids 100m in diameter or greater that can come within 0.05 AU of earth.

i think some of the Saturn stages had internal insulation...

http://www.geocities.com/launchreport/satstg5.html (the s4b stage)

http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/01launch_ascent.htm

(sorry, not the best links, and i don't know why this was chosen, and apparently forgotten....)