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Actually, while there is a case for not using coal just to produce energy, producing metals out of their ores is a very valid use of coal. As it is, that carbon dioxide is trapped in the mines ...

Refining iron releases a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the air. Iron ore, ferrous or ferric oxide, is heated with coke, which come from coal. The reaction produces iron and carbon oxides. We normally just let the carbon oxides go. Capturing them might be possible, but it isn't easy.

More promising is to substitute hydrogen or electricity for the coal, but this is still in the early stages of development. It should work, but iron will probably get more expensive.

Yeah, it's one of the classic great ideas like world peace. To give credit for originality though, I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion. Doesn't it typically cost a couple of billion just to develop one new drug? ( http://www.scientificamerican.... ) Oh I know... develop just one drug but have it be a drug that cures everything! That's some kind of genius.

Makes you wonder how bad the health effects of indoor laser printer pollution will turn out to be. The toner nanoparticles are much more dense in operation than people realize. See serious academics:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/wp-co... "Effects of Laser Printer–Emitted Engineered Nanoparticles on Cytotoxicity, Chemokine Expression, Reactive Oxygen Species, DNA Methylation, and DNA Damage: A Comprehensive in Vitro Analysis in Human Small Airway Epithelial Cells, Macrophages, and Lymphoblasts"
http://www.scientificamerican....
https://www.arb.ca.gov/researc...

..iPhone owners are wealthier than Android owners. See here for similar results without the silly phone angle.

You're way in over your head and you don't even know it.

XD

Looks like they're removing stuff now.

What, every single group that does temperature reconstructions is "removing stuff" and just happen to end up with the exact same answer? That's one hell of a conspiracy theory! It's item 4 on the conspiracy theory detector.

In my humble opinion, his successor is lying a lot more. That's why every month this year has been a "record."

So, nothing to do with the El Nino? That's item 10 on the conspiracy theory detector.

Even featured here on slashdot it's so suspicious,

That one's off the chart.

This site has actual photos of newspaper articles.

But isn't discussing global temperatures so is not really relevant to our discussion...

Those stubborn facts again-

Well, yeah :)

Yet another analysis:

Also not discussing global temperatures...

I understand you're not a scientist. However for God sakes, look at the data! Go into the distant past to present! Analyze it! Come up with a theory!

We've already got one, and as I've shown, the data fits quite well!

Another clue is they want to put people in jail that disagree with man made GW.

Yes. Clue #7

What's very frustrating to me is I've predicted this for 20 years that their models wouldn't hold up

Yes. That's got to be frustrating given how well they have!

Wonder why I haven't been responding? I

Because you're losing our bet so badly and because of how cocky and condescending you were when you entered it and because you're not particularly fond of the taste of crow?

You're way in over your head and you don't even know it.

XD

Looks like they're removing stuff now.

What, every single group that does temperature reconstructions is "removing stuff" and just happen to end up with the exact same answer? That's one hell of a conspiracy theory! It's item 4 on the conspiracy theory detector.

In my humble opinion, his successor is lying a lot more. That's why every month this year has been a "record."

So, nothing to do with the El Nino? That's item 10 on the conspiracy theory detector.

Even featured here on slashdot it's so suspicious,

That one's off the chart.

This site has actual photos of newspaper articles.

But isn't discussing global temperatures so is not really relevant to our discussion...

Those stubborn facts again-

Well, yeah :)

Yet another analysis:

Also not discussing global temperatures...

I understand you're not a scientist. However for God sakes, look at the data! Go into the distant past to present! Analyze it! Come up with a theory!

We've already got one, and as I've shown, the data fits quite well!

Another clue is they want to put people in jail that disagree with man made GW.

Yes. Clue #7

What's very frustrating to me is I've predicted this for 20 years that their models wouldn't hold up

Yes. That's got to be frustrating given how well they have!

Wonder why I haven't been responding? I

Because you're losing our bet so badly and because of how cocky and condescending you were when you entered it and because you're not particularly fond of the taste of crow?

You're way in over your head and you don't even know it.

XD

Looks like they're removing stuff now.

What, every single group that does temperature reconstructions is "removing stuff" and just happen to end up with the exact same answer? That's one hell of a conspiracy theory! It's item 4 on the conspiracy theory detector.

In my humble opinion, his successor is lying a lot more. That's why every month this year has been a "record."

So, nothing to do with the El Nino? That's item 10 on the conspiracy theory detector.

Even featured here on slashdot it's so suspicious,

That one's off the chart.

This site has actual photos of newspaper articles.

But isn't discussing global temperatures so is not really relevant to our discussion...

Those stubborn facts again-

Well, yeah :)

Yet another analysis:

Also not discussing global temperatures...

I understand you're not a scientist. However for God sakes, look at the data! Go into the distant past to present! Analyze it! Come up with a theory!

We've already got one, and as I've shown, the data fits quite well!

Another clue is they want to put people in jail that disagree with man made GW.

Yes. Clue #7

What's very frustrating to me is I've predicted this for 20 years that their models wouldn't hold up

Yes. That's got to be frustrating given how well they have!

Wonder why I haven't been responding? I

Because you're losing our bet so badly and because of how cocky and condescending you were when you entered it and because you're not particularly fond of the taste of crow?

1 degree of global warming isn't enough for you?

And there is a big difference in falsifiability: you could go to school and learn the physics that go into climate change. If you ever found a point where the teachers told you the equivalent of 2+2=5, you could point that out to the world. Whereas, if I went to seminary(?) school (apologies for not knowing the correct term), there's no way to guarantee God would ever speak to me.

If only 5% of the Louisiana damage was caused by climate change, that's $1B that could've been spent on green energy. That, in turn, would lead to reducing the pollution that causes breathing issues (asthma) or heavy metal poisoning (mercury in the fish we eat). If we don't burn coal, the mercury in the coal can't drift into the sea. If we did get off fossil fuels, that would save $361B to $886B annually.

& torrential rains soon to hit the Left Coast again soon: see Wikipedia for "Pineapple Express."

The climated do-gooders are going to have a field day with the next mega-rain on the West Coast, but they happen about every 160 years.

Well, on the west coast we are still waiting for the repeat of the 1862 atmospheric river (aka pineapple express) they promised us last year to get us out of the drought. Of course as will all things, there can always be too much of a good thing.

http://www.scientificamerican....

This time we'll just let your FALSE source expose himself
Dark Money Fueling Climate Change Denial
Oddly enough, mostly the same people who wrote all those glowing pro-smoking lies

And the puppet behind your puppet theater source? the always ignorant and usually easy to debunk Steven Goddard known fraudster
And just what is the truth?
The 8 big lies of denialism exposed
Your crimes against logic are therefore "argumentum ad populum" "argumentum ad venicundium" and simple lying.

You might want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On the other hand . . . good old Jacob Bronowski taught us the eating meat was a very important step in the Ascent of Man. Meat is a more concentrated form of protein, and freed up time to work on other stuff, besides food collection in the stone ages.

That is a pretty outdated view in paleoanthropology. It's up there with "Man the Hunter" and "Meat Made us Human". To spare you the mountain of scientific articles, books, and studies on paleonutrition conducted by archaeologists (not those insane popular "paleo" journalistic writers), here is a Scientific American article explaining how your ancient "man" most likely arose from the ability to cook food and consume starches:
"Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians" http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/

You only need to look at any studies of ancient fiber consumption (derived from coprolite data) to arrive at the conclusion that our ancestors (recent and in the deep past) ate a shit-load of plants. Something like 10 times what the average westerner would eat on average.

> As others have pointed out the core of the argument is sound

It was debunked, knucklehead. "Others have pointed out". Oh LOL!

> melting polar caps or some other nonsense

If ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest man in the world: http://www.scientificamerican....

> Thank you. Some one had to tell the truth about how horrible wind turbine farms were along with these sugar-coated FUD articles by BeauHD for the benefit of leftist dreamers.

Dumb ass

Screeech! Bawlllll!! Moan!!! Just fucking deal with it, okay.

I am all for sustainable wind-generated energy, but let's not take a dump in the waters directly off shore.
You say you are all for it but here you are bawling about it likening it to "a dump." Your brain is so rigid you see a wind generator and think it's an abomination on the face on the Earth yet you can't explain why. Because you're not thinking. Try thinking. Your sense of visual aesthetics. Other peoples lives. I bet you don't bother protesting outside of ugly "dump" coal powerstations do you? You're a NIMBY. http://www.scientificamerican....

Here's less 'stunning' picture of this... https://www.bostonglobe.com/me...

oh the horror! you must cry yourself to sleep at night. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/...

Whenever they have tried to build windfarms near land, especially wealthy areas like Long Island, the landed gentry have howled and bawled NIMBY! NOT IN MY BACKYARD! So they must build these far away to keep the landed gentry from calling in their congressmen to put a stop to us. http://longisland.news12.com/n...

Sad fact: Coal pollution is big killer. It kills more people from cancer than nuclear power which is no saint either. http://www.scientificamerican....

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm blown away by system, it's a breath of fresh air to see someone trying to do the right thing.Yes! Imagine the economics of scale if this gets popular.

You are saying that NOW after India used it to make nuclear weapons? Seriously?

Well, first of all, they didn't. They used the CIRUS research reactor in Trombay. The US and Canada gave it to them under an agreement that it would only be used for peaceful purposes.

Oh come on now, do you think the readers are really that stupid? Alex Gabbard pushed that line and the bullshit about terrorists building nukes from ash but he was getting paid to lie when he did it. It's no more real than his novels about hillbilly moonshiners.
It's as radioactive as fucking sand because that's what the stuff that becomes ash was before it ended up as impurities in coal.

I didn't say anything about building nukes from coal slurry, so that's a strawman. I made the point that coal has real, measurable impacts that one can actually see whether one subscribes to the concept of global climate change caused by human activities (such as burning coal) or not. The idea is that you can readily see severe environmental impacts from coal and oil power plants without having to get into any sort of complex interconnected open system dynamics. You can just see entire towns buried by fucking coal slurry like Kingston, TN and in Martin County, KY.

Also, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. But please, don't let facts get in the way of whatever agenda it is you're pushing. You done yet?

There is a project that would involve accelerating tiny probes to a fraction (0.2c) of the speed of light, allowing a mission to a nearby solar system. Also, that system is moving towards us at about 21km/s so the longer we wait, the shorter the trip gets (but not by much, heh).

1. I addressed the nuclear power issue.

2. The hydro issue is again a conflation of environmental politics with economic viability. Politics is not economics or logistics.

3. Solar is generally good on 99.9 percent of roofs. Fly over a suburb and spot the roofs that are not totally exposed to the sky. Its very very very few.

4. Cities have increasing populations because of subsidies. The housing is subsidized, the food is subsidized, the medical care is subsidized, the education is subsidized... and the birth rate in cities is shit... and has always been shit. We hear endlessly about how people want to improve the economy and improve birth rates... well... consider not subsidizing stupid urban planning. Just a thought. The higher the urbanization the worse it gets. Consider that it is a false correlation to associate urbanization with modernity. That was a context of the industrial revolution which is not prescriptive on future logistical paradigms.

5. As to examples of the fees utilities charge solar installations... well known and easily found... anyone that can use google will find many examples of it. Here is one:
http://www.scientificamerican....

I could get you pretty pictures for vastly cheaper. ;)

Seriously, though, while I think the exploration is great, the fact that NASA has morphed into the All-Mars Channel is kind of annoying for those of us who prefer other destinations in the solar system (for me, it's Venus and Titan with a little Enceladus, Europa and Io on the side)

We already have empirical data from previous periods with high greenhouse gas numbers, and we know what happened: plant life flourished, died, got buried, turned into coal, and served as a carbon sink. Anyone arguing that this won't happen again is making an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof.

It's not entirely clear that coal can be replenished at anywhere near the scale we've been using it.

This interesting bit of info on coal's formation came to my attention not long ago:

Trees invented lignin -- the tough fibrous component in bark -- millions of years before bacteria and fungi invented ways to break down and digest lignin. (Even today, lignin takes a long time to break down and only a few organisms can digest it, but there are enough that it gets recycled eventually.) That meant for millions of years, trees that died didn't rot and get recycled as they do today; instead, they just piled up and eventually got buried and became coal.

Better source:

Now a new genomic analysis suggests why Earth significantly slowed its coal-making processes roughly 300 million years ago—mushrooms evolved the ability to break down lignin.

Here we go again, with the "it isn't secure, and we're gonna hack the election" conspiracy. Funny how our entire banking system is online and secure enough, yet voting isn't.

But it isn't. Bank fraud happens all the time. When it happens, you show the paper trail, and the bank verifies it and gives you your money back. They accept the loss as the cost of doing business. How do you get your vote back?

Here is David Pogue's comment in Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-will-we-be-able-to-vote-online/):

“But wait,” you're entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?”

Voting is much trickier for a couple of reasons. Whereas monetary transactions are based on a firm understanding of your identity, a vote is supposed to be anonymous. In case of bank trouble, investigators can trace a credit-card purchase back to you, but how can they track an anonymous vote?
And credit-card and bank fraud goes on constantly. It's just a cost of doing business. But the outcome of an election is too important; we can't simply ignore a bunch of lost or altered votes.

Somebody didn't get the memo about fMRI studies; fMRI right now is only about half a step away from being pseudo-science. What with sofware bugs rendering thousands of studies meaningless, and widespread methodological errors leading to voodoo correlations, any claim of a discovery based on fMRI right now should be taken with a bucket-sized pinch of salt.

Statistically speaking, we are currently governed mostly by lawyers. Oh, and the rich. If you are a rich, charismatic lawyer, your future as a politician is bright.

Of course scientists aren't perfectly rational. But do you think they are better at making policy decisions than what we currently have? Or more objective than the topmost 0.1% of the rich who have never depended on a paycheck? Just demanding supporting evidence would be a huge improvement over how policy is currently set: by debates that are little more than an extensive survey of the various logical fallacies, and by forming coalitions of selfish lawmakers who are either getting personal kickbacks or pork for their home district.

Besides, for everybody who is panicking that scientists will lead us to some sort of horror novel society where ethics are forgotten, scientific thinking makes you more moral.

The question isn't whether Tyson's Rationalia would be perfect - it's whether it would be better than our current government which amounts to groupthink among advantaged narcissists. The answer seems pretty clear to me. Let's elect some more scientists and engineers, and let's demand the same burden of proof on policymakers that we expect of middle school science fair projects.

Rhetorical questions of course. Religion by definition cannot be objectively true because it depends of belief in something which isn't falsifiable. If it cannot in principle be measured or observed (with past, existing or future technology) then it cannot be true.

I think your statement is mistaken. Here's why:

Objective truth refers to a proposition (e.g., "God exists") which is true without regards to the person making the statement, holding that belief, etc. I totally agree that the most important question regarding a religion is whether or not it's objectively true.

I think your mistake comes from your apparent premise that (a proposition P is not falsifiable) implies (P is not objectively true). If that's what you meant, then there are numerous critiques of that logic which I'm not going to enumerate here. Some good starting points in case you're interested: Here, here, and here.

If we're talking about the falsifiability of Judeo-Christian religions specifically, here are a few aspects which you might consider objective but not (obviously) falsifiable:

(1) They involve historical claims: The Israelites followed a column of smoke/flame through the desert after fleeing Egypt; Jesus was dead, and then three days later was alive; etc. These are objective claims, in that they're true or false regardless of who's thinking about them. But they're not obviously falsifiable, because they're supposedly one-off historical events. I.e., there's nothing in Jewish / Christian theology that would lead one to think he/she could formulate an experiment to test if these events happened in the past. The historical method is perhaps the best we can ever do for this category of claim.

(2) Claims about events which cannot be forced to happen during one's lifetime: for example, claims about what a person would experience after death. (I don't mean after pseudo-death, like having no heartbeat for 5 minutes. I mean perma-death dead.) These claims are not falsifiable in any useful sense of the word, because the theology generally indicates that a person will be able to observe them only after death, which is a bit too late to be useful.

I think there might be some aspects of Christianity's claims which are subjective and falsifiable, but I'd want to leave it to a well-educated Christian to enumerate / defend those.

Well, one way to reply to a post calling out confirmation bias ... is to double down on the confirmation bias. Apparently I get to represent all liberals now (or at least the ones you don't like, with that bit of no-true-scotsman mixed in under cover of "I didn't mean everybody").

Let's get back to your original claim, which can be distilled to 'liberals conform more than conservatives'. A few minutes of googling turned up no shortage of studies which appear to have reached the exact opposite conclusion. Here are a few studies and some related articles:
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://link.springer.com/artic...
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu...
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.psychologicalscienc...

Instead, it's nearly all incoherent rants about how "frankenfood" is not what "mother nature" intended for us to eat.

Mine's more concerned with an unintended and will almost never occur in nature genetic hybrid getting out and turning out to be bad. For instance, I'm 100% for genetically reverting the 3 human biting mosquitoes to previous non biting incarnations, undoing millions of years of evolution. Now that would truly be a bit of magnificent and beneficial genetic modification.

Note that it was centuries before tobacco was deemed unhealthy. Beef and alcohol even longer. Wood smoke, bad. Some things were found out more quickly, recall thalidomide? It was perfectly safe before it ... wasn't. GMOs have to be proven safe one at a time, every time. The process can never be proven safe, because that same process can create the next pandemic disease just as easily as the cure for it.

I'm still undecided on whether Monsanto's soybeans are safe or not. There simply hasn't been enough testing over a long enough time, and there's been too many variables surrounding a variety of trends since those soybeans started being grown. What's not in doubt, however, is that Roundup itself is quite bad. It turns out an inert ingredient is actually maybe not so inert, as it negatively affects health. It only took us over 21 years to figure that out. Maybe it's too soon to determine if the soybean GMOs are actually safe as well? Maybe GMOs that use genes from outside their genus or sub-family should require the same FDA process any man-made chemical requires to be approved for human use.

I don't rant and rave, I don't point to alternative medicine websites or random blogs. I merely look at the facts and see that perhaps all is not as safe as the industry that stands to directly benefit from GMOs says it is. They would, after all, never lie, right?

The Main Problem With Patented GM Food Is The Patent, Not The Fact That It's GM

Roundup Cancer

Genetically Monetized Food

And my own skepticism. Genetically modifying food on the molecular level is not the same as breeding. You will never see in nature where mechanical and chemical means are used to cross species like it's done in the lab.

So, those of us with concerns about GMO crops have legitimate skeptical and informed reasons for being so. And I realize that there are some great things about GMO crops..

So, comparing us to uninformed ignorant people who don't want to hear the actual facts is completely unwarranted.

It's my understanding that most of the cfc compounds that were banned were actually heavier than air. Just how the heck did they get up in the upper atmosphere?

You ever hear of diffusion? Or wind? Gravity is not the only force involved.
Anyway, those chemicals have been unequivocally detected in the upper atmosphere, so they definitely got there.
See here
And here

Yes.

So, what you're saying is that you have evidence that a drug manufacturer's advertisement is criminally fraudulent, and therefore we should not allow anyone in that line of work to spend money promoting their businesses, and instead they should put all of their money into research on new drugs until they run out of money, at which some other person who knows you won't allow them to advertise will of course invest billions of dollars in the same area because even though they're smart enough to come up with new drugs that you personally can't produce, they're too dumb to realize you want them to fail, financially. Do you even listen to yourself?

Oh, you want to see documented instances of misconduct in by pharmaceutical companies?? Try here for all sorts of legal settlements, you can review their specific conduct in the settlement agreements. What, did you think nobody's ever caught them misbehaving before? Hardly. And even aside from legal settlements, other investigations exist that do bring up a share of worries. And no, their questionable conduct isn't just limited to questionable marketing, there have been other problems.

As I said, you don't want to examine their conduct in its full scope, you want to avoid even considering the questions. Unfortunately for you, others have already.

That you present this hysterical idea of an absolutist sentiment as an objection just makes you sound silly, and what causes you to say such a silly thing, I don't know, but I'm guessing it's something in your own psyche. Of course, there are other options, for example, Europe does forbid DTC marketing of drugs, and the various companies don't seem to be suffering unduly there. So your idea? Yours, not mine. You made it up, not me, thus you are the one who should look in the mirror and ask yourself why you said it. Why did you say it? How did you think I'd react? Well, my reaction is that I hold you responsible for your own words. You said it, not me.

You may want to try to inform yourself better. You need to correct a lot of insufficient awareness of actual circumstances and improve your ability to recognize what others are saying. After you do that, then you can really work on your presentation.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can't be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.
Although CO2 makes up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that small number says nothing about its significance in climate dynamics. Even at that low concentration, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a greenhouse gas, as physicist John Tyndall demonstrated in 1859. The chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost 6 degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations.
Contrary to the contrarians, human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, anthropogenic CO2 amounts to about 30 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce. True, 95 percent of the releases of CO2 to the atmosphere are natural, but natural processes such as plant growth and absorption into the oceans pull the gas back out of the atmosphere and almost precisely offset them, leaving the human additions as a net surplus. Moreover, several sets of experimental measurements, including analyses of the shifting ratio of carbon isotopes in the air, further confirm that fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are the primary reasons that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent since 1832, from 284 parts per million (ppm) to 388 ppm—a remarkable jump to the highest levels seen in millions of years.
Contrarians frequently object that water vapor, not CO2, is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas; they insist that climate scientists routinely leave it out of their models. The latter is simply untrue: from Arrhenius on, climatologists have incorporated water vapor into their models. In fact, water vapor is why rising CO2 has such a big effect on climate. CO2 absorbs some wavelengths of infrared that water does not so it independently adds heat to the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, more water vapor enters the atmosphere and multiplies CO2's greenhouse effect; the IPCC notes that water vapor (pdf) may “approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO2 alone.”
Nevertheless, within this dynamic, the CO2 remains the main driver (what climatologists call a "forcing") of the greenhouse effect. As NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt has explained, water vapor enters and leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2, and tends to preserve a fairly constant level of relative humidity, which caps off its greenhouse effect. Climatologists therefore categorize water vapor as a feedback rather than a forcing factor. (Contrarians who don't see water vapor in climate models are looking for it in the wrong place.)
Because of CO2's inescapable greenhouse effect, contrarians holding out for a natural explanation for current global warming need to explain why, in their scenarios, CO2 is not compounding the problem.

I've thought the same thing, but then remembered in the early universe, stars were probably a lot larger and hotter, and would've had dramatically shorter life spans than yellow darves.. some of those supergiants only last 10 million years. I guess the question is, how many supergiants were there to go supernova in the first billion years or so of the universe?
Another plausible scenario to the Fermi paradox is that our particular galaxy is just kinda dead. For all we know, Barnards Galaxy, or M32, or M33 are full of life.

It has been looked into but I think these guys are perhaps expecting too much of alien civilizations. http://www.scientificamerican....

UNESCO had drawn up a list of world heritage sites that were in danger from climate change, and Australia had the reefs removed because it would hurt tourism.

To top it off, Australia has just gutted the research arm that studies this.

See no evil. Hear no evil.

Right, the NTP can't possibly know what they are doing. This is why Scientific American would never link to such trash.

Perhaps you shouldn't be so sure of yourself. Glyphosate may not be lethal immediately as used, but it does appear to have unexpected detrimental effects. And then there's the really bad "inert" ingredient effect to consider.

It's not all about LD50 numbers. O2 or H2O can both kill you, yet, like salt, you must have them. Glyphosate has no beneficial health properties, it merely makes farming "easier" apparently. We grew crops successfully long before glyphosate, maybe we should review that effort. Considering one of the linked stories, in western societies incidences of various chronic diseases has increased markedly since Glyphosate entered wide-spread use.

If "organic" means no-pesticides, then I'm all for it, where I can afford it. "Natural" on the package doesn't mean anything useful and it probably will always be a junk marketing term. I use "natural" to mean anything that you could find while wandering around on the planet. Of course, then, arsenic is natural, so that isn't a good enough criteria by itself.

Except organic does _not_ mean no pesticides, it means they are using decades old formulations of pesticides that were pretty arbitrarily certified organic with little research, rhyme or reason. They require a lot more chemicals to be effective than modern, better researched and more effective pesticides. If you are eating organic to avoid pesticides, you are doing it wrong. They often have more pesticides than normal food since they are restricted to less effective pesticides and are going to be worse for you than modern equivalents that were designed to be safe.

some good info with hard examples of how much more pesticide is needed for organic farming.
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Umm, avoiding the question? It wasn't clear what you were referring to. Good job sounding like a complete douche.

http://www.scientificamerican....

There are lie detectors that DO work quite effectively (fMRIs, for example, are very effective since different areas of the brain are activated and easily detectable).

fMRI has not been proven to work as a lie detector.

Maybe. Maybe not:

http://science.sciencemag.org/...

There have been several studies to date transplanting gut flora from "skinny" rats and mice into "obese" rats and mice resulting in weight loss with the same diet composition. They have also showed the reverse to be true.

Furthermore there seems to be some evidence that sugar-alcohols and artificial sweeteners may be better food for the growth of bacteria that favors an obese phenotype.

http://www.omicsonline.org/bac... http://www.scientificamerican.... http://www.nature.com/nature/j... http://www.nature.com/news/sug...

(FWIW - I am a doctor (MD) but I am not an endocrinologist/obesity researcher)

It looks like most plants use a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate. This ref says that molten sodium has been tested.

-Most of the world's oxygen comes from the phytoplankton [earthsky.org], and their population dynamics are remarkably challenging to model. However, if they are not dying en masse, then the oxygen production will remain about the same; some may be redistributed.

A report published in 2010 says "Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950". I wonder how much that has to do with the drop in oxygen in the oceans.

Apparently being rich makes you an asshole: http://www.scientificamerican....

there are many more articles on the subject all indicating the same thing. Hurting those who hurt others is a basic instinct.

Whales are about as smart as pigs and have been eaten in many cultures.

The guy who asserted that whales were as smart as humans was on LSD at the time. He spent the rest of his life tripping balls and trying to teach dolphins to talk...Good work if you can get it.

We now have Functional MRI that tells us the extra grey matter in whales is for sonar processing. Large brain mystery is solved. They are as smart as pigs.

No. If only you were as smart as you think you are. John C Lilly is far from the most recent research into whale intelligence.

https://theraptorlab.wordpress...

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

As to accusations of crony capitalism, how is not pricing fossil fuels for the actual costs they incur anything but handing fossil fuel companies probably the largest set of financial subsidies in human history?

In what universe? Fossil fuels are heavily taxed already.

Do you think continue to allow people like the Kochs to profit massively off of an energy source that is heating the planet

The Koch brothers' profit or profit margin doesn't change much if the US government imposes additional taxes on oil and gas; they just pass those costs on to consumers. And if they really thought solar was a threat to their business, they'd just invest in it.

Furthermore, the Koch brothers are MIT-educated engineers and billionaires in the 70s; the idea that they take political positions because of future profits is laughable, in particular given their long history of support for libertarian causes, often opposing both Republicans and Democrats (including gay marriage and abortion rights, opposition to the war on drugs, opposition to the Iraq war).

If the market was able to produce a solution on its own, it would have been now. The market is going to need a kick in the nuts, and that kick in the nuts is making fossil fuels more expensive.

Ah, the "kick in the nuts" theory of economics! How could I not know? Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work that way.

What's needed in order to replace fossil fuels with, say, solar cells is a decrease in the cost of solar cells; that requires lots of incremental improvements to technology. Those improvements have been happening since 1980. Solar cells aren't competitive with fossil fuels yet because innovation actually takes time. Kicking scientists and engineers in the nuts will not speed up innovation.

In fact, artificially increasing the cost of fossil fuels has the opposite effect on innovation: it encourages and subsidizes the production of inefficient solar cells and discourages innovation because, after all, innovation isn't needed to compete. At the same time, it makes consumer poorer (by taking away their money) and transfers their money to politically favored corporations. That's what's been happening.

For chrissakes, even the Saudis know the days of oil as a major energy source are numbered,

I also think that oil's days as a major energy source are numbered; however, if we adopt the "kick in the nuts" policies you favor, a transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a post fossil-fuel economy might be delayed by decades.

In any case, as far as climate change is concerned, any of that makes little difference: we are looking at 2-4C warming no matter what (even according to the IPCC), and for people like you to pretend that we can avert that if we just adopt the right governmental policy is either ignorant or simply dishonest.

If you're an academic, you must get government research grants

But nothing says those grants must reach a pre-decided conclusion. It's purely an assumption that these academics would not get grants to study other aspects of the climate, should global warming be disproved.

you're out of a job and your career is in the toilet

You know what would cause that even faster than your grant not being renewed? Getting caught lying about your results, or showing consistent bias. That would sink your reputation in a heartbeat. It's curious that such a huge proportion of climatologists around the world all apparently suffer from this alleged bias - and are also apparently unable to see it in others' publications either, even during peer review. That would make climatology unique in the fields of science.

What biases oil and gas company sponsored scientists have (the few there are) is irrelevant.

Again, I find it amazing that people simply refuse to see the distorting influence of such large sums of money on the public debate, despite the oil and coal industry demonstrating it for decades.

A little bit ago I said I was most interested in finding out how much it would cost me to feel I'd done my share and how much extra I'd need to pay to look down my nose at other people.

I was wrong. What I really want more is to know is how I can cash in.

Pretty easy, lots of money available to relatively few people. "In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010." http://www.scientificamerican....

I then propose nuclear power and people go nuts, "we can't do that, people will die!" or some shit.

Actual climate scientists disagree with those people: http://www.scientificamerican....

The problem for me is that a lot of denialist articles include "facts" that were later proven wrong and some years ago they were TOLD it is fine to lie in their studies to get people to deny climate change. So much of the denialist FUD looks like a power grab by fossil energy companies to give to pet politicians and astroturfing organisations to funnel the money back to their coffers.

FTFY

The problem for me is that a lot of denialist articles include "facts" that were later proven wrong and some years ago they were TOLD it is fine to lie in their studies to get people to deny climate change. So much of the denialist FUD looks like a power grab by fossil energy companies to give to pet politicians and astroturfing organisations to funnel the money back to their coffers.

FTFY

Can't help it but it has to be said, basically the statement made is exactly the statement you would expect them, the CIA to make, if they fully intended to torture again. So in reality no more water boarding but instead based upon a string of stories, direct manipulation of the human brain via drugs and frequency and resonance manipulation, via acoustics and the electromagnetic spectrum. So rather the torture people through the rest of the body, they far more likely fully intend to target their torture techniques directly at the human brain itself or the spinal cord. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , http://www.scientificamerican.... , http://www.mindpowernews.com/M.... So they will no longer torture the body, just the brain and spinal column. They basically used GITMO not to gather evidence by torture but to do torture research, human experimentation of the worst sort. Again not to gather evidence of crimes but to fabricate evidence of crimes, getting people to confess to anything they want them to.