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4) The only thing we know of at this time that could be causing this global warming trend is CO2

That turns out not to be the case.

6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.

Nope. Parts of it, maybe, but the high latitudes will become much more habitable.

7) We have workable solutions to this right now.

For some disagreed-upon values of "workable". For that matter, it's not even certain that they are "solutions".

Greenhouse gasses unquestionably contribute far more to recent warming than solar activity, although solar activity is definitely a factor.

I question it. NASA also questions it. Quote: "Indeed, the model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 percent or more of the warming that has occurred in the Arctic during the last three decades." The interesting thing is that it looks at two kinds of aerosols: sulphates, which tend to reflect sunlight and cause cooling; and black carbon (soot), which absorbs sunlight and causes warming. Because of regulations on sulphur levels, the former has been dropping, but the latter has been rising in particular with the growing industrialization of Asia.

And sure, that's all (well, mostly) anthropogenic, but it's not the dreaded carbon dioxide (which actually has a much lower greenhouse effect than the water vapor in the atmosphere).

Not only is the summary ripped from the linked article without quoting it, but the article is plagiarized in whole from ScienceDaily! I knew I'd seen it before this article, and this explains why. The blogger even hotlinked the image from science daily, wasting their bandwidth.

The linked article in the summary should be adjusted to the original ScienceDaily article and the entire summary should be quoted from it rather than attributed to slreboy.

Failure intrigues me more than success because it's through failure that we learn.

Not exactly. You must be over the age of 12.

> Whales communicate for several hundred miles

That's a pretty lowball estimate (src):

We now have evidence that they are communicating with each other over thousands of miles of ocean. Singing is part of their social system and community.

Birds have a genetically specified latent memory for flight so maybe these baby chicks have a latent memory for counting too.

We all have our pet peeves. Mine is people that go around claiming things are stupid and unscientific when they have no scientific backing.

Please try to research a subject before you claim it is unscientific, or stupid:

Study Shows Aspirin Blocks Plant Pain

It's not news anymore that plants may "cry in pain" when attacked or damaged by a hungry herbivore, but now we know that there is a way to stop all this vegetable "suffering" right in your medicine cabinet -- with simple aspirin.

Neurobiological View of Plants and their Body Plan

Each root apex harbours a unit of nervous system of plants. The number of root apices in the plant body is high and all brain-units are interconnected via vascular strands (plant nerves) with their polarly-transported auxin (plant neurotransmitter), to form a serial (parallel) nervous system of plants. The computational and informational capacity of this nervous system based on interconnected parallel units is predicted to be higher than that of the diffuse nervous system of lower animals, or the central nervous system of higher animals/humans.

I've never taken a science class that refers to evolution as anything more than the current scientific theory of how man came to be. In a science class, we deal with the observable.

Those who say evolution is a "theory" use the word improperly and as a wedge to drive an "intelligent designer" into it. To them it's just one of a number of theories, however in science there is no theory that carries the weight evolution does. At least with the Out of Africa hypothesis there's evidence to back it up, as there is to back up the multiregional hypothesis.

How about this for a compromise: You teach what you want to in church, or a class on religion/philosophy, and scientists will teach what they want to in science class.

That's fine with me. In school science should be taught in science classes but an "intelligent designer" and all other pseudo theories belongs in a religion or philosophy class. Those who oppose evolution want their beliefs taught in science when it has no scientific basis though.

Falcon

I've never taken a science class that refers to evolution as anything more than the current scientific theory of how man came to be. In a science class, we deal with the observable.

Those who say evolution is a "theory" use the word improperly and as a wedge to drive an "intelligent designer" into it. To them it's just one of a number of theories, however in science there is no theory that carries the weight evolution does. At least with the Out of Africa hypothesis there's evidence to back it up, as there is to back up the multiregional hypothesis.

How about this for a compromise: You teach what you want to in church, or a class on religion/philosophy, and scientists will teach what they want to in science class.

That's fine with me. In school science should be taught in science classes but an "intelligent designer" and all other pseudo theories belongs in a religion or philosophy class. Those who oppose evolution want their beliefs taught in science when it has no scientific basis though.

Falcon

Now, I want to make it clear that I don't hate gardening or reading (well I do hate reading fiction, but that's another topic entirely), I just don't think that they're inherently more valuable than other leisure activities.

Reading a book requires you to use your imagination to visualize what the author is writing. You interact with the book using all the facets of your mind, and the story becomes your own.

And what exactly is the productive value of imagining my own little world that never existed? There's no value outside your own mind, which is exactly the same as a video game.

In a game, all the visualization is given to you. While physical things like twitch reaction time are worked out, your imagination and intellect have very little to do.

Try playing Nethack sometime. Games aren't all Halo, there are tons of games that really tax your imagination, strategy, and critical thinking skills. How do you feel about chess? Is it an unproductive waste of time? What's the difference between chess and, say, Civilization? Also, we shouldn't neglect the benefit of increased hand eye coordination. It's especially helpful if you're a surgeon.

Gardening takes patience and planning over a long period of time.

That sounds like work.

It gives a sense of accomplishment far beyond "pwning noobs" in an FPS, or beating a variant of the same uber boss at the end of the game.

You know, I've done both and I disagree. Gardening takes effort yes, but there's not much skill involved. Really putting in the dedication it takes to beat a challenging game like Nethack or Radiant Silvergun (even on easy!) gives me a sense of accomplishment. All I really get out of gardening is a snack.

You have helped a living thing grow

So what? It's a plant, they grow and die all the time. I've got an aloe in the window, isn't that enough?

sometimes, you can enjoy the fruits of your work at the dinner table.

I enjoy the fruits of my work at the dinner table every night. I work, and get paid, and buy my food. Is it so wrong to want to have some fun?

If you think that playing a video game is just as good a leisure activity as that, do humanity a favor and don't breed.

Not planning on it. Kids are a drain on finances, time, and sanity. I just don't see what people get out of it. No thank you.

Well, the Pennines in England are contaminated by iron-eating bacteria, and there is a particularly nasty form of Strep that actually digests the entire human body within 24 hours.

• Metal-cleanup bacteria found in contaminated regions of the Pennines
• Iron-reducing bacteria
• Really nasty metal-eating bacteria

• Flesh-eating Strep

Yes, but they generate tons of nuclear waste that doesn't go away for thousands of years.

If/when they build a nuclear plant that is more efficient (less waste), then I would think that's a good option. They are already working on fusion methods to 'burn' excess waste but it's not production ready yet.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127131654.htm

Check out the link above if you haven't seen it. Very cool stuff. Until then, we should be more responsible as a race and utilize cleaner fuels until we get where we need to be.

Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.

Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141354.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1191

There are several motives for the media and politicians to lie to you about global warming, aside from money and control.

• The media sells more papers, magazines, and television ratings soar when their audience is scared of some imminent catastrophe that your respective service is reporting on. Although, they can't decide whether we're going to burn to death, freeze to death, or drown. http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759
• Environmental organizations and some scientists will lie to you because their funding depends on it. If theres no crisis to work through, then they start losing funding. This is well documented. http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/von_Storch/staged_angst/a_climate_of_staged_angst.html
• Foreign countries are lying to us (by means of the IPCC) because they wish to throw a monkey wrench into the inner workings of western economies, which are the strongest in the world. If our economy slows down, the economic standing of other countries improves because we will no longer dominate the markets.
• Development and industrialization of third world countries will be stamped out, along with hundreds of millions of lives, all under the guise of "saving the planet from climate change". It's absolutely sickening. So, who's really on the "immoral" side? Us or the alarmists?
• Wanna talk about new taxes and restricted freedoms? Try carbon taxes on everything and strict regulations for everyone....all coming soon by convincing you that CO2 & greenhouse gases are somehow evil and you must pay to emit them. Too bad they can't tax the oceans since they are the cause of 96.5% of all greenhouse emissions, naturally, eh! Also too bad they can't go back in time and tax the dinosaurs since CO2 levels were MUCH higher back then and it must have been their fault.

The motives for deception are there. Do your part to fight alarmism!

CO2 is NOT a pollutant!

Educate yourself!

Antarctica is getting colder and thicker: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/12/05/sea-level-rise-not-from-antarctic-melting/), and we know that any fluctuating warming/cooling is due to natural occurrences, and not human activity.

MUST READ LINKS:
http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777
"http://globalwarminghoax.wordpress.com/2008/03/
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061121_gore.pdf
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
http://www.junkscience.com/challenge.htm
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFiZDAyMWFhMGIxNTgwNGIyMjVkZjQ4OGFiZjFlNjc
http://www.cei.org/pdf/5331.pdf
http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_sunclimate.html
http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/images/sunclimate_3b.gif
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030321075236.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/56456.stm

A recent study indicated just that. In order for students to be successful in higher level sciences, they need depth and methodology rather than wrote memory of facts.
 
Unfortunately, (and I say this a as high school science teacher) our school system is set up in such a way as to mandate the teaching of broad facts. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, we are now rigorously tested on the breadth of what we teach.
 
This leaves us with an interesting quandary: Do we teach so that students can be successful, or do we teach so that the school can be successful? For the students, we need to teach depth. For the school, we need to teach breadth.
 
Ideally, we'd do what the students need. Realistically, we do what the school requires, since to fail to do this means a loss of jobs.

Only intelligent animals keep other animals in cages.

Herding Aphids: How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food: ants have been known to bite the wings off the aphids in order to stop them from getting away and depriving the ants of one of their staple foods: the sugar-rich sticky honeydew which is excreted by aphids when they eat plants.

in some industries it may take much longer than 5 years to research and develop the idea - pharmaceuticals take 10-15 years to go from lab to market, due to all the human trials they have to run. The patent would be expired before the thing even got off the bench in a 5 year term...

I think that's pretty easy to remedy, have the patent term start when a drug is released. Oh, and since you brought up pharmaceuticals do you know that "Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development"? Here's a proposed "alternative to pharmaceutical patents".

Falcon

An important caveat, Thomson notes, is that more study of the newly-made cells is required to ensure that the "cells do not differ from embryonic stem cells in a clinically significant or unexpected way, so it is hardly time to discontinue embryonic stem cell research." Scientists Guide Human Skin Cells To Embryonic State

I'm unsure how this supports your argument.

Okay....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/health/21canc.html
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12202589
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080409130711.htm
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/18/embryonic-stem-cell-therapy-causes-cancer-in-teenage-boy/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4465717.stm

However, new information was released this week. There are scientists who think they've found a way around the cancer problem with stem cells:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/virusfreeips.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13384-stem-cell-breakthrough-may-reduce-cancer-risk.html

It is -now for over 8 months- not necessary anymore to terminate babies in order to create stem cells.

first hit on google

But why stop killing when you can have so much fun hurting babies ?

Here's another way of putting this that's no less correct : Obama forcing people to pay for killing babies. Because that's what "funding embrionic stem-cell research using taxpayer money" is.

(and btw, if one thing is NOT a solid foundation to build morality upon, it's star trek. If you don't know why don't you just "build one" upon the foundation that's worked thousands of years now ? On Jesus Christ).

Modern drugs do work. Antidepressants in the last decade have been something of a scandal, though. People want them, drug companies want to sell them. Studies have shown (even on slashdot!) that the most commonly prescribed drugs are basically no more effective than a placebo, and also that expensive placebos work better, and further that placebos can be effective in around 30% of a population, I think that there are some serious arguments against antidepressants in specific---and beyond that, what else have we been lied to about? Big Pharma has a lot to answer for.

I'm not advocating the dismissal of science in medicine, but I do think that it needs to be entirely divorced from the profit motive, if such a thing is possible.

I have always wondered why we can't have something like a nuclear battery on board the elevator. Is it their weight/volume that make them impractical?

Recent articles like this one http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050514205902.htm suggest such technology is in development. And they nuclear subs already have their own power supply.

Seriously? No radiation around Jupiter?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/03/010329075139.htm

Such as the immunization and the possible link to autism, lets say it creates a 1% increase in autism how ever it saves 25% from death, the benefits out weigh the risks and the parents who avoid this are poor judges on risk assessment.

Arrgh!
Speaking of fear mongering, it has been repeatedly shown that there is absolutely no link between autism and vaccines.
Please, can't this FUD just die already? It's already caused deaths in the UK from a loss of herd immunity!

(Also, can you provide a citation for the allegation that Marketing outweighs R&D? Although I agree with your sentiment, most marketing is directed at physicians in the form of educational materials, rather than patients)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm

Marketing is double the cost of research. That probably does not also include lobbying fees

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

The top twenty pharmaceutical companies and their two trade groups, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and Biotechnology Industry Organization, lobbied on at least 1,600 pieces of legislation between 1998 and 2004. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, pharmaceutical companies spent $900 million on lobbying between 1998 and 2005, more than any other industry. During the same period, they donated $89.9 million to federal candidates and political parties, giving approximately three times as much to Republicans as to Democrats.[1] According to the Center for Public Integrity, from January 2005 through June 2006 alone, the pharmaceutical industry spent approximately $182 million on Federal lobbying.[2] The industry has 1,274 registered lobbyists in Washington D.C. [3]

... if it weren't for the fact that I'm skeptical enough to know better.

Ignoring the fact that they spend twice as much on advertising as on R&D, routinely dump their toxic crap in underdeveloped countries; the truth is that the majority of their products are worthless, and may do more harm than good

It was discovered not long ago that hair itself contains cells, not just the follicles, and that the hair protects those cells against damage. This has been a massive boon to archaeological DNA studies, as it massively reduces contamination as well as reducing loss of information.

The discovery was made during studies of the hair of woolly mammoth. It's a fascinating line of research and one that is under-utilized at present

I'm not making excuses for Linux. Fact is is marketing, which Linus distros do little of, has a big impact of what people buy. If advertizing, part of marketing, didn't have an impact then businesses would not spend a lot on it. And yes, businesses do spend a lot on marketing. pharmaceutical companies [pdf warning] spend more on marketing than on research.

Ubuntu is not as a good as a desktop operating system as Windows Vista. It's just not.

Ubuntu may not be good to you but it is to plenty of other users. And there are plenty who do not like Vista, if people liked it then OEMs would not offer a downgrade path from Vista to XP. It also offers competition, and without competition things hardly improve.

Falcon

Also, most people -including violinists - can't tell the difference between a Stradivarius and any other violin anyway.

"For another, even trained musicians can't reliably pick out the sound of a Strad, he said."

Yer, nice present for the grandchildren (sorry son, we where unable to live within our means so here is some deadly shit for you to either fix or look after for 100,000 years).

If you actually read the links you would have seen that the spent fuel for those reactors has half-lives in the tens of years, not thousands. Lets use some logic here, is it better to hand our grandchildren some radioactive stuff more or less safely and easily encased in concrete or some other capsule, or should we just pump it into the atmosphere and say, "oh, nature will handle it"? My vote is for the former.

The markets *have* spoken. E.g. when the power infrastructure in the UK was privatisied "the market" refused to take nuclear power so it was split off and kept by the government.
AFAIK the only way nuclear power can win in "the market" is through government subsidies: eg covering/exempting the insurance cost so that any accident is covered by the taxpayer or exempting companies from the full cleanup costs of normal (non-accident) waste.

That's why as soon as the U.S. NRC gave an early permit in 2007 companies have lined up to apply for so many reactors?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070319175743.htm/
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-licensing/new-licensing-files/expected-new-rx-applications.pdf/

And the permits cost tens of millions of dollars. Even if the market wouldn't bear it this instant, that is fine too. As the market recovers from the crash and fuel prices inevitably rise again it makes nuclear ever more attractive. Throw in a straight tax on carbon emissions to account for that externality, and it looks even better.

Recent studies have shown that the famed sound of the Stradivarius violins was not caused by the wood, but by the chemicals used for varnishing: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090122141228.htm

It's bad enough that we've effectively lost the top octave (10kHz and up) to widespread lossy compressed audio, the bottom three octaves (160Hz and down) to widespread use of computer speakers and earbuds, now you're going to introduce random noise?! Speaking from a music production perspective it's already got us badly handcuffed, not to mention every idiot with Garageband thinks they don't need to hire a pro to make their platinum album.

What's really scary is that the auditory capabilities of the entire market can actually degrade from widespread exposure to poor audio, to the point that people literally cannot appreciate good sound. Your ears are not microphones, they are more like keyboards with over 20,000 keys that give the brain information for it to generate the sound you hear. That's right, you are hearing your brain's interpretation of the waves, not the waves themselves.

As the standard of audio quality degrades, so will the brain's ability to appreciate music. There are important subtle cues that are critical to music sounding lifelike instead of synthesized that are already suffering at the hands of lossy compression, if further artifacts are introduced, engineers will probably have to add a more natural noise to the recordings* to mask the artificial noise.

Here is a great article that should shed some light on how music affects the brain. In short, music is most effective by creating and then satisfying anticipation. There's no question random artificial noise severely handicaps that process. I gave up my LP's long ago, I don't want those snaps crackles and pops back!

* We actually already do introduce natural noise to cover artificial noise and have been for decades. It's called bias for analog tape and dithering for digital formats. However, that is a necessary evil for the sake of the recording equipment, and much less significant than the noise random errors would create, even if only to the lower-order data. The noise would have to be constantly as loud as the loudest possible random artifact.

I'm beginning to wonder just what IS in those deadzones.....

Little to no oxygen. Which I think is a more immediate problem than acidification.

If we have documentation about alkaline runoff - there ought to be more documentation about acid runoff.

It's not so much there would be acid runoff, not because of CO2 at least. CO2 is an acidic oxide, which water will absorb. On land though plants will use it to grow.

Oh, something I just recalled. You know how some people say "let's plant more trees"? While CO2 boosts the growth of some trees, it slows the growth of other trees. And guess what plant loves CO2? Poison ivy. It grows faster with higher CO2 levels.

Falcon

If you have a hot water tank, perhaps an electric one without the heating elements connected*, you'd have hot water from the day before and have your warm/hot shower

To keep the water harm if not hot in a tank the water heater would have to continually cycle on and off just as refrigerators and freezers do. Every time a heater or cooler cycles on the power spikes, and the water isn't always being used. A point of use water heater only runs when the water is being used though. See the Tank-Type versus Tankless box.

If you mean you can use a solar water heater to heat water before a tank in conjunction with a point of use heater, then yes it may be more efficient. I thought I said that before, but I went up this tread and didn't see it so maybe I said it in another thread.

That $420 Billion would provide almost 3,000 gigawatts with PV technology, a lot more than even 400 Gigawatts.

Still have the difference between 'subsidy' and 'build' Don't forget the disadvantage solar has over nuclear when it comes to demand and capacity factors.

Nuclear power will need subsidies as well. Wall Street will not finance nuclear power plants without some subsides. Here's an article that first appeared in "Forbes" on 26 November 2007, "Hooked on Subsidies"
"Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power." Whereas coal generated electricity costs 3.53 cent per KWH and "clean coal" it's 3.55 cents per KWH, without subsidies nuclear power generated electricity cost 5.94 cents per KWH. If the subsidies for coal are removed coal is still cheaper, 3.79 cents and 4.37 cents for clean coal.

For a typical power system, the rule of thumb is that the base load power is usually 35-40% of the maximum load during the year.

Wow, that's more than I thought. If the Science Daily link you provided was right then the coal plants would all be needed but the LNG plants could be closed.

I'd say more engineering needs to be done; yes, they can use the waste sitting in casks and cooling ponds as fuel. Depending on design, you can even pull rods/fuel/waste from the plant and reprocess it to provide MORE fuel to the more standard plants.

So the tech isn't ready. To reduce the waste that's already there I may agree to reprocess it so it can be used in power plants that have already been built but I don't think I could agree to building more nuclear power plants.

I wonder why France would build the BN-600 in Russia.

Falcon

There are very promising aspects of thin film, but silicon has not reached its full promise either. Reduced energy costs for purifying silicon are coming and efficiency gains continue to appear as well: 25% currently http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081023100536.htm I think the US should be doing more with silicon given the large potential domestic market. But, China is surely willing to step in.

Okay, in advocating that there's enough NG to replace coal and nuclear you post a link that says "but LNG will not be a panacea for North American natural gas shortfall" ?

It wasn't meant as a permanent replacement for coal or nuclear, only as a way LNG can be used until there is a better method of generating a baseload of energy.

Second link - aren't we trying to gain energy independence from the middle east?

Both the first link and third list places where LNG come from that are not in the Middle East. The first one lists Trinidad and Tobago which is in the Caribbean. The third lists Barents Sea which is between Greenland and Northern Europe.

Besides - Natural Gas Imported To US For Electricity Generation May Be Environmentally Worse Than Coal.

That's for the link, I didn't see that before. However as you quoted in your post as a baseline capacity it should not matter if LNG plants operate at a low capacity. They are after all only meant to serve for when alternative sources do not provide enough energy.

By the way, that also increases costs for people trying to heat their homes with 97% efficient NG systems.

Properly insulated building reduce if not eliminate the need to heat with LNG. There are other ways to heat as well. Former President Bush used geothermal heating to heat his Crawford, Texas ranch. People in New York City use geothermal heating. People also use solar thermal heating, even in Northern Europe.

We'd need 27 trillion cubic feet per year to replace the coal & nuclear plants.

Only if LNG were to replace coal and nuclear, but not if it is only used as a baseload. That means when alternative energy sources do not provide enough energy. However as I said earlier SciAm has the article "A Solar Grand Plan" that says "solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." For wind power, the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supple electricity to the 48 continuous states. On the East Coast Cape Cod, Cape Hatteras, and points in between the Carolinas and Mass are good places for offshore wind farms. On the West Coast, between British Columbia and southern California there are also good sites for wind, and solar power.

People like you are looking for the next big thing in energy when a bunch of different technologies can be used instead. You're focused on one solution when there are many others.

Falcon

If you have any left over, just convert it to biodiesel!

Also, anyone in business will tell you that money/price is hardly ever a deciding factor on whether someone will pay for a product.

This has got to be the stupidest thing I've heard in months. It is ALWAYS a factor of whether I pay for a product. Psychologists say that most people weigh the pain of losing money with the pleasure of having a new product in order to decide whether or not they'll buy it. No wonder an entire economy can crash in a matter of months -- it's got too many idiots, disconnected with reality, pulling the strings. When I need to choose between listening to a new music artist or feeding the family for a day, I choose feeding the family. If it were a choice of listening to a new music artist where I just have to skip dessert to break even, I might consider buying the CD.

Okay, in advocating that there's enough NG to replace coal and nuclear you post a link that says "but LNG will not be a panacea for North American natural gas shortfall" ?

Second link - aren't we trying to gain energy independence from the middle east? Besides - Natural Gas Imported To US For Electricity Generation May Be Environmentally Worse Than Coal "The 1990s saw a surge in construction of natural gas power plants, fueled by cheap natural gas, low investment requirements and the idea that natural gas was less carbon-intensive than coal. Since these plants were constructed, natural gas prices have skyrocketed as the North American natural gas supply has become more limited. These gas plants are now operating at a very low capacity, fueling the energy industry's interest in increasing gas supply by using LNG."

By the way, that also increases costs for people trying to heat their homes with 97% efficient NG systems.

Your third link doesn't address production, it addresses liquification, storage, and transportation.

In 2003, natural gas reserves in the United States were estimated to be 1,338 trillion cubic feet, and U.S. gas production was 18.6 trillion cubic feet.

Per the DOE, in 2007 we used 6.8 trillion cubic feet for electricity. NG and nuclear are about equal at 20%, and coal is over double at slightly over 40% of electrical generation. We'd need 27 trillion cubic feet per year to replace the coal & nuclear plants. Overall production in 2007 was only 24 trillion.

Where are we going to get the supply to feed the various uses of NG for residential, commercial, and industrial use?

Um, ignoring the marijuana perspective for a minute, major breakthroughs were made in alzheimers recently:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081207134109.htm

Reseachers have figured out that HSV-1 (herpes virus) is found in the amyloid plaques in the brain, and it is likely that HSV-1 outbreak later in life due to weakened immune system may be a trigger. So many people haven't heard about this, but it has been baking for quite some time as researchers confirmed it with some solid results. HSV-1 plays a huge role in destroying the brain.

So back to marijuana - is the article here saying that marijuana is an anti-viral? Or it somehow slows the progression of HSV-1? You can't treat the symptoms. You need to treat the cause. I have little faith in doctors who say that Omega-3 oil and doing math puzzles will stop alzheimers - it won't, sure it might help the brain a bit, but the damn virus is still partying in your neurons.

Not going to knock MJ for other purposes (like having a little bit of illegal fun now and then), but why bother with something that 'maybe helps a little' if you're really trying to prevent Alzheimer's? The science is out: if you want to take something that REALLY helps prevents AD (and also coronary artery disease and Parkinson's, among other things), talk to your doctor about getting started on simvastatin: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070719011237.htm

scientists are discovering ways to make adult cells revert to stem cell status

here's a recent methodology:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090107134633.htm

in the near future, there will be no need for stem cells, or rather, stem cells will be made from sources no moralist, medical ethicist, or religious dogmatist could possibly object to

what better way to solve an intransigent divide between science and religion than to make the issue moot?

now if only someone can come up with a methodology to make evolution look like "the word of god", and we're all good

Well, we've already got Wallhack.

Isn't 1x1 cm already big enough to form an entire CPU chip when each transistor is only 1x10 atoms?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417142452.htm

The South Korean method sounds like a build-up or additive process, to create a small graphene sheet. The Manchester transistor sounds like a subtractive process, to cut electron channels out of the graphene mesh. So can't they do each in order, and start making prototype atom-scale CPU's now? I guess they haven't figured out how to make the subtractive process targeted and repeatable yet, but this new larger sheet size sounds like a good place to start cutting!

There's a bigger team at Boston University that's been working on this technology.

I particularly like their plans for use in cars. I can imagine combining this with nano piezoelectric technology to create roadways that use passing car vibrations to power illuminated markings that can also transmit road condition information to passing cars or link their light-based inter-car networks around corners and over hills.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades that decode and display ambient porn...

The telegraph is wrong once again... Nobody talked about 3 cups but 7 cups of instant coffee. Here is the study from a more reliable source

Sure, there are hand-waving mechanisms consistent with the mainstream astronomy view that are interesting to entertain as hypotheses. But if, as you claimed, solar EM phenomena would indeed be well-understood, there would instead be models encompassing the major observable phenomena with quantitative accuracy.

As to coronal heating, a picture does more than a thousand words. Have a look at this soft X-ray image of the sun: http://www.lmsal.com/YPOP/ProjectionRoom/latest/sxt/full/sxtdag_512.gif. Does that not look awfully like energy production in the corona? Not surprisingly, several experiments have been done that have verified the existence of an energy production mechanism under coronal conditions, though an appropriate theory is still lacking. The mechanism occurs in a low-pressure plasma containing helium and hydrogen, see for example http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf and http://www.springerlink.com/content/3u3v2eqnv9y1jmwg/.

Pure hydrogen plasmas without helium do not show anomalous energy release. Given that, it can be understood why the solar wind is strongly modulated by how much helium is present: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070530114957.htm

ok, read this excerpt from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080116114150.htm The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990. so i guess most of your hypothesis about gw being bogus because the earth is cooling is suspect...

Actually, Jews are more similar genetically to Arabs than white Europeans, and real research beats a Google Image search:

Dr. Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said she had found considerable similarity between Jews and Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, as if the Y chromosomes of both groups had been drawn from a common population that began to expand 7,800 years ago.

"DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School and University College in London has shown that many Jews and Arabs are closely related."

Jews Are The Genetic Brothers Of Palestinians, Syrians, And Lebanese

Jerusalem Post - Experts find genetic Jewish-Arab link "The researchers found that the Arabs are more closely related to Jews than they are to the Welsh"

etc etc...

I wonder if this could be caused by drilling. There have been cases of volcanic activity triggered by drilling. Of the top of my head, I remember that the Air Force got caught pumping waste chemical weapons into the subsurface under Rock Flats, CO without a permit. They were detected by the increase in earthquakes. Couple that with George Bush's legislation to allow drilling in preserved areas, that Republican mantra of Drill Baby Drill may not have been so smart after all...