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The Carboniferous period is the source of 90% of our coal though. Coal formation during that time was 600 times the 'normal' rate. Apparently because the wood got buried and compressed instead of broken down into carbon and oxygen. The bacteria that could break it down evolved later.

Source: http://phenomena.nationalgeogr...

What is really surprising is bacteria has been found growing in space, on the outside of the International Space Station. Is it possible that our exploration of space could inadvertently be leaving a trail of life in its entirety, or at least highly developed constituent parts? If it doesn't yet exist, Earth might become the origin of extraterrestrial life.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/mars-soil-earthworm-agriculture-science-spd/

http://www.iflscience.com/space/cosmonauts-find-live-bacteria-on-the-hull-of-the-iss/

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1219_TVsugarmeteors.html

What is really surprising is bacteria has been found growing in space, on the outside of the International Space Station. Is it possible that our exploration of space could inadvertently be leaving a trail of life in its entirety, or at least highly developed constituent parts? If it doesn't yet exist, Earth might become the origin of extraterrestrial life.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/mars-soil-earthworm-agriculture-science-spd/

http://www.iflscience.com/space/cosmonauts-find-live-bacteria-on-the-hull-of-the-iss/

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1219_TVsugarmeteors.html

tldr:

When temperatures rise and ice melts, more water flows to the seas from glaciers and ice caps, and ocean water warms and expands in volume. This combination of effects has played the major role in raising average global sea level between four and eight inches (10 and 20 centimeters) in the past hundred years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

If we allow cosmologists to be unlicensed, the entire universe could collapse into a black hole. There is some evidence that this is already happening. That is far worse than a bad haircut.

Other sources, like this article
https://news.nationalgeographi...
have more images.

> Food can't (yet...) be DRMed, so no ink cartridge refill schemes. https://news.nationalgeographi...

Exactly. The whole 'global sea level rise means island nations will drown' narrative is fake news.

It's more complicated than that

https://news.nationalgeographi...

This reminds me of bananas, which are also all clones. When a suitable predator evolves, an entire bread breed of bananas can be wiped out, because it cannot evolve to protect itself. This happened to bananas in the 1950s and could happen to our bananas. In the long run I suspect it will happen to the crayfish.

There was a documentary about this on TV, not sure what channel, but I saw it just a few days ago, about how

Looks to me like you are referring to this documentary on National Geographic

They used LiDAR in Belize in 2009 for the Caracol Archaeological Project (also Mayan). This is not revolutionary tech, nor a revolutionary application. https://news.nationalgeographi...

Regarding size and weight specifics...

From the Nat Geo site: Estimates say the rock likely measured three to six feet across, and could have weighed more than a ton.

TFA says, "the level of oxygen in all ocean waters is falling, with 2% – 77bn tonnes – being lost since 1950."

A 2% world-wide decrease in ocean oxygen driven by temperature rise would require an average temperature rise somewhere around 1.5C - 2C. According to this, ocean temperature has risen 0.1C in the past century.

TFA has a map showing areas of open ocean with oxygen content lower than 2 mg/liter. According to this, heating seawater to 50C reduces oxygen content to about 5 mg/liter. I'm not sure you could heat it enough to get it down to 2 mg/liter before it started to boil.

Rounding error compared to what? We don't lose anything by reducing CO2 use. And the amount of CO2 produced by launches is not small. For example, the Falcon 9 uses around 25,000 gallons of kerosene per a launch, which is about the same CO2 output as a moderate sized US town. However, the total produced CO2 if you count that made in making a rocket is typically an order of magnitude or more higher. Moreover, if your concern is about other pollutants, then the Falcon 9 and other rockets that SpaceX uses are also particularly clean for those also. One of the reasons that SpaceX avoided using solid rocket boosters is because they are terrible from a pollution perspective. Solid rocket motors often use aluminium perchlorate which is bad for the ozone layer since burning it releases chlorine (and has an impact similar to CFCs https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090414-rockets-ozone.html), as well as all sorts of other nasties which are produced since they are also burning PBAN or some other rubber-like substance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybutadiene_acrylonitrile. Yes, as a fraction of total pollution these are small, but we do better by reducing pollution from all sources in general, and every little bit helps.

FYI, the article didn't talk about "starving to death..."

Read this article.

It will perhaps educate you.

About 2% of the people you meet outside Africa is Neanderthal. See: https://genographic.nationalge...

I guess they didn't make the important part obvious enough: you are going to be paying for that increased price.

And it's at least partly due to an insistence we increase border security to keep out undocumented workers from stealing jobs. Jobs, it turns out, that no one wants but need to be done in order for us all to not starve.

It says here that raising the wages of produce pickers to $15/hour would cost American households an extra $20 per year. If that's true, I wouldn't expect an uprising over increased produce prices due to increased farmworker wages.

The claims of alien bacteria on the ISS are being met with widespread skepticism.

And this is how it would look: https://www.nationalgeographic...

There are 31,536,000 seconds in a calendar year (non-leap year).

There are 100 lightning strikes per second, cloud-to-ground, earthwide.

That puts the number of strikes about 2 orders of magnitude higher than you calculate.

Zombies aren't a thing IRL.

Mother Nature would like a word with you.

I don't know what they use in the real world, but I doubt they try to measure gravity. You can make gravitational maps of the Earth from an orbiting spacecraft, but that takes many many orbits and careful measurement of those orbits from the ground. An ICBM in flight simply wouldn't have the time to make such a map, and I doubt it would be communicating with ground stations either.

The Earth is "lumpy" from a gravitational perspective so it's plausible that a highly accurate ICBM might need to take precise gravitational maps into account. However, those maps would have to be created ahead of time and pre-programmed into the missile.

Scientists have created gravitational maps of the Earth and the moon, as well as other solar system bodies.

I may have to go to India this year for work. While I have worked with Indian people here as well as in India for many years, I simply do not want to go. I have no desire to see dead bodies rotting in a river, or public feces. These are things that should not happen at this scale in this day and age. It's their society, but I don't understand their caste system or why they can't solve sanitation issues that cause
569 million people poop outside.

And you think that your best-case scenario gains could possibly make up for loss of arable land?

https://www.nationalgeographic...

Umm, with the amount of ice that Antarctica is shedding, you might want to rethink that.

People with money and power really do.

I think you are confusing the pursuit of short term gains with long term value. They are not the same.

Soon to be vividly documented on Nat Geo WILD in “the secret life of drones”: Common drones are actually rather remarkable devices. These sleek, black machines are excellent and acrobatic fliers on par with falcons and hawks. Such aerial skills are on display during refueling season, when exciting docking rituals include an elaborate dance of chases, dives, and rolls. (slightly adapted from Nat Geo)

https://news.nationalgeographi...

http://phenomena.nationalgeogr...
http://northernwoodlands.org/d...

Recently he said SpaceX would land people on Mars in 5 years.

First, Elon plans to land cargo ships on Mars in 5 years.

Second, Musk's time-line for landing humans on Mars is 7 years.

Third, Musk never said that those people would be alive.

Musk hasn’t yet specified how all those humans will survive once they’ve landed on a world with noxious soil and a suffocating atmosphere.

Fourth, Musk has already created the fastest production car from 0-60, reusable rockets that land themselves, the largest factory in the world, huge batteries, integrated solar roof panels. All this while opening patents and boring a hole for high speed transit. Don't forget how Musk's PayPal changed the way we make purchases.

Just because his time-line is off, doesn't make him a failure. Musk is reaching for perfection and achieving excellence.

Recently he said SpaceX would land people on Mars in 5 years.

First, Elon plans to land cargo ships on Mars in 5 years.

Second, Musk's time-line for landing humans on Mars is 7 years.

Third, Musk never said that those people would be alive.

Musk hasn’t yet specified how all those humans will survive once they’ve landed on a world with noxious soil and a suffocating atmosphere.

Fourth, Musk has already created the fastest production car from 0-60, reusable rockets that land themselves, the largest factory in the world, huge batteries, integrated solar roof panels. All this while opening patents and boring a hole for high speed transit. Don't forget how Musk's PayPal changed the way we make purchases.

Just because his time-line is off, doesn't make him a failure. Musk is reaching for perfection and achieving excellence.

There may very well be AGW, but hurricanes aren't proof of it.

Well, there is, but you're correct.

The other day I was reading an article [WARNING: Annoying advertisementt] on National Geographic's website which was talking about the storm. I found this phrase somewhat annoying:

And while scientists maintain that no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, two centuries of human fossil-fuel burning has altered temperatures just enough to almost certainly make this season's storms more powerful.

So, it wasn't enough last year. The tipping point was this year?

It sort of reminds me of the meme, "I'm not saying it's aliens...but it's aliens." "I'm not saying it's climate change, but it's climate change."

Even though scientists--y'know, smart people that we should consider listening to--say that a single event cannot be attributed to climate change, we're going to say it anyway. Because, hey, what do scientists know? Amirite?

A need to be treated fairly is hardwired into primates.

Considering that in 50 years the climate is projected there to become LETHAL to a normal, healthy adult in the shade, I think this is the only way that these countries will continue to exist.

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

Actually, this solution may work, grandiose as it is, for the rich cities like Dubai (assuming they can live off their oil derived fortunes). Unfortunately for those who cannot afford to live in round the clock air-conditioned environments, like the entire country of Yemen, they'll DIE.

Or they'll join the hundreds of millions of refugees from that just that part of the world. (It doesn't include the more than HALF A BILLION people living in similar areas in South Asia). Or the hundreds of millions from other countries including East China and even parts of the U.S.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

Of course, they'll try to find a cooler climate to live in, UNDER PAIN OF DEATH. How the world will handle this, when the (tiny by comparison) six million refugees from the Syrian war has tightened borders everywhere, does not inspire hope.

The future may be a very very horrific place for much of humanity

feed them proper grass and neither corn nor soy beans... problem solved

Unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem.

This, however, might...

And yet those "bigger" plants are less nutritious by biomass. So, you need to eat even more of them to get the same amount of minerals and vitamins.

"Bread, chips, french fries, cakes, pies
Lattes, milkshakes, and smoothies

Carbs are the devil"

Unfortunately, higher atmospheric CO2 due to climate change, cause also the good crops to have more carbs and less nutrients.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

What does aspirations have to do with it?

Um...everything? Complete this sentence: "the sun never sets on the XYZ Empire." Did Russia have colonies across the world? How about China?

They didn't have matching technology

You're right - China was a century ahead of any European country in naval prowess, yet they didn't establish a global empire - as opposed to England and Spain.

but if your objection is aspiration of world conquest, the original point falls apart

Or you're just really eager to hold onto that false equivalency.

It would be interesting to get a similar car analogy for volcanoes!

https://earthobservatory.nasa....

http://sciencing.com/major-sou...

https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp...

http://www.nationalgeographic....

The skeleton of the Clovis childâ"which experts determined belonged to a young boy about one to one-and-a-half years oldâ"was discovered in 1968 in the Anzick burial site in western Montana. Dozens of ochre-covered stone tools found at the site were consistent with Clovis technology, and radiocarbon dating revealed that the skeleton was approximately 12,600 years old.

Science is still practiced by people who can be pig-headed and stick to their guns long after it has become apparent ...

Einstein was criticized for sticking to his crackpot "general" theories in later life and not jumping onto the quantum bandwagon he himself had originally piloted out of the shuttle bay. But ask yourself this: did the world actually need Einstein working on quantum physics, or were all the other brilliant people involved more than sufficient?

If the stubborn Einstein had not persisted down his stubborn path, would we now be collectively guessing what might have been in the one and only Einstein had not nestled himself in the cockpit of the alien wormhole shuttle to unimagined physics?

Instead of yammering on about this old arrogance morality tale (oh, tiresome prose!) how about bringing some actual cost/benefit to the table?
____

You know, in that horrible movie, The Hobbit, I wasn't going to believe they couldn't open that stone door until there was 14 skeletons lying beneath it. If you're going to rattle the handle to the dragon's lair, the least you can do is stick to your guns (and your magic moon map).
_____

For anyone interested the sociology of science, or the immensity of planet earth itself, or just in it for some mind-blowing pictures, I can't recommend the following article strongly enough:

Formed by Megafloods, This Place Fooled Scientists for Decades — 9 March 2017

"Bretz was making arguments, and no one was going into the field to see anything," Baker said. "They were just countering his arguments with theory." And because scientists are first and foremost human beings, they're loathe to change their theories or their minds because of mere data.

Baker told me a story as we looked out at Palouse Falls, another dramatic cataract at the head of a massive canyon, with a stream running through it that seems comically out of scale, like a toddler wearing a grown man's boots. Sometime in the late 1950s or early '60s, a geologist named Aaron Waters brought one of Bretz's most vocal critics—James Gilluly, the one who'd called his ideas "preposterous" and "incompetent"—to the scablands for a first-hand look. As they took in the sight of the falls and the canyon, Gilluly was dumbfounded by their scale. "Gilluly was just quiet the whole time," Baker said, "and as they were leaving, he broke out into this immense laugh and said, 'How could anybody be so wrong?'" After resisting Bretz's theory for decades, simply seeing the landscape with his own eyes had changed his mind.

I often visited Drumheller and the surrounding badlands in my childhood. Amazing place. Never been to Spokane, but it's not that far away.
____

Grow up. Stubbornness is a virtue every damn time stubbornness works.

The exceptions are so rare, Herzog made a movie about it, with the entire cast in character the whole wretched time.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Yeah,I lived there a long time ago (1990's). I even had the idea,being an avid RC plane nerd, of equipping them with an auto pilot as had been available for RC helicopters for a couple of decades and using them as remote location drug delivery vehicles. But I never had the time nor resources. Now you buy complete electronics packages for under $100, drop them in a senior telemaster and deliver 5kg of supplies 1000km away for a few dollars a trip.

It's not without precedent, even fifteen years ago. (He was successful)

The so called Liquidators alone are more or less all dead:

At the peak of the cleanup, an estimated 600,000 workers were involved in tasks such as building waste repositories, water filtration systems, and the "sarcophagus" that entombs the rubble of Chernobyl

One advocacy group, the Chernobyl Union, says 90,000 of the 200,000 surviving liquidators have major long-term health problems.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

Sorry, no idea where you have your numbers from, but I saw several thousand dead bodies myself.

Keep in mind: the Liquidators where 17 - 19 year old recruits of the soviet army, they should be about 50 now, more than 2/3rds are dead.

And that does not even include the civil persons that died in the area around the plant.

According to this month's National Geographic magazine (subscription link, but you can peruse a paper copy from any number of places), several teams are genuinely close. In order to make the final cut in the successive rounds of elimination, the six remaining teams all had to demonstrate that they had a spot on a rocket flight manifest. Several are ganging together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 flight. One is going with a RocketLab launch. One is sort-of self-certified, in that the team and rocket company are the same entity.

Whether the lunar probes/landers are genuinely flight ready is a different matter. And as we all know, rocket launch schedules are hardly set in stone. So it may be that, rather than have December come and go with a handful of teams just barely missing out, Google decided to extend the deadline in the hopes that several will at least launch by then.

Denialist points.

1. No point in U.S.A. aiming for sustainability if (insert 3rd world country) isn't doing their part. - Check
2. It's just a wealth transfer. - Check
3. Renewables aren't reliable and consistent. - Check

There is no perfect solution. Saying something is worthless because it's not perfect is just a stalling tactic. There will never be an enforceable, global contract. The Paris accord was a success in getting every nation to recognize the problem and work towards solutions. It was a really good step in the right direction. Nobody claimed it was "gospel" except you. "sent trillions of dollars from the US to anyone who wanted a free bucket of money" Source please. - I call B.S. on that statement.

Your comment that China is "simply not good at keeping promises. They are good at deception, expansion, and colonization" reeks of the type of isolationism rhetoric that's infected the airwaves lately, and it's got little to do with addressing AGW. I'm not defending China and their government, but I take issue with your statement. The truth is that China has exploded over the last 20 years and is still developing rapidly. They've experienced many growing pains including terrible pollution. That pollution has caused them to prioritize clean energy. It's no coincidence they are the lead solar panel manufacturer. They're also a leader in renewable installations and battery powered vehicles. "China added 35 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2016 alone. “That’s almost equal to Germany’s total capacity, just in one year" http://news.nationalgeographic...

"Simply dumping non-renewable sources means that millions suffer and die because we lose necessary power for hospitals, refrigeration, air conditioning"

Pure Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. You forgot to mention the children. Nobody is calling to just suddenly shut off all the coal power plants. Anyway, it doesn't matter what you think. The economics of renewables have already overtaken coal. "... solar already rivals the cost of new coal power plants in Germany and the U.S. and by 2021 will do so in quick-growing markets such as China and India." https://www.bloomberg.com/news... My relatives in Mississippi, yes Mississippi, have an offer on a nice chunk of land for the power company to install solar panels. Time to wake up.

"And lets face facts: We will always have some dependency on non-renewable sources of energy. Renewable sources are not consistent, and dead batteries are very bad for the environment."

No. That's not a fact. Not consistent? The sun shines. Water runs. Wind blows. The earth holds heat. Not all the time in every place, but in combination with smart distribution and storage it's very much possible. It's sad the pessimistic view you have on the potential of the human race. The "dead battery" thing is such a red herring. Though no product has 0 impact, common lithium-ion batteries are relatively benign, recyclable, and have lifetimes greater than 10 years. Tesla's lead researcher, Jeff Dahn, one of the world's leading and most respected battery researchers claimed they've doubled the lifetime of batteries. https://electrek.co/2017/05/09... So we have 10 year batteries in service and 20 year batteries on the way - all of which can be recycled. And that's not even looking at Vanadium-Redox, salt water batteries, and lithium-iron-phosphate batteries and so on.

The nitpicking over data points, taken out of context of the larger data set seems at best trolling.

This whole "thought," started a long time ago with the old adage.. "Don't shit where you eat"

We don't shit where we eat because we may get a disease, its not healthy, the ground doesn't produce the same, it soils our water.

Take that to the next step, burning our trash. Our neighbors don't appreciate it because it creates smoke, which makes one cough, naturally telling the human being that "smoke isn't great for the lungs." On a small scale when there were not 7+ billion people on the planet, that would be fine, but if every citizen of NYC or Paris burned their trash, people would get sick and do.

Coal burning plants have destroyed forests next to them due to the amount of waste produced. Sludge contaminating the water. Smoke contaminating the air. Acid rain killing all vegetation around them is well documented. Citation

Put enough industrial plants on the planet, and that "backyard of waste" is now the entire planet.

The full effect is the considerable change to our environment, from polluted waterways, acidification of the oceans, and a rising temperatures, just to name a few.

So what is the best name to use instead of "Climate Change", so that we can quit arguing over trivial data points when its fairly clear to anyone with eyes, ears and a nose that we are shitting on the environment that we live and eat in?

No one is making a criminal accusation

Wrong. It is exactly that — a criminal accusation. People driving SUVs or eating beef are evil, because they are killing the planet . So, yeah, vast well-funded forces are making criminal accusations with punishment ranging from mandatory education for the ignorant to prison time for the worst offenders, who are committing the crimes against humanity.

rhetorical turd you have dropped has an intimidating perfection because people would rather step around it than sweep it up.

Ah, a fecal metaphor, nice. Too bad, it does not help your argument in the slightest. For all the SAT-words in your vocabulary, you are still wrong — the Western world really is on trial, a criminal one, the fact you attempted to deny. Remember to logout.

All those floods, storms, heat waves, and other events are being caused by humans, using fossil fuels.

...all the Category 3 or stronger hurricanes caused by global warming that have hit the continental US? Oh, wait... Despite predictions of an increased number and strength of hurricanes hitting the US, Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005 were the most recent major hurricanes to hit the continental US -- the longest period not to have a major hurricane landfall in NOAA's records back to 1851. Apparently Mother Earth didn't hear about Obama's declaration back in 2014 that hurricanes will become “more common and more devastating” because of climate change. Pity.

Also, Greenland would be quite nice.. and it's largely uninhabited.

Once the ice pack melts, Greenland will be largely underwater. Much of the actual land is below sea level.

No, it isn't. Greenland is way above sea level. Where do you get your information from?

Here's a nice set of maps of the shorelines if all the ice caps melted, for what it's worth: http://www.nationalgeographic.... Greenland is almost unaffected.

Fascinating that it takes about ten seconds with Google to prove my claims are correct yet you seem utterly uninterested in even that minor effort. Speaks volumes about your desire to know the truth of the situation.

Not that you'll bother reading any of it, of course, but just to prove you're wrong here are some links:

http://news.nationalgeographic...

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

There are literally hundreds of other links to similar articles from a variety of sources, all corroborating my statement. Would you like a glass of water to help wash down the taste of crow? Care to admit you're wrong so you don't seem so much like a smug, ignorant ass?