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http://channel.nationalgeograp... talked about solar power in NV, FL, and India. It was an interesting episode. IIRC, it talked about FL's voters and how old power companies tried to block the solar companies. :(

What he's saying (poorly but about typical for someone untrained in the effect of radiation on biology) is that there is no proof that long-term exposure to low levels of radiation is dangerous. That's a huge-ass assumption we've been living with for the last century. We know high doses of radiation are harmful. So we drew a straight line interpolating it down to zero, which leads to the unsubstantiated conclusion that low levels of radiation are also harmful. But we figured better safe than sorry, and set up radiation limits and protocols as if it were true.

Animal population studies from Chernobyl are a mixed bag so far and do not clearly support this conclusion. If it were true that long-term low level radiation were unquestionably harmful, you'd expect to find a clear negative trend. But the trend so far is mixed. So more than likely the effects of long-term low level radiation exposure are much more nuanced - sometimes bad, sometimes neutral, and as the man said, sometimes good. The mathematics of adaptation would seem to bear this out. The rate at which a species can adapt to changing conditions would depend on (1) its rate of reproduction, and (2) the rate of DNA transcription errors induced by radiation. So too much radiation and the organism dies due to biological malfunction. Too little radiation and the species dies due to inability to keep pace with changing environmental conditions.

Here is another one with tail feathers from a bird, ~100million years BC.

These guys have finally designed the world's best 2005 Semi Truck.

Also one or two full-size beds will be included inside the vehicle's enormous cab.

For who? Are they trying to milk the last owner operators? Walmart quibbles with OEMs over 0.1 MPG claims. The second they can, every single Walmart truck is going to be replaced by an autonomous driver, even if it's just between cities. (Given where most Walmarts are located it'll replace 90% of their need for drivers). They spent a lot of time and money designing something that will never get used by time this hits the market.

, the vehicle will provide nearly double the power of the current-gen diesel-powered semis/articulated lorries

And? Truck OEMs are moving to Natural Gas. Locomotives are too.

Everyone thought Warren Buffet was crazy buying a rail company in 2009. Turns out that he owns Northern Natural Gas the largest interstate natural gas pipeline system in the United States. Northern Natural Gas' pipeline system stretches across 11 states, from Southern Texas to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, providing access to five of the major natural gas supply regions in North America. (At which point he starts to sound a bit more like Rockefeller).

10 years ago Natural Gas was a 3rd party add on. Now the engine OEMs are selling it in addition to dual fuel engines (NG/Diesel). That goes for engines for a small tractor up through their largest stationary engines.

Natural gas is:

1. Domestic.
2. Cheap
3. Run to households in a lot of the US.

With a tiny compressor you could come home and 'fill up' at night..

If I was an investor the 2 power sources for vehicles going forward are going to be natural gas & batteries. You cut out a lot of gasoline and diesel refineries. You can run locomotives and semis on natural gas (since batteries alone can't (yet)).

Hydrogen, in 2016, is a non-starter. First you can't just 'get' it. We're quickly getting an EV grid and the Natural Gas 'grid' is already there.

Finally it's not about horsepower. Those Semi truck engines "only" pushing a few hundred HP can easily put out more. The Caterpillar D11 bulldozer only has 850 HP. The reason they're de-tuned is they're designed to do that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for a million miles. You can easy tune them up to easily out do the 1,000 horsepower and 2,000 foot-pounds. [And why geeks that aren't into machinery shouldn't just look at specs like they're computers.]

By 2020 this is going to look like a dinosaur.

No you did not.

the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s.

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.” For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/

That's the legacy of welfare reform.

This study may interest you. Conservatives like money-saving light bulbs, as long as they don't have a "good for the environment" sticker on them: http://news.nationalgeographic...

What caused the several centuries long mega-droughts in California in the last 2000 years before Manmade Climate Change?

AGW/Climate Change is contributing, to be sure, but the last 150 years in California have been unusually wet. Centuries without appreciable rain are not rare for the region.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04...

The drought, now in its fourth year, is by many measures the worst since the state began keeping records of temperature and precipitation in the 1800s. And with a population now close to 39 million and a thirsty, $50 billion agricultural industry, California has been affected more by this drought than by any previous one.

But scientists say that in the more ancient past, California and the Southwest occasionally had even worse droughts — so-called megadroughts — that lasted decades. At least in parts of California, in two cases in the last 1,200 years, these dry spells lingered for up to two centuries.

The new normal, scientists say, may in fact be an old one.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

"During the medieval period, there was over a century of drought in the Southwest and California. The past repeats itself," says Ingram, who is co-author of The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climate Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow. Indeed, Ingram believes the 20th century may have been a wet anomaly.

"None of this should be a surprise to anybody," agrees Celeste Cantu, general manager for the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority. "California is acting like California, and most of California is arid." (Related: "Behind California's January Wildfires: Dry Conditions, Stubborn Weather Pattern.")

Unfortunately, she notes, most of the state's infrastructure was designed and built during the 20th century, when the climate was unusually wet compared to previous centuries. That hasn't set water management on the right course to deal with long periods of dryness in the future.

Annual global seaweed harvest was 28,000 metric tons (61,729,433lbs) in '88 according to Wikipedia.

And your 28,000 metric tons figure must be for a single country or a single species of seaweed, not properly fact-checked by Wikipedia's editors since it references a paper article instead of web link. Seaweed is a staple food in Asia, and global production is about 25 million tons annually. Even in the late 1980s it was nearly 5 million tons/yr.

But take note, according to this pro-meat article, livestock accounts for 20% of greenhouse emissions. Should be worrisome to anyone consuming cows or dairy...that's a lot we could cut out very quickly if the will existed.

A large part of the world's open plains have been fenced off for livestock. If you eliminated livestock, you wouldn't eliminate those methane emissions. Those open areas wouldn't need to be fenced anymore, and those wild grasses would instead be consumed by wild herbivores who would produce the same amount of methane (or more).

Livestock feed also represents a convenient sink for excess grain production due to our policy of overproducing food to prevent shortages (having too much food is a much preferable problem to not having enough). In the U.S. at least, the government has been subsidizing farming since the Great Depression to prevent a repeat of the famine which followed the dust bowl (drought and windstorms which blew away much of the topsoil on farms in the Great Plains). Farmers are encouraged to overproduce, and some are paid to leave their fields unplanted just so we'll have excess farmland if there's another dust bowl. Normally this would crater the price for grains since supply exceeds demand. So the government buys all the grain at a set price high enough to keep the farmers in businesses, reselling what people need for food.

The excess grain is used for a variety of things - feed for cattle, converted into high fructose corn syrup as a substitute for imported cane sugar, foreign food aid, and ethanol production being the major ones. (This is why we use corn for ethanol even though economically it's a terrible crop for making ethanol. When the program was first started, it was excess corn being turned into ethanol. The cost to grow it was a sunk cost, so didn't factor into the economics. But then the corn lobby got their hands on it and now we wastefully grow corn for the explicit purpose of converting it into ethanol.) Eliminate feed for cattle and we'd have a lot more excess grain every year. We'd have to figure out something else to do with that grain, or the government would have to scale back these food production subsidies, putting us at greater risk of food shortages.

Read some of the recent articles by the elder statesmen of the environmentalist movement, such as one of the founders of Greenpeace.

oh, so NOW your listening to them.

Intentionally conflating alpha, beta, and gamma radiation.

Please, please, please can you people please learn the difference between a radionuclide and the radiation it emits. I'm not fucking einstein but I'm fairly certain you don't want to breath plutonium oxide or have plutonium chloride in your food.

Too late, who knows how much of a serve Fukushima and Chernobyl gave us of that. I guess we will have to rely on the promotional materials from the IAEA.

The even bigger lie is intentionally conflating short half-life with long half-life.

ok, how about radon seeping into water tables from mine tailings or CFC114 emissions from enrichment (now thankful ceased) or megalitres of radioactive sulphuric acid slurry from acid leach mining or DU DU everywhere!

There is waste that releases enough radiation in a year to be dangerous,

Yes there is

It's really it like showing somebody a firecracker and saying "this is metal oxydizing" (true) and "the metal in your car could oxydize at any moment" (also true, your car is oxydizing all the time).

My brain is oxidizing.

Those are old estimates, and they were revised upward by the U.N. two years ago.

"In a paper published Thursday in Science, demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division conclude that instead of leveling off in the second half of the 21st century, as the UN predicted less than a decade ago, the world's population will continue to grow beyond 2100. (Read "Population Seven Billion" in National Geographic magazine.)"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140918-population-global-united-nations-2100-boom-africa/

One reason for this is that the second derivative for women in first-world countries is not declining, it's actually started going upward again:

"The revision in the low variant's total fertility rate - the average number of children per woman - was due to a rise in births in Europe and the United States following years of an 'artificially depressed' fertility rate, according to demographics expert John Bongaarts. This lower rate was a consequence of large proportions of women delaying pregnancy until later in their lives. 'During the ‘90s, while the average age at childbearing was rising, women became more educated, wanted a job,' said Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council. 'That artificial depression is now being removed as the average age of childbearing stops rising.' The 2008 U.N. revision projects that the industrialized world will average 1.64 children per woman between 2005 and 2010, up from an average as low as 1.35 projected in 2006..."

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6038

...use one's eyes to know that climate change is real. When I was a kid, in the 80's, I normally had my coat, and gloves out by this time in November. Shoot we had at least 1 to 3 inches of snowfall by this time in November. Don't believe me then look here: https://www.currentresults.com... Then fast forward to 2016: there is no snow in sight, and it is 72 degrees currently in Overland Park, KS where I am. Don't tell me climate change doesn't exist. If you don't believe your senses then look at the great barrier reef that is slowly dying due to the water being too warm http://news.nationalgeographic... Climate change is real, but IMO there is nothing that we can do about it now. Humanity hasn't invested enough time in developing clean energy, clean transportation, etc. to turn things around. A few people like Elon Musk are trying, but the price point for Teslas are still beyond most peoples reach. Very few people that are in that price point are also Earth conscious / green.

The San Joaquin river. Could be a dry season issue, but the dry area at the time (link below) was over 40 miles. A guy tried to kayak down the river for CNN.

Using the CNN link below, page down to mile 187, that's where the river ends. It does start up at a later point. As well, the ground itself has sunk up to 30 feet from aquifer depletion (per Nat Geo link farther down).

http://www.cnn.com/interactive...

http://www.nationalgeographic....

If half of what is shown in this show is true, it'll take some time to fix, but they're aware of it and working on it. Long story short, they use a lot of coal, but they are at the limits of what the grid can distribute so power goes out often (and burning more coal -- which they're doing -- only strains the grid more) and lots of places have diesel generators for backup.

In the UK here I doubt that one person in 20 could point to it on a map or even know that it is in Africa

Don't feel bad, more than 1 in 10 Americans cannot find the United States on a map. http://news.nationalgeographic...

So when it comes to finding Liberia, spelling Liberia, or generally knowing anything about Liberia, the odds of an American getting the right answer are poor. Sure many Tea Party members believe that Liberia is the political party they split off of but that is not saying much.
Right now the Donald Trump/Charles Taylor ticket, with the "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him." slogan, may win the presidency of the United States, which will make it truly sad that Americans know nothing about Liberia.

The current issue of National Geographic has a good article which already explains that SpaceX and NASA are basically partners (SpaceX shares everything with NASA for instance).

It's paywalled, but here's the article (I read the tree based version):
http://www.nationalgeographic....

Anyway, nothing to see here, move along.

Climate change refers to an increase in average global temperatures. It turns out that that increase in the average is largely due to increases at high latitudes. Climate change will likely lead to very little warming in areas that are already warm. Furthermore, it will likely lead to increased evaporation and precipitation. That is, there is a good chance that Spain will actually become greener.

We already see this effect in the Sahara desert.

Means more room for humans. We're succeeding as a species. I suspect it wont end well for us though.

I have no doubt that certain species are declining, but others are booming, and it's precisely because there's more humans. For instance, there's more deer, black bears, raccoons, and coyotes, just to name a few.

What about the fact that species die out all the time?

Wow, the level of ignorance here is ... astounding.

It's not species dying that's the issue. It's the *rate* that they're dying that's the issue.

I know that may be too difficult for you to understand, but go look here and learn:
http://news.nationalgeographic...

Shareholders will be happy until there are important regional conflicts about water supplies.

Why should there be conflicts about "water supplies"? Climate change generally leads to more precipitation and a greening of deserts.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

Had to undo mod points to post this, but I feel it needs to be brought up. As a resident of Louisiana, I would like to offer a quick perspective. When Katrina hit, it displaced a paltry 250,000 people, and has taken 10 years to recover that population. The richest country in the world was seemingly unable to handle this overflow well, despite only being around 0.1% of the nations population. Now, can you imagine what kind of nightmarish hellscape the earth will be if 6.3 BILLION people start trying to "move a few miles inland". Considering the timescales that could be involve, it might be more like 14 billion. Even over a drawn out time frame, this will be a very dark period for humanity. Also, you might want to look more carefully at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.... , depending on your definition of "a few miles"

In 1989 a solar event caused a widespread long duration blackout in Quebec. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...

If an event like the 1859 Carrington solar event occurred today, our modern infrastructure would be devastated. The geologic record indicates that these occur at least every few hundred years https://mic.com/articles/11774... . At our current state of readiness most of the US could be without power for an estimated six months. The spare parts to repair our power grid simply do not exist. Because so much of our economy runs on technology dependent credit (not cash) the world would face a rapid economic collapse. No phones, no internet, no fuel and soon no food - no joke. http://news.nationalgeographic...

Fortunately this is an unlikely event so we roll the dice and are happy in our ignorance. I would estimate the risk of this issue to be more than a 1000 times that of terrorist attack. The cost of insuring against this risk is not high. The logic for being prepared is unassailable. Hopefully as an open minded intelligent well educated person such as yourself, now armed with the facts you will draw the same logical conclusion.

This is not about politics, it's about the duty of a functional government.

I've nothing more to add on this topic, so this will be my final reply.

Viral, huh? Exaggerate, huh? So you say you want something dramatic, eh?

Well, here you go.. and, BTW, this isn't a debate on whether global warming is man-made or real or not --this is actual animal death caused by actual human activity. There is no debate that human's trash, crop runoff, and effluent is killing the ocean.

http://chrisjordan.com/gallery...

It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean."

'BIZARRE' isn't the word I'd use. More like DISGUSTING and SAD.

How a DVD Case Killed a Whale

http://news.nationalgeographic...

One fact that left me horrified and speechless... nearly 1/4 of the Great Barrier Reef underwent severe bleaching (coral death) this year.

Not to mention the ~ 200 underwater dead zones. After the Deepwater Horizon, almost all of the gulf is now a dead zone.

http://www.pasadenastarnews.co...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...

Do you know why they're 'toxic' algae blooms? Algae makes a biotoxin called domoic acid that causes:

vomiting, nausea, diarrhea and abdominal cramps within 24 hours of ingestion, headache, dizziness, confusion, disorientation, loss of short-term memory, motor weakness, seizures, profuse respiratory secretions, cardiac arrhythmias, coma, and possible death

The earth's oceans account for nearly 80 percent of breathable-oxygen. Kill the ocean and we ALL die.

How about them apples??

To get an article published and make it go viral, you have to exaggerate and conjure an image of something visually dramatic.

OK, how about this? Chris says that he didn't touch anything... he only took pictures. I believe him.

http://chrisjordan.com/gallery...

"It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean."

Bizarre...? Hmmm. Not the word I'd use... more like DISGUSTING!

How a DVD Case Killed a Whale

http://news.nationalgeographic...

And the recent survey of the largest coral bleaching took out almost 1/4 of the Great Barrier Reef.

There's too much illness to report.. too many deaths from debris, bycatch, and overfishing, not to mention ~ 200 dead zones around the world.

There's NO distortion, rather there's no reporting of this in mainstream media. Obviously.

Kill the ocean and we ALL die. Forests barely make 20 percent of breathable oxygen.

And you're an anonymous coward, so what's the point? Nuclear is VERY cost-efficient, and compact in terms of footprint. The reasons that it doesn't appear so at the moment have nothing to do with the technology, but the efforts of environmental groups to stop them. Years of red tape, study after study, injunction after injunction raise the costs and time for construction considerably. Do you honestly think it takes decades to build a reactor because of the technology? Seriously? They aren't "piddling around", they're being interfered with, obstructed, and delayed. http://www.fool.com/investing/... I am a realist. Mini-nukes - the kind on aircraft carriers and submarine are very cost-effective, incredibly safe, and the military literally has decades of data on their output and function. I had a brother who was in the navy, and they used to sleep on top of them. And it will scale fine...you're still thinking about large-scale plants like three mile island. I'm talking about reactors the size of refrigerators that arrive fully-fueled and automated. You never have to do maintenance, you never have to adjust them...and when they're out of fuel, the entire unit becomes a disposal container. They don't have to be large enough to power entire states, just small towns and cities. And before you whip out your Bush Derangement Syndrome, it's Obama (and GE) that are building and deploying them NOW. http://news.nationalgeographic...

Since 1990? Geez...that's setting the bar pretty low...let's go back a few hundred years, I bet it's more like 80%.

Sadly one of the main culprits almost sounds like a footnote - 'logging' is often done to clear land for livestock, just look at the Amazon. And most of the 'agriculture' is also to support that same livestock. In the US, 1/2 of ALL land is used for livestock - either space they take up, or for producing their food (and 70-90% of all corn, soy and wheat grown in the US is fed to livestock). XKCD has a stunning graphic showing the mass of all mammals on the planet.....and much is (you guessed it) livestock, followed by humans, with a sprinkling of wild mammals. NatGeo illustrates how much land there is on the planet, how much remains 'untouched', and how much we consume. We use up almost 40% of the entire non-ice land for 'agriculture', the vast majority as pastures, and you'll find much of the cropland is also devoted to this area.'Free range' is actually worse, demanding even more space than 'factory farmed'.

If you really care about this issue, consider what you're eating. When it comes to resource use (water, energy, space), livestock are at the top, or near. And it's a change we all can make. (And there's never been greater vegan options to choose from, give them a try if you haven't!)

I would argue there should be no visa waiver countries in the first place. We really ought to require everyone entering the USA notify the state department a head of time.

What about countries you share a land border with, like Canada? An estimated 75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US-Canada border, and "Canada accounts for about 20 per cent of America’s US$2.3-trillion export sector, making it the single biggest destination for Made in America products in the world." Requiring pre-visit visa applications would seriously dampen the enormous day-trip cross-border shopping industry. As of a few years ago, all visitors to the US require a valid passport (previously Canadians could enter with a birth certificate and two other forms of ID.) Since you already have full details on visitors from their passports, it becomes a cost-benefit analysis; what other details would a visa capture and would that information be worth the potential costs (ie: to the economy in lost sales)?

just like we expect people to have some basic awareness of geography

Since when do we expect that? Plenty of surveys have found that random Americans can't even point out Texas on a map of the US.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

http://www.salon.com/2007/08/3...

According to this Salon article from 2007, only 94% of young Americans could even find America on a map! That means 6% of our young population can't! And 12% can't figure out where Mexico is! That means, if you go to a place where 18-20 year-old people are common, more than 1 in 10 of them don't even know this extremely basic fact of geography regarding our southern neighbor.

When our solar system has exited this warm section of space you're going to be really, really embarrassed.

Yes, I read the article before this chicken-little shit started. No I cannot find it again but I am still looking.

And don't start talking about tinfoil hats. There's billions being made here. What would you do for a million? Don't lie.

Ask yourself, who is selling the 'carbon credits'? How are they generated, and who is getting the money from them?

http://news.nationalgeographic...
http://www.space.news/2015-10-...
 

I agree about wrench but ... Man, nobody is scared of Siberia in Russia! We just live here. And usualy ROFL when came across something like this:

"The winter in Inner Mongolia is very unforgiving. At a freezing temperature of minus 20 and lower, with a constant breeze of snow from all directions, it was pretty hard to ..."

http://travel.nationalgeograph...

I remember taking a walk without hat at minus 32, buying an icecream at -25 and a -20 is a warm winter day for walking a child.

I think this is The Hanford website I think you are refering to.

This National Geographic article may also be interesting. It calculates that a train full of the waste materials would fill a train that would go around the entire equator, and then some. It's a great read if you are interested as even if it is shut down tommorrow our generation is still left with this stuff that was created before many of us were even born.

I don't think you realize how much complete melting of the ice would raise sea levels. I've seen estimates that it would raise is nearly a kilometer.

You've seen wrong. The complete melting of all ice would raise sea levels by 66 meters / 216 feet. Iceland would be little affected, in terms of land area..

Waterworld was a work of fiction. Even 66 meters is in absolutely no danger of happening. The average midsummer high temperature at the South Pole is -26C.

The "If you really live in Iceland" is because your answer sounded like a joke.

Contrary to popular myth, we're a real country with real people who live here.

But you still need spent fuel pools.

No we don't -- not if we have the ultimate solution, which is nuclear plants that can use the waste as fuel.

You can buy a hell of a lot of dogs[1] for that amount of money!

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0112_060112_dog_cancer.html/

So... Get ready to keep all your old electronics as it suddenly becomes VERY expensive to have it removed.

...not if you have a shovel and enough property to hide the results on.

On a more serious note, such a rise in disposal costs will create a legal black market of sorts where questions aren't asked, loopholes are exploited heavily, and the price of their service is only nominally higher. You know, like they do with ships nowadays.

I mean, if you can dump a zillion tons of outdated naval vessel, ditching a truckload of cast-off smartphones is child's play.

Here's one.

The lesson here is that different power sources are appropriate in different areas: hydro is good in areas where it doesn't destroy the fish habitat, but bad in areas where it does. Nuclear is good in the middle of nowhere, but bad in close proximity to NYC. Solar is good in the desert, but bad on north-facing slopes in cloudy areas. Wind is great on bare ridges and offshore, but not so great for forested valleys. Every form of electricity generation, except fossil fuels, has its place.

Why is this modded +5 insightful while the anonymous coward was modded down? Anyone who knows the slightest bit what they were talking about would know that iron STOPPING pulling the oxygen out of the oceans was one of the events for the way life evolved on the planet. There are these rocks called Banded Iron Formations, made from a mineral siderite (FeCO3) which can only form in the absence of oxygen, and hematite (Fe2O3), covering wide swathes of areas like the American Midwest and western Australia.

The reason they're banded is because the iron exposed to the ocean water would use up all the oxygen in the sea as it was converted, and then after a while enough oxygen would reach the area again from oxygen-producing microbes for it to precipitate. This didn't progress at the same rate worldwide; areas with lower circulation would have been the last to have any free iron to convert.

In contrast, due to increased dissolved CO2, nutrient runoff, and rising average ocean temperatures, algae blooms are increasing, leading to increased occurrence of deoxygenated zones. Due to the increased abundance of algae, things have been happening like a population explosion of algae-feeding sea urchins, and then a huge crash as they became crowded enough to be more prone to disease. In addition to coral bleaching from the temperature itself, the algae smothers coral reefs.

Aside from their importance in the food web, coral reefs are an important for maintaining the state of the environment itself: you have powerful waves smashing up against the coral, and mixing of ocean water increases the dissolved oxygen. In areas serving as bellwethers, areas where coral reefs were healthy but had a history to suggest some other factors could disrupt them (i.e. increase in sediment blocking out light), coral reefs are reverting to the more primitive algal state and becoming devoid of much other sea life.

"You gotta stop with the doom and gloom crap, we already know the path between the beginning of time and this point in time had points that were FAR fucking worse than ANY prediction about global warming ... and yet ... here we are."

"But the 'threat' of 'climate change' doesn't sound nearly as big bad ass scary when you look around and say 'no ... this isn't really anything new, we just haven't actually been here for the previous times its been like this'"

such as the Permian extinction. It involved outgassing of CO2 with flood basalts from the Siberian Traps, +10C change and massive drops in dissolved oxygen, which wiped out some 99% of marine species. We don't know how quickly that happened because the accuracy on dating that far back is +/- 10,000 years. Certainly there have been times with higher CO2, but it has never been rising this quickly: http://news.nationalgeographic...

So, your post has highlighted that yes, it isn't anything new, because there are obvious comparisons with major extinction events and our understanding of the development of complex life, running backward.

"If you were working on Wall Street, the same version of your story would be 'Amazon from running the smaller businesses and competition out of the market .. we'll have another great depression!!@#~!@$~!$@~'"

To suggest that the viewpoint of a climatologist and a Wall Street executive are just morally relative because climatologists want to keep their jobs is to speak against the value of scientific expertise altogether. Climatologists are concerned with facts, not delivery. People here like to speak about celebrities that have spoken out against global warming, but that doesn't make it true any more than if I trolled here by accusing people here advocating evolution of believing it just because Bill Nye does.

My perspective is that I'm glad I only got a bachelor's in geology, because it means there's still time to go into something else and actually make money instead of making less wanting to help the world and being accused of lying for it.

There is a good chance that climate change will, in fact, bring more precipitation to Northern Africa:

Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

http://news.nationalgeographic...

Americans born after 1970 or so have little memory of what smog was like before the introduction of emissions controls dramatically improved air quality. I remember as a kid coming back from vacation and getting the first glimpse of the city a giant brown smudge on the horizon. When you got back you could actually feel how much harder it was to breathe; it was like a mild asthma attack.

If you have no memory of pre-emissions control smog, try this image search. Yes, it really looked like that. Not every day mind you, but regularly in the summers.

The only place in the US where you can still experience that kind of epic smog is in parts of LA, and even that has improved over the last several decades.

Isn't the Sahara greening?

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0102/earthpulse/ The bad part of the Internet is that history actually exists.

Still, where does it say that New York was going to be underwater today? You claim specifically that New York was predicted to be underwater now, and your citations say not one thing about that.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0102/earthpulse/
The bad part of the Internet is that history actually exists.

If it means we end up like Venus, that's a much bigger problem. I don't think anyone is suggesting that, however.

Oh yes they are.

That made me remember the reports for the big 8.8 down in Chile in 2010. Supposedly it was so powerful it sped up the rotation of the Earth. Take a "stable" system, up the rotation, and mass imbalances become bigger effects in precession. Even if they weren't an issue before, they can start to cause wobbles at higher rotational speed. Anyone who's ever ridden a motorcycle with a wheel out of balance can attest to it - at low speed the wheel is stable, but the faster you go the more you start to wobble.

I wonder what impact the big 'quakes in the last 25 years have had? Big earthquakes (8+ magnitude) have become more frequent, with 26% of the big guys happening in the last 20% of the time from 1900 to the present.

Tics might have served as a better example.

http://voices.nationalgeograph...

...and the Europeans nowadays no longer know how to protect their own people against invading savages...

I may have news for you:

Hitler is dead, and since then Europeans, Germans even, stopped killing people just because they are foreign.

The interesting thing to me, with my German/Jewish/Russian heritage, is that there were no "Germans" etc. during the time of this battle. They came from all over Europe, and Hitler's concept of "race" had no meaning for them. Two tribes who came from what we now call Germany, or France, or Italy, were as likely to be allies as enemies, as likely to be allied against other tribes from Germany, France or Italy, and as likely to intermarry.

There were no pure "races". The DNA seems to show continuous mixing. (The Jews were as close as you get to an exclusively interbreeding population, and if you go back before their European dispersal, they were interbreeding as much as everyone else.)

Another bronze-age example was the Egdtved girl http://news.nationalgeographic... http://humanities.ku.dk/news/2... who was revered as Denmark's national ancestor, when her tomb was discovered in 1921, turned out to be from the Black Forest. So there were no Germans, and there were no Danes.

Coal mining also disrupts the water table and does far more damage over all. Nuclear has far less waste also. A waste that can be managed where coal waste is dispersed around the planet.

Yep, totally agree, coal is extremly damaging. What has that got to do with permanently polluting an entire water table with radioactive isotopes?

As for managing nuclear waste perhaps this article from the science section of National Geographic Magazine will help put it into perspective for you.

Selective breeding is a lot more predictable than directly twiddling genes. There are a lot of unforeseen side-effects.

Such as?

As we've seen with antibiotic resistance, expect Round-Up resistant weeds for starters.

In fact, it seems to already be a problem, with over 61 million acres as of 2012.

Health-wise, GMOs seem to have proven themselves pretty safe - not the worse thing in our diets.

But not sure what most of them are really for. Leaving out Golden Rice, which is awesome, there isn't a food shortage that GMOs are trying to solve, there's a huge amount of wasted food:

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which keeps tabs on what's grown and eaten around the globe, estimates that one-third of food produced for human consumption worldwide is annually lost or wasted along the chain that stretches from farms to processing plants, marketplaces, retailers, food-service operations, and our collective kitchens.

At 2.8 trillion pounds, that's enough sustenance to feed three billion people. In the United States, the waste is even more egregious: More than 30 percent of our food, valued at $162 billion annually, isn't eaten. Pile all that food on a football field and the layers would form a putrefying casserole miles high.

Anyway, for the most part I don't see the rush to GMOs, and I'm definitely in favour of labelling and can't understand anyone being against it other than for knee-jerk reasons. Let the market decide indeed.

And as I've had to explain to many people, adapting doesn't men that you and your family change. It means you and your family and 99 percent of everyone dies, and the rest are left to reproduce.

99%? Do you always use hyperbole in your explanations?

99 percent might be conservative

http://news.nationalgeographic...

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

The idea that human population may have nearly gone extinct at least once ~ 2000 humans left in the world makes for some interesting discussion.

Here are photos and an article in National Geographic from the massive quake and tsunami in the same area in 1896. Almost 27,000 people were killed and a tsunami was reported as high as 50 feet.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic....

The excuse that the tsunami was unprecedented and a "once in a 1,000- year event" is false.

The take away for me after five years is that it was criminally incompetent to not have planned for the possibility of a similar event so recent that there are photographs of it.

The engineers involved in the construction and operation should be in prison.

Disclaimer: I have a BSME with a Nuclear option, and I should be in prison if I had anything to do with the plant. I also live within 90 miles of the plant and remember thinking that I was in serious jeopardy when I saw a helicopter dropping water onto the stored fuel rods on TV. When the helicopters come out, it's the last straw.

Caostal nuclear power is very vulnerable to sea level rise. But, in Floral it is doubly so. Their customers all have too move away as well. http://news.nationalgeographic...