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In a word, you are wrong. And oh please! A NDA, geez? No his emails include discussions on how to intimidate folks from questioning global warming, and how to avoid producing the data and avoid complying with the law.

Here's a link to the story in the Daily Mail. Nothing the headline and major bullets at the top. In fact, the story goes on in saying that Dr.Jones "can't find his data", it doesnt claim that his data is covered by a non-disclosure. WHAT A FANTASY! Of course this guy works at what us Yanks call a publically funded university.

The story continues on to confirm there has been no global warming since 1995 (see that's really what "no" and "no significant" means) in the dictionary. and as to the prior warming period have been similar warm periods earlier in the 20th century, and confirms that there was a MidEvil warm period, etc.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

Now as to Mars, here's just one of the stories -- this time from National Geographic -- confirming the warming trend on Mars that occurred in parallel to Earth's. This using Earth and Mars data generated from satellite measurements.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

I would go on but the rest of your post is purely argumentative on face value. Simple enough for you?

I'm not sure that I buy that 90% number. The percentage of our DNA that is composed of endogenous retroviral material is around 5-8%. ERVs are horizontal gene transfers that occur in germ-line cells, such as sperm, ova, and all of the cells in their ancestry back to the original zygote for that individual. Genetic changes to these cells (and only these cells) will be passed down to future generations.

Now, it's true that ERVs are not the only type of viral DNA that an individual may have in their cells. Any infection of a somatic (non-germ-line) cell by the appropriate type of virus since the individual's conception will lead to chimeric DNA in some part of the body. For example, well over 90% of American adults have had some form of herpes infection during their lives, such as chicken pox or herpes simplex. This becomes a permanent addition to the DNA in the infected portions of the body, but it is NOT passed down to offspring.

The reason that your 90% figure doesn't pass the sniff test is because it would mean that more than 80% of the DNA in an individual's body would be acquired AFTER birth. If this were true, then wouldn't we expect to see huge, obvious differences between individuals throughout the entire genome? This is definitely not what we see when we sequence DNA. After all, which diseases an individual contracts, when they contract them, and in what order is essentially never the same. Hell, the difference between a human and a chimpanzee's genome is only about 4%. The difference between individual humans is far smaller than that, so it seems likely that only a small (probably 1%) percentage of an individuals genome is made up of viral material obtained since birth. This passes the sniff test as well; you'd expect the genetic insertions that have accumulated over millions upon millions of years in germ-line cells to far outweigh the horizontal gene transfers that happen within a single individual's lifetime.

"Prove that it isn't. There is no science to prove that it's anything but a behavior decision."
Proof is a bitch but a preponderance of evidence is not.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
2. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0510_050510_gayscent.html
3. http://public.gettysburg.edu/~bmeier/Publications/Meier,%20Robinson,%20Gaither,%20&%20Heinert%20(2006)%20-%20Homophobia.pdf
You sir, are a fucking moron. In addition you are probably are a coward you can't take the basic fact that you love cock.

"By your argument, everyone should hire people who don't conform to standards they set (moral or otherwise) despite espousing those standards for themselves."
He didn't argue a fucking thing, he asked you a god damn question, which like any cock-smoking, hypocritical, coward, didn't bother to consider answering, and then tried to misdirect. Oxford debate club material you sir are not.

"By your argument, everyone should hire people who don't conform to standards they set (moral or otherwise) despite espousing those standards for themselves."
No he's saying if something does effect job performance, doesn't predict future performance, and is a private activity it shouldn't be used to determine employment. Your example is shit because it makes the focus of the job the point of contention. You of course can hire and fire based on pertinent aspects of a job. I'm not going to hire a flat chested heroine chic punk rocker to work at a Hooters. If you claim, at all, to believe in freedom and liberty, which a fascist, dominionist, hypocrite like your self probably doesn't, then feel free to be a dick and think that only you are right and everyone who doesn't think as you do can starve.

I would bet that pieces will be found of the meteor. FIrst, the orbit / path will be well known, with so many multiple videos of it from different locations.

Second, astronomer Mark Hammergren, of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, predicts that it may have weighed as much as 1000 pounds.

"One of the misconceptions about bright meteors is that they're due to very tiny objects," said Hammergren. But "if something is bright enough to light up the sky like daytime and cause sonic booms throughout the entire area, it's big. It was major," he said. "If it was daytime, people would have undoubtedly seen smoke trails."

I think that this is very sound reasoning. Happy hunting to rockhounds in Wisconsin !

Now, why do we never get such multiple confirmations of UFOs ?

There are a number of issues that have some scientists skeptical that the newly found Australopithecus Sediba is our ancestor. One is that Homo habilis is significantly older (by around half a million years), and is more human-like than Australopithecus Sediba. The other is that the anatomy simply does not fall into line with the other specimens. The length of the arms, etc, seem a step backwards. Perhaps it was a parallel branch that died out.

It's hard to argue this is the ancestor of Homo when it's occurring much later than the earliest members of the genus Homo by half a million years," said anthropologist Brian Richmond of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

National Geographic

Dont watch a lot of discovery channel I take it. Insects have their roots in the sea. Scary giant sea scorpion! http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071121-giant-scorpion.html Here is something that blows some ppls minds and causes arguments... DOGS AND BEARS ARE RELATED! Amphicyonida! I know dumb crap like that and only have a passing interest.

You know I was going to make a joke about macs in croatia and my amazement at one in native croatian to boot, but then that got me thinking that I didn't know hardly anything about croatia's history, yet alone its actual geographic location. (yeah, i'm a dumb american, so stereotypical, but hey the eastern bloc countries are kind of a jumbled mess) This led to a fascinating wikipedia read and a bunch of photos....

Is it really as idyllic as this?

http://www.i-travel.bg/052/images/EXC/croatia%20(2).jpg
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/places/images/photos/photo_lg_croatia.jpg
http://www.eurotravelpages.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/croatia.jpg

I mean it looks BEAUTIFUL. Croatia is pretty small too if my I'm reading this map I'm looking at right. I'd love to go there if I could only get a passport. :(

http://www.ap.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.c-span.org/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/

Need I go on?

Like hide and seek, they just had to pretend to give up the search, and the galaxies got bored and came in for some lemonade, yes?

But I'm wondering if this finding contradicts a few days ago announcement that the movement of galactic clusters is due to mass outside our universe. If our universe now has 90% more mass than it did, now maybe these flows make more sense. At least there's nothing in the article saying "The soon to be announced finding of 9 times the currently known amount of matter does not affect this report."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100322-dark-flow-matter-outside-universe-multiverse/

They are required to describe something that works, but the requirement to demonstrate in an unambiguous way to the patent examiner a working implementation of the patented process or device was removed quite some time ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_model

No, I know that. I'm a patent agent, actually.

My point was that they still have provide a written description that describes how to build and use a working invention, and if the Examiner says "I don't believe this works," the Applicant has to provide evidence it does. That said...

Here's a nice anecdotal example of what can result: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1111_051111_junk_patent.html

The USPTO actually has an incentive for allowing these... They get to collect issue fees and annuities, and they're not concerned about it ever being enforced, because someone would have to build a working one in order infringe the patent... and if they could build a working one, then hey, it wasn't invalid in the first place, and the USPTO would have been wrong to reject it! Plus, it adds stuff to the database of prior art, and will expire long before anyone does anything remotely close.

So, you'll find that they tend to rubber stamp applications like this.

As the article points out, this misleads investors who think that because the guy has a patent, he has a marketable product... but protection of investors and consumers is the realm of the SEC and other agencies, not the USPTO, as noted in the wonderfully-named Juicy Whip v. Orange Bang decision.

They are required to describe something that works, but the requirement to demonstrate in an unambiguous way to the patent examiner a working implementation of the patented process or device was removed quite some time ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_model

Here's a nice anecdotal example of what can result: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1111_051111_junk_patent.html

Yes, but almost all of those accomplishments are just part-and-parcel of the Apollo 11 mission and the one other just is a silly technical distinction (the first). NASA is to be congratulated on Apollo 11, no doubt. But the Soviets also deserve recognition for so many other meaningful "firsts," and they almost NEVER get it in the U.S. Make no mistake about it, government sanctioned or not, there is a very real propaganda machine in the U.S. that makes the space race sound like it was dominated entirely by the U.S. and NASA. Very rarely is that image ever breached, and when it is, it's usually shut down very quickly.

And example of how difficult it is to pierce that image? Back in 2006, the BBC produced an excellent docudrama miniseries called "Space Race: The Untold Story," that told BOTH the Soviet and NASA space race stories with never-before-seen (or seen since) footage. It aired twice on U.S. television and was effectively banned thereafter. National Geographic has refused to air it since (even though they own the U.S. rights, it's in modern HD, and it got great ratings on its initial airings). Nor has it ever been released on video in the U.S. (about the only modern miniseries to air on National Geographic channel and not be offered for order on video by them or anyone else). It's still to this day only available in Europe and Australia as Region 2 and Region 4 PAL versions. American DVD players won't even play it if you import it.

Hm. I think the two examples you gave mostly substantiate my understanding of the problem with the anti-nuclear mentality.

You say of them 'No proof is possible that it is safe' whereas your approach is 'No proof is necessary that it is safe'. It appears you both are afflicted with that mentality yourselves.

"...even after they were informed of the right answer, they still didn't change their opinions..."

Ok lets test the theory on you.

This is the crux. Despite revised knowledge, there's some kind of emotional resistance to nuclear.

This article describes the state of Nuclear waste around the world. This situation is unresolved and this technology will do nothing to resolve it. Did you know this or does this "revised knowledge" you now poses allow you to continue to justify your presumptions?

You may be tempted to refer to "Yucca Mountain" so please refer to studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology that revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less than 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain and that the DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste". Given the scientific and Governmental sources of information I've refered to do you categorised them as "emotional resistance to nuclear", because they look a lot like real reasons to me.

The emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe which was not undone by learning different. The fear remained regardless of knowledge change.

A "Licencee Event Report" (LER) is submitted for issues above a safety significance threshold. For example at Davis-Besse, the frequency of the replacement water filters was out of spec. It should have signaled that something is going wrong in the reactor. This is the type of event that should be signaled as a LER even if it seems insignificant. At the Davis Besse plant I believe that it led to criminal charges as management allowed the plant to operate outside of it's "Basis Design" which is a known operational characteristic of the plant. Filter replacement intervals had been defined and were known about and thus should have characterised the plant as "not operating safely". I'm not sure if the criminal charges were placed because management should have reported several LERs instead of inspectors finding a hole in the reactor head when it was shutdown.

Whilst this issue was resolved, it shouldn't have even occurred. There are questions regarding the operational safety of Vermont Yankee and Palo Verde so it's a current issue.

Nothing has changed this knowledge. So now that your knowledge has changed and you know Nuclear Industry near misses are not uncommon. These facts illustrate that "emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe" can be "actual caution based on a continued analysis of operational procedure" even if most people don't have the expertise to analyse them.

Do you poses that expertise? Has your "lack of concern" been maintained now that your knowledge has changed?

Emotions don't necessarily respond to logic/information. (Which you see in every online debate.)

A Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy,

First, nuclear is relatively resource intensive because recycling of fuel rods doesn't occur.

In other words Nuclear power is resource intensive and limitations in material technology mean this is the reality of nuclear power.

If the nuclear industry really is releasing 500 tons of CFC 114 into the atmosphere per year, then it is an insignificant amount and not worthy of discussion here.

Actually if you look up the EPA data (I have it's available on the epa web site), it is the Number 1 highest industrial emitter of CFC114 in the U.S. The evidence is that 93% of US emissions of CFC-114 is from the enrichment of Uranium. The word for that is significant. More significant than any other source since it's the largest emitter every year since the international community banned it's use. That is the official, government recognised, industrially measured FACT of a facility that has been DUE for retirement for at least 10 years. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to establish why Ultracentrifuge is so difficult to establish on a industrial scale.

No other source anywhere in the world comes close certainly does make it worthy of discussion. If you are not aware of *how* uranium is enriched to make nuclear fuel then you probably aren't as informed as you think you are.

Aside from the sole exception of Chernobyl, no one has documented a significant release of radioactive materials into the environment.

Perhaps you should read this, after that you can get familiar with NRC regulations that allow noble gas venting. This list goes on and on, but that should be enough reading material for now.

The radioactive isotopes that are considered particularly dangerous are so due to two things, first, that they have a tendency to accumulate in organic matter (such as strontium 90 in bones, iodine 131 in the thyroid gland, or tritium (hydrogen 3) in any water containing tissue).

So you mean what radioactive isotope emissions are inevitable over the entire industrial process?

Mine tailing: radioactive mine tailings from open cut mining where ever it has occurred, radon 220, radium 226, thorium etc.

Enrichment: U-238 or DU. Used as weapon projectile, is pyrophoric and burns into a radioactive powder. Groundwater contamination from leaking Hexafluoride tanks

Reactor facility: tritium, iodine 131, xenon 141, 143, 144, cerium 141, 143, 144. Noble gasses which decay into more dangerous daughter products (Xenon 137, Krypton 90, rubidium 90, strontium 90, Xenon 135, xenon 133, krypton 85, Argon 39). Of course no epidemiological studies have been performed on the noble gas venting which are released hourly from *all* Nuclear reactors. 4000 gallons of primary coolant water PER DAY containing plutonium 238,239,241, technetium 99, iodine 129, carbon 14 and *ahem* tritium. That's just the authorised *documented* effluents not the accidents.

Reactor decommissioning: cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63.

Radioactive Waste: Plutonium, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and on and on

But to be blunt, there aren't significant sources, man-made or otherwise of these isotopes in the world today. And due to the rate at which these isotopes decay, old radiation releases rapidly become innocuous over a few generations. This doesn't strike me as a serious ecological problem.

If mankinds industrial activities makes the environment toxic for humans, that in reality qualifies as a serious ecological problem.

Nor do I need to answer this question. It wasn't posed nor is relevant to

National Geographic did an article on The Mannahatta Project, which did the same thing -- digitized old maps, then matched up known reference points to map them into modern map overlays with GPS coordinates. It also provides some background on why this is such a cool thing to do.

Choose your mood:

Insightful) I can raise you level of outside the box thinking: Lifelong marriage is an invention of churches anyway, and not the basic human thing that we all think it is. In nature it’s rather unusual for humans to stay together their whole life. Usually you stay together a couple of years/decades. Since humans were small communities where everybody was there for everybody else, your children usually were raised by the whole tribe. Look at those tribes who still live like that. It’s our natural way of living. :)

Funny) Wait, I thought the copyfight was the struggle of our generation... (Btw: Is being gay copyrightable? I’m sure, by mafiaa rules, it is. ;)

Troll) Sorry, this option is not available for this comment. ;)

Hunter-gatherer societies are in general hierachical, war-like, mysogynstic, and rigidly bound by social mores that would make the Victorians look like libertines.

I'm intrigued by what you say here because of a fascinating article I read in National Geographic several weeks ago about the Hadza people. They're one of the last few "modern" hunter-gatherer societies that are left in the world. No true political hierarchy, no religious beliefs, no tribal war, and so on. The journalist mentioned specifically about how much leisure time they have, and was quite jealous.

A very worthwhile read.

Human DNA has been patented: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/22064243.html But DNA is hardly anything else as just a "collection of facts". Do you mean that these patents were illicit?

There’s an obvious reason for that: Humans are not made to live in huge hierarchies. We are made to live in small groups of people, where everybody knows everybody. (Example)

As soon as things become half-anonymous, or people do not actually participate in any decisions anymore, it stops working. The one on top will then only care for themselves, as they are the only ones that seem “real”. The one on the bottom will “just do his job”, not really caring for the company anymore.

It’s the same reason why states can’t work. We’re not a team anymore. We are way to diverse to be that tight unity of a community where everybody cares for everybody, or even has mostly the same views as everybody else.

It is possible with fractal structures though.
Meaning you have small groups of 20-50 people, who also act as a atomic entity in a group of 20-50 groups. And so on.
It’s very important here, that they can really act like single entities in that big group. Else it’s not possible.

Scientists need to realize that if they're going to get public support, they really need to be very careful with their choice of wording. Like it or not, the scare mongers, and I mean scare mongers in the sense that there are people who are trying to scare folks into believing that Global Warming is some sort of wealth redistribution scheme by the socialists, are going to use any hint, real or not, that scientists are making up their findings.

Scare mongers? Let's take a look at some of these "hints" that scientists are making up their findings. From May 7, 2002

Dozens of mountain lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are so swollen from melting glaciers that they could burst their seams in the next five years and devastate many Himalayan villages, warns a new report from the United Nations.

From January 17, 2010:

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Do I need to pull the quotes that claim NY and Florida will be underwater?

As for the "fear mongers" saying that GW is a socialist wealth redistribution scheme.

Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change. The United States, for example, has promoted its three-year-old Millennium Challenge Corporation as a source of financing for projects in poor countries that will foster resilience. It has just begun to consider environmental benefits of projects, officials say.

Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation fund.

Strange. When did Rush and Hannity start writing for the NY Times?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100106-cell-phones-alzheimers-disease-mice.html

The challenge is to explain this effect as due simply to heating, or else to discover a microwave-pumped or microwave-inhibited reaction path at this signal level.

No one's surprised that microwave fields can change the outcome of a chemical reaction, favoring one reaction product over another by favoring certain molecular configurations, thereby making some reactions more probable than in the absence of the microwave pumping. It's routine industrial chemistry, you can look it up.

Why this can't happen in the brain remains to be determined, although it's much asserted.

---
the spam filter word for this posting, thankew AI, is "abstain"

Considering it normally looks like this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100204-pluto-hubble-best-pictures/, those blobs of yellow and grays are pretty impressive.

Picture in the Nat Geo article is quite the same picture as the one in the Discovery article; I'm assuming you pasted the wrong link (why it has +5 informative then, I don't know.. even a casual glance would reveal both the first article and your link relate to and show the same pictures)

Considering it normally looks like this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100204-pluto-hubble-best-pictures/, those blobs of yellow and grays are pretty impressive.

But the normal picture looks shiny.
Pluto is one of those chicks that looks better from a distance.

Considering it normally looks like this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100204-pluto-hubble-best-pictures/, those blobs of yellow and grays are pretty impressive.

Many predictions from the Oracle at Delphi were supposedly inspired by escaping gas vapors.

Will in the future people ask of the 'Sun Oracle' - "What were you guys smokin?".

HUMANITY!

This is pure hunter/gatherer humanity: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text
Tell me that does not prove that the natural structure of human society is that of gangs!?

Man, stupid, stupid, STUPID.

How is solid evidence of shrinking polar caps not highly damaging?

Yeah, obviously shrinking polar caps are evidence of anthropogenic global warming. That darned Mars rover is just heating up the place.

The question that will matter to all of us in coming years is not whether the IPCC had, in the midst of a large report of substance, accidentally transposed numbers when discussing a real and dangerous trend.

A better question is whether the IPCC, in a report full of nonsense and propaganda, accidentally told an easily-verifiable whopper.

You claim the problem is "polarization" and then only argue that one side is blinded;

Simply examining the moderated 5 comments exposes the imbalance of the argument here at slashdot.

what about the other side of the argument, about the nuclear detractors grasping at any minor flaw they don't even barely understand and trying to scream that it's horribly dangerous and the world is ending?

The other side of the argument barely exists here, so I don't need to criticise the other side of the argument because everyone else does. Despite the science and available evidence the slashdot audience seems convinced that Nuclear power is a viable option for producing electricity. Ask yourself what objective analysis of the facts you have actually done and be honest about it.

The arguments here are between "This problem is not significant at this time, so everything is fine" and "This shit isn't perfect, so the world is ending."

The argument here is between "ok, things have gotten pretty bad right now we should stop while we can" and "fuck it, we're fucked anyway so who cares". I just happen to care. Tell you what give this article a read and tell me if you have a reasonable solution - just to this problem.

It's like arguing that any exposure to any sort of fat is going to give you a heart attack; versus arguing that fat is not dangerous and the medical reasoning behind the link between saturated fats and heart disease is flawed (it is, but that doesn't mean it's wrong).

Except that it isn't. Exposure to radioactivity has no safe level. All damage from exposure to radiation is cumulative ranging from minor to fatal. As more radioactive *isotopes* make it into the food chain there is a greater chance of internal exposure from ingesting them - which is the main concern. Once you understand that and begin educating yourself about the actual facts do you start to understand the actual ramifications. Have some objectivity with how you form your opinions and ask yourself if they were developed with any basis in fact.

We've had that technology for 40 years. There is absolutely no technical limitation that would prevent us from building a reactor that could run unenriched uranium with burnup ratios approaching 100%.

Ok, then let me be more specific. Burnup of U-235. My criticisms are directed at the *existing* commercial Nuclear Industry.

The problem is that breeder reactors have been banned by statute and the industry has stagnated ever since the late 70s since a de facto ban on new construction.

Because they create more plutonium, three times more, than goes in which creates a nightmare scenario for Plutonium containment. The technology I am speaking of would be a burner reactor which creates deadlier waste products (i.e more radioactive) but are radioactive for less time (less than 1000years vs less than 25000 years).

There's a Google Tech Talk video that describes one way that we could start building reactors that would eliminate address every downside that you can reasonably put forward. (It doesn't address the "I don't like nuclear power because it's icky" objection, but nothing ever will)

Actually it addresses none of my concerns, and if you look carefully it reinforces my concerns. There is no way it deal with existing waste concerns and the output of thorium reactors, thallium-208 a gamma emitter to quote him is "very nasty stuff to deal with...very hard to deal with" may actually increase our containment woes.

However, this is a completely different technology stream from the one I am discussing and therefore out of scope for my criticisms. It certainly looks more benign than the existing nuclear industry, with all it's flaws, as it has more of a chemical base for separating products that poison the reaction and certainly looks like a better reactor design. If advance designs and projects were carried out to contain the thallium-208 output product of the reactor and good studies were carried out on the failure mode of the reactor I think it would not warrant the criticisms the existing nuclear industry does.

It would be a completely new industry though.

Bandwidth?

Why worry about that when your island is basically a volcano?

All that geothermal should be a clue, and if not the Atlantic rift running right up the middle of the island should give you some kind of clue.

http://www.decadevolcano.net/volcanoes/iceland/graphics/island_hekla.gif

What could Possibly go wrong?
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/e/eldfell-volcano-41861-sw.jpg

From this article (by a unabashed pro-global warming person), the estimate is 3 feet by 2100.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0323_060323_global_warming.html
"By the end of this century the seas may be three feet (one meter) higher than they are today, according to a pair of studies that appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science."

This other pro global warming site has a different figure (backed up by several other sites)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11049-major-climate-change-report-looks-set-to-alarm.html
"the new report is believed to predict that sea-levels will rise by between 28 centimetres and 43 cm by 2100" (16 inches).

Personally, I think building properties on the edge of the ocean and subsidence from pumping groundwater are more significant to the problem.

In 99% of the globe, raising sea levels 16" is not going to significantly change the coastline.

Man, these are the moments, where I am proud to be human. There may be much evil going on. But sometimes we just seem to switch to another mode. Where we work together and act for the good of us all.

Maybe we humans just have too comfortable lives. Cavemen were small groups who had to work in that mode, to survive.
Like the Hadza for example.
I’m of course not saying that I want more catastrophes. Just more of that outside-normal-rules teamwork.
We would already be much further in evolution...

"If we only relied on our senses, we could assume that it's safe to live next to Chernobyl ffs!"

Maybe. On the other hand, relying on your senses alone, you can determine that the fuana and flora around Chernobyl aren't exactly "right", and decide to live elsewhere.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.html

Have a source for that plutonium figure?

Yes, get your own citations. I haven't seen anything other than rhetoric, ad-hominem attacks in your "argument".

Even if you're right, that is a tiny amount. You have no sense of scale, especially when you compare the waste to other industrial products.

Oh, ok heres one that doesn't include military waste. That should give you some scale.

You're using special pleading to treat nuclear waste specially.

Thats because it is. A person breathing in a microgram of plutonium *will* die of cancer. That microscopic radioactive isotope will continue to kill for as long as it's ingested and radioactive.

As for the greenhouse gasses --- you know perfectly well that ..., and newer designs are coming online. It's disingenuous.

The disingenuous argument is ingoring the REALITY that CFC 114 is STILL USED for enrichment TODAY, and that 1 million pounds of CFC114 has leaked into the atmosphere per year since the inception of the Montreal protocol in 1995 and we can expect 1 million pounds of CFC114 to leak into the atmosphere every year it continues. What is disingenuous is ignoring that CFC 114 attacks the ozone layer that protects that algae that makes THE OXYGEN WE BREATHE.

Ultracentrifuge is extremely expensive and the bearing technology is still problematic, the CFC method will continue to operate for a long time. Seen any announcements for building UC's lately?

Speaking of being disingenuous --- your 0.3% quote is a lie: first of all, you must be referring to the percent of U235 in natural uranium (even if our number is a bit off).

No, I'm referring to the burn up rate of U-235 in the core of a PWR nuclear reactor, 0.3%. Best figure I have seen quoted is 3%. Nuclear Reactor technology is absurdly inefficient. Go look it up for yourself. 53 tons of u-235 each year into each reactor for re-fueling goes in and 53 tons come out, well 52.97 tons ;-)

It's just dishonest to claim that we're extracting 0.3% of the available energy when only that much of the substance is fissile and has energy to extract.

Well gee wizz, thanks for pointing your straw-man out. So if the 52.97 tons of u-235 is the fissile substance, the 0.3% of the ore, how many tons of u-238 does that leave behind in the enrichment process. Wow, that's a lot of waste u-238 isn't it?

2) there's more seawater than you imagine.

I'd imagine all the seawater in the sea. Question is how many gigalitres of seawater do you need process to get the 530tons of u-235 to re-fuel all the reactors in the US every year? I'd imagine it's a lot.

And as for your containment facility in granite --- what would be geologically stable enough for you? Yucca mountain is perfectly stable by any sane person's standards

But not by the DOE standards. So what part of The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste didn't you understand?

It's only hysterical opposition like yours that leads to it being dubbed seismically unfit. Would one tremor disqualify a site? One fault line, no matter how ancient? You might as well dictate the Archangel Michael stand guard at the door. It's ridiculous.

O---K, what part of But to answer your question directly A geologically stable containment facility in granite didn't you understand? Look I'll make it r-e-a-l simple for you. A_containment_facility_that_would_satisfy_my_criteria: Take NORAD and make the containment facility like that, you could even convert NOR

Could it be on Slashdot? Yeah, that's the ticket, Egypt tried to copyright the pyramids and the sphinx no less. I haven't heard anything else about it, but I'm pretty sure that answer was "how about no".

Hi, thanks for biting. Here is a passive broadband millimeter-wave/terahertz (100-2000 GHz) image of a subject with two items beneath several layers of clothing. One is a metal gun, and you're right, a magnetometer would detect that easily.

The object on the left, however, is a very thin piece of foam. Its overall weight is much less than the 3 oz of PETN the underpants bomber had. It is thin for obvious reasons that I do not need to explain here.

By the way, low vapor pressure of explosives is a serious problem for those "puffer" machines, so imaging technologies are the only real way to detect them.

If only the US had launched some space observatories
If only the US had bothered to maintain some of its science assets
If only the US had conducted any exploration of our solar system
If only the US had commissioned any meaningful physics experiments
If only the US had any anthropologists discovering stuff
If only the US had any geneticists discovering stuff
If only the US had bothered to conduct any nuclear physics experiments
If only the US had any medical science to speak of
If only the US had any practicing bioengineers
If only the US had funded any studies into the harmful effects of BPA

...then maybe then SlashSnot editors would avoid indulging their myopic views of the US science.

There was a good article in National Geographic about this, with great maps, reference to the treaties governing claiming of seabed territory, in relation to oil and gas deposits in the Arctic.

Basically, it has to do with the continental shelf... the Russian continental shelf extends (subject to debate) across the North Pole... here's a map that helps clarify. I couldn't find the NGM map that shows the various claims by the countries surrounding the arctic, but I've pored over that issue of NGM for collective hours while sitting on the shitter (that's the best place to read NGM, IMO).

Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor. I'll bet most of the people who are missing these microbes have been exposed to a lot of antibiotics. This may also explain why staph infections are turning deadly, and I know it's why Western kids have lots of strange allergies.

The Hadza are the last hunter gatherers in the world, probably. They seem to be doing alright. (Not saying I'd give up my lifestyle, but there are lessons to be learned.)

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0420_040420_earthday.html

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fcons/fcons4.asp

Now with handy maps!
http://nexialinstitute.com/world_60_m.htm

So many extinction level events yet we linger at the precipice of become spacefaring people. Mega volcano? Mega landslide in Hawaii? Defrosting Russian permafrost? Global warming? Comet? Meteor? Gamma ray burst? Solar flare?

Let's take a look at your list:

1) Mega volcano: There have been a grand total of four VEI 8 (highest level of the Volcanic Explosivity Index) eruptions in the last 640,000 years. That's an average of 1 every 160,000 years. The chance of one occurring in any given century was then 0.0625%. Most importantly - none of these wiped out homo sapiens predecessors back then, and it's absurd to think anything equivalent could now.

2) Mega landslide in Hawaii/Canary Islands: Could inundate up to 25 kilometers inland from the coast. Massively destructive? No doubt. Global economic collapse/anarchy? Possibly. Extinction of the human race? What are you smoking?!

3) Defrosting Russian Permafrost/Global Warming: As I couldn't find anything particularly destructive about the defrosting of the Russian permafrost in itself, besides its effect on the warm garments industry, I'm going to assume you're thinking of how it could play a role in fueling global warming. Which also allows us to face the global warming question. Is there any even slightly reputable model that estimates that within the next 200 years this planet will become inhabitable due to global warming? The worst I've ever even heard of, as regards a threat to the existence of our species, is the idea that somehow we'll end up like Venus. If this is even possible, it's not gonna happen overnight, and as the situation actually begins to threaten we'll easily be able to channel our resources and technology into adapting, or developing on off-planet solution. Most likely adapting. Is there the possibility of the loss/adjustment of quality-of-life/lifestyle on major scale? Absolutely. Is there going to be major loss of life? Possibly. Extinction?! No freaking way. Also, global warming isn't an "event" unless you subscribe to the "Day After Tomorrow" hilarity.

4) Comet/Meteor: Wikipedia says that there have been an estimated 60 objects that have struck the Earth with a diameter greater than 5 kilometers in the last 600 million years. These may have resulted in, at most, all 5 mass-extinctions that have taken place in the last 540 million years, the largest killed off 90% of life on Earth. Note that there is disagreement, and lack of evidence that all these mass extinctions were caused by impact events. Even if you believe that no humans would be resourceful enough to survive such an equivalent event; and that the future impact object would not be detected and prepared for, or even prevented; then the likelihood of us being extinguished in any given millenium is about 1 in 90000, or 0.0011%. Personally, I say that for just this millenium we not freak out about it.

5) Gamma Ray Burst/Solar flare: I'm pretty sure a GRB is gonna destroy all life wherever it hits, and it's just as likely to hit any other region of space we might be inhabiting. The only way to protect against it would be spread out over enough of an area that no single GRB could destroy us. Fortunately, the likelihood of a GRB or a solar flare powerful enough to destroy all life is even less than the comet/meteor impact event - seeing as how there hasn't been a single event in the last however many hundreds of millions of years it's been since life began on Earth.

Basically, the gist of all this perspective i

I know this is slashdot, but the vast majority of posts so far are elaborate arguments about trees in the US, which is completely missing the point. Forest [...]swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every year. Most posts therefore are mere red herrings. IOW, the world / the climate does not care much about Oregon.

There's a lot more to deforestation than that: Fast Facts about Deforestation and Quick Actions to Prevent Deforestation

You're assuming that everyone who has an opinion about this will actually be informed, will take the time to look through those proofs, reproduce those experiments, etc.

Read this.

In particular, look at that graph. Are you frightened yet?

Evolution is one of the crowing triumphs of modern science. It has more evidence than any other theory I know of, from many branches of science -- the "tree of life" is repeated, exactly, in genetics, in the fossil record, in the geologic record, everywhere we care to look for it. It informs pretty much all of modern medicine and biology, and it is a humbling look at our origins and our true status with respect to other life on the planet. It is beautiful, important, and solidly supported by fact.

Even the Catholic Church has officially embraced evolution, and the big bang theory, as truth.

And a third of Americans reject evolution outright. These aren't people who just aren't sure -- they say it is definitely false.

Want to guess why?

Because they feel it threatens their religion. Because if evolution is true, the Earth (and certainly the Universe) cannot be six thousand years old, and they must accept that they are descended from apes -- or that, by any honest classification, humans are still a species of ape. Because they cannot accept the fact that at least some part of that religion is a fairy tale, or at least a metaphor.

The problem is, in order to reject evolution, they find they have to doubt just about every legitimate scientist who has an opinion on the subject, and keep themselves willfully ignorant. Furthermore, in order to believe the earth is six thousand years old, they pretty nearly have to stick their fingers in their ear and go "la la la la" in order to avoid pretty much every branch of science that has anything to say about the subject.

That is, if they are right, even the most basic grade-school cosmology must be wrong -- there are objects more than six thousand light years away from us. Geology must also be wrong -- not merely carbon-dating (which is already quite rigorous), but the kind of time scales modern geology suggests. And of course, modern medicine must be wrong -- our understanding of things like antibiotics relies on evolution to work.

And yet, they will feel qualified to address these issues, to challenge real scientists with such arguments as, "That's microevolution. Show me one 'kind' turning into another, and I'll believe it." When this fails to get them anywhere, they again close their eyes, ears, and minds, and ultimately turn to the very simplistic, reassuring, and ultimately wrong words of Ken Ham: "Who should you believe -- God or the scientists?"

The problem here is not just the validity of evolution. It is that in order to believe what the creationist wants to believe, they have to reject huge chunks of modern science. In order to continue to be relevant, they have consistently attempted to get their strange ideas taught in school -- not just as a philosophy, or a class in its own right, but as part of science.

And it's not just america -- 22% of Canadians are creationists. Something like a third of Americans are.

So, the short answer is, yes, laypeople absolutely will doubt whatever they feel they have a problem with. If they doubt evolution, cosmology, Einsteinian relativity, geology, archeology, paleontology, etc, just so they can believe a certain way, it's certainly not a stretch that they would doubt anything that conflicts with their actual (polluting, wasteful) lifestyle.

And unfortunately, even when 99.9% of scientists agree on something, it doesn't help if they can't convince the public -- because laypeople are also voters.

We need another Carl Sagan.

Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s.

Yeah, once the industrial age had got started in earnest.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

You and all your fanatical friends are failures. Will that putrid hypocrite Gore refund you the price of your five copies of A Convenient Lie?

mainstream america is what's *wrong* with this country.

mainstream america voted for bush, thought the war was a 'good idea', can't tolerate others' views (if you're not christian) and all that other bullshit.

MSA *is* the problem. we need to wake up and modernize our views on a lot of things. backwater USA is an embarassment.

(where is america's place in the world when it comes to belief in human evolution and not 'bearded sky wizard'? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/21329204.html gives us a hint. the ONLY country who believes LESS in evolution is TURKEY. yes, that's right. backwater USA in all its glory and only TURKEY is worst than the US when it comes to modern thinking about stuff like evolution).

MSA needs to grow up and get with the world program. it really does. the sooner we admit that, the sooner we'll be able to, uhh, evolve a little, ourselves.

--Regardless if global warming is a problem, we should ALL strive to lessen our effect on the environment.--

It IS a problem and a bigger one that was first thought. Just look at the salinity of the oceans the amount of carbonic acid in the seas and what is happening there. Life is already dying there because of global release of locked up carbon. Let's call it that because a lot of that CO2 is going straight into the oceans. It's not false and it wont kill everything or probably even everybody but even if you read the bible, look at that part where it says a 3rd of sea. That appears to have already happened. What's it going to take to make someone believe it? Does a disaster have to be right on top of them? The reef systems may be gone in 30 years. Ask anyone this stuff who fishes or used to fish for a living.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090128-ocean-dead-zones.html

Even if we fix the problem today, this is going to stick around for tens of thousands of years and the oceans turn most of our CO2 into O2 and lock the carbon. If you kill a high percentage of life there, the problem will only get worse.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/OceansGlobalWarming.php

If you kill the phytoplankton, well most of the rest of life up here will die right with it. 90% of the earth biomass is in the oceans but no one mentions the affect this may have. Who the hell knows, but it can't be good? So we are heating up the planet along wit dumping massive amounts of CO2 into an environment that can't take much more.

Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s.

From the linked article: "The scientists say that the Kilimanjaro glacier findings emphasize another way that global warming is affecting the world"

Nice try....

Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s.

Yeah, once the industrial age had got started in earnest.
And in the past 50 years the industrial age has really grown, and so have the consequences.

Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s.

C02 in the atmosphere has only been shooting up since the 1950s. Pre-industrial C02 levels were about 2.8 parts per 10 000. As opposed to 4 or so now.

If these things pre-date C02's big increase this indicates a large role for natural climate variations.

This is what many skeptic say.

... require extraordinary evidence. The global-warmists, or climate change proponents need to pony-up some real evidence for all the wild, alarmist claims about doomsday they've been making for the past 20 years... not just anecdotal bunk like misc. ice sleets falling off Antarctica, etc.

I agree with your subject statement but I disagree with that very last part. Apparently the West antarctic ice sheet was the part with "ice sheets falling off it" while the East side remained relatively stable. That's recently changed. I don't think this proves anything but I admit it's alarming to me that we might just be sitting on our hands while Antarctica breaks apart. Hell, we're already opening up shipping lanes through the north pole. It's true, I am just another internet moron but I would really prefer we don't have to find out what results from Antarctica breaking apart or melting. At this point, I'm open to suggestions and theories ... although for any of them to be unquestionably valid, I refer to your first statement.

No one seemed to refute our decision to stop using CFCs. We all seemed to agree as a planet that they were bad. And so on and so forth you can look back historically at man negatively altering his environment to varying degrees. I think more than sufficient evidence has been provided to prove that we need to get a better grip on what emissions and carbon proliferation mean for the Earth and -- most importantly -- us. I'm a small government kind of guy but if that means more government funding being dumped into unbiased investigations than so be it. I don't want Earth to end up like Easter Island.