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The average heat flux from the earth is less than 0.1W/m2. Compare that to ~ 1000 W/m2 for the sun. Sure, it varies all over the place (see: volcanoes, etc.), but it's not a no-brainer where any heat anomalies the glider detected came from. In general, the deep ocean is quite cold because of that whole thermal expansion thing (also note that seawater is densest a few degrees above freezing (~4 deg C, if I recall). So heating from the bottom tends to cause convection.

You'll note that the scientists quoted don't mention global warming; they are excited to see stuff that they didn't expect. That's good enough to satisfy their intellectual curiosity & need to come up with new and interesting grant proposals.

You'll also notice that scientists in general don't sell newspapers or magazines. It's the journalists whose job it is to butcher the science to sell newspapers and magazines.

Finally, the oceans are very much tied up in our little carbon experiment. A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the atmosphere will go into the oceans. Also, a lot of the CO2 that we've emitted is already going into the oceans, which leads to ocean acidification. This is the rate of carbonic acid input (that's CO2 + H2O H2CO3 H+ + HCO3-) is much higher than the ocean can buffer it with CaCO3 (which buffers effectively, but only on very long time scales). In the meantime, hope you don't like coral.

2. The "proof" IPCC report was not 1000's of scientists, it was a few dozen politicians creating a "summary for policy makers" that was based on the full report (which will be modified to match the summary.)

AR4, The Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was written FOR policy makers, not BY a 'few dozen politicians. Here's the author list. I'd be interested to know where you got that. Are you an AEI Fellow?

I'll give you (for your point four) two reasons, of thousands, that might ring true for the way your mind seems to work. 1) The influx of people (to the tune of a few million) looking, by means of force, for a clean water supply. Our executive think-tanks have thought this through. The protocol has been drawn up already (and it's de-classified). It might get ugly. 2) the 50,000,000 people who will be displaced by raising sea levels. Lock your doors baby. They're comin' to take your house and the coast guard isn't around in strong enough numbers to protect you.

anything to stop the people from acting responsibly?

Unfortunately the global warming problem is so severe that even a magic wand that shuts off all carbon dioxide production worldwide today, and stripped away all CO2 released over the last 7 years, wouldn't stop continued warming for most of the next century (though it would markedly reduce it). See page 13 of: the IPCC Working Group I Fourth Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers. Even extremely optimistic scenarios for reducing CO2 release lead to warming over the next century three of more times greater than the "magic wand" solution.

Although acting responsibly is certainly necessary, the situation has reached the point where even immediate dramatic responsible action (not yet in evidence, sadly) will not avoid severe climate change in coming decades and centuries. To reduce the scale of the developing disaster additional measures may be necessary.

Crutzen's stratospheric sulfur injection proposal has the advantage that natural experiments have already proven that it works. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 was a recent example.

A recent report on this in Science was: Science 20 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5798, pp. 452 - 454,
"A Combined Mitigation/Geoengineering Approach to Climate Stabilization"
T. M. L. Wigley

Summarizing Wigley's findings, Richard A. Kerr in the same issue stated:

Pulling off a "human volcano" to counteract global warming would take some wherewithal. Pinatubo put up 10 million tons of sulfur, most of which fell out of the stratosphere within 2 or 3 years. So humans looking to cool the greenhouse by stratospheric shading would have to send millions of tons of sulfur tens of kilometers into the air every year, perhaps century after century, in order to renew the continually depleted shield of haze. The resulting acid rain would be minor compared to current levels, say proponents. People have discussed delivery methods from balloons, big guns, and giant planes. To ease the burden of lifting megaton masses, the late Edward Teller--father of the hydrogen bomb and "Star Wars" missile defense advocate--proposed substituting more efficient reflectors for sulfur, something metallic and perhaps engineered like tiny retroreflectors.

Daunting practical aspects aside, the latest--although preliminary--climate modeling hints that shading the globe to counteract greenhouse warming could actually work. In this issue of Science (p. 452), climate researcher Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, reports that in a simple, so-called energy-balance model, firing off a Pinatubo eruption every 2 years or so would be enough to counteract the projected warming indefinitely. And so far in sophisticated general circulation models (GCMs), "all the simulations have suggested it would basically work," says Caldeira, who has run many such simulations. Crutzen, who has been cooperating on other GCM simulations, agrees. "It's very tantalizing," he says. "It just looks too good."

Read the substantiated facts:
  http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/WG1AR4_SPM_Appro ved_05Feb.pdf IPCC science summary v4
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.wunderground.com/education/928.asp links to governmental agencies opinions.
http://www.wunderground.com/education/hoax.asp refutation of unsupportive satellite data:
http://www.wunderground.com/education/stateoffear. asp refutation of M.C's state of fear:

Distribution of EMS produced by our local star:
http://www.tak2000.com/data/planets/solar-rad.gif
or
http://www.eas.slu.edu/People/CEGraves/Eas138/fg02 _18.jpg

The Summary for Policymakers from the Scientific Assessment Working Group ("Working Group 1") of the Intergovernemental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due out Friday morning at 9:30 am Paris time. There will be a webcast of the press conference. This report reflects the worldwide scientific consensus (and it contains contributions from some of the scientists who've complained about being muzzled by the US government). Every word will have been ironed over by scientists and diplomats. Watch the skies:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/

The full report of the working group will be out in May and published by Cambridge University Press in June (the same people who've published the last three Assessment Reports). The working group reports are a great way to get an overview of the current scientific understanding, and they're meant to be readable by the technically-savvy non-specialist.

The National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has a pic of the identical (attached) snowflakes on their kid's page.

They look more like nanopumps than snowflakes to me!

NO, I am talking about present day enterprise level computer room cooling. Some small, non-enterprise level installations may not need distributed air handlers and can get by with other air conditioning arrangements. Hell, I have even seen a few small computer rooms cooled with home type central air conditioners.

Liebert air handlers are pretty much the gold standard for data center cooling. Whether you are cooling a couple thousand square feet or several hundred thousand square feet of computer cabinets, you need to have distributed air handlers. The air handlers are supplied with chilled water from water chillers that are located outdoors. The air handlers draw air in through the top, cool the air, add humidity if needed, and then blow the air out the bottom; pressurizing the area under the floor with cool air. Cool air is vented up through the floor wherever cooling is needed, either near the computer cabinets or directly into the cabinets.

One example of cooling an 8,400 square foot computer room is available at http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/news/05/lead/0919.cooling .html

A quick google tells me the sun reverses magnetic field every 22 years. 11 is in the middle, guess that is why but not fully. So we shift that question upstream one notch as to the "why?" part. source : http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/sun/activit y/solar_cycle.html

I also just found out this NASA solar division lost funding

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.sht ml

Oooo. Since some people disagree, therefore McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong. No.

That was quick: we arrived almost immediately at the part about science that you don't understand. I am not pointing out merely that "some people disagree." You may be used to philosophical and religious discussions, where disagreements are not resolvable definitively and argumentation is a matter of superior persuasion.

But this is science; your sarcasm has no power here. It is not that "some people disagree." It is that the experts you cite have been shown to be incorrect in peer-reviewed journals, and to my knowledge there has been no response in kind. I've invited you to correct me on that and I invite you again.

Bradley 2003, Rutherford 2005, Wahl 2006, ...

Sorry, I should have clarified -- it wasn't "general" damage. It was damage to particular infrastructure elements. If I remember correctly, they had one for the oil industry in the region, and one for power generation. The models did include issues like how long it would take to get into damaged areas to repair them, but I don't remember if the specific issue of levee failures was mentioned or not.

I assume that what's being talked about in this article under "pegging hurricane's damage potential" is related to the presentation that they gave at the meeting I was at.

Smog is a somewhat inappropriate name here. Nitrogen oxides and ozone are the primary ingredient of smog (at least in developed countries). And the sulfur dioxide would be inserted at high elevations well above human habitation. The mixing between that region and the lower atmosphere is limited, so I understand. OTOH, sulfur dioxide is a significant cause of smog-related deaths and inserting this much sulfur dioxide (10 million tons a year) will contribute to some extent. Be aware that far more sulfur oxides than this are inserted each year (according to the previous link natural sources emit 80-290 million tons and human sources emit 70-100 million tons). The key is that this sulfur dioxide would be inserted above cloud layers. One thing that is nice is that sulfur dioxide will come out in about two years time which is pretty good for an atmospheric modification.

you don't know what you think you know...

The Sun is typically very active when sunspot counts are high. Sunspots are indicators of disturbances in the Sun's magnetic field, which can generate energetic solar events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Since reasonably reliable records of sunspot counts extend back to the early 1700s, long before other measures of solar activity could be observed, sunspot counts serve as a valuable, relatively long-term indicator of solar activity. The Sun emits significantly more radiation than usual in the X-ray and ultraviolet portions of the electromagnetic spectrum during solar max, and this extra energy significantly alters the uppermost layers of Earth's atmosphere.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/sun/activity/sunspot_c ycle.html

hockey stick
medieval warm period
actual history

Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.

Community Climate System Model. Enjoy.

Sure humans can try and cope, but there are several billion other species on this planet that are incredibly susceptible to environmental change. I doubt that it could be successfully argued that the extinction of, say, 50% of these species is a good idea, and I don't think that humankind could really try and discover how to save these species before global warming kills either us or them.

I'd merely cite Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and say that analyzed peer reviewed academic journals for dissention on the topic of global warming, but such vague referencing doesn't really seem appropriate for the discussions that slashdot encourages. This however, is a summary of research into the peer reviewed journals. 75% of the articles analyzed agree that global warming is occurring, and that it is doing damage to Earth's biota. 25% of the articles are ambivalent towards the effects of global warming. That leaves a big, fat 0% of peer reviewed academic articles supporting the corporate viewpoint of global warming.

Finally, the Kyoto Protocols were a step towards undoing and reducing environmental damage caused by industry and agriculture. Unfortunately, the Kyoto Protocols aren't going to do much - while they are restrictive in a capitalistic sense, they are very lenient in an environmental sense, and will not effectively reduce global warming by themselves (see article here). I guess those of you in the United States do not have to worry about it much though, since the US never ratified the treaty - in fact, it sounds like certain government agencies are doing their best to prevent global warming from being acknowledged as a threat.

I think, that perhaps rather than trying to work out how survive the time-bomb that's ticking right in front of us, it might be better to try and work out how to defuse it.

I wonder if there could be a solar flare powerful enough to render half the earth's electronics unusable... That would cause quite a technological singularity, in the opposite way that NPR imagines it. Any geophysicists out there who care to comment? I know Québec had a blackout in 1989 affecting 6 million people due to a magnetic storm in the atmosphere.

OK fellas, let's take it easy judging the Japanese on their attempts to model the environment. This stuff is already being done all over the place, especially in the US.

I'm a PhD student in Statistics, and I do a lot of work with the Environmental Sciences. While I am no expert on their Climate Models, I do use their results frequently with my statistical models. There are essentially two kinds of models

1. Global Climate Models (GCMs) which are numerical models trying to predict the effects of any potential environmental changes. They're quite useful for going far into the future, but there is no guarantee that they truly reflect what has happened in the past. CCSM is a model I am currently working with right now.

2. Reanalysis Models which are similar to GCMs, but they take the time to compare its results with actual data observed from the past, making sure that it reflects the trends we have already seen. Bonus is accuracy, but I believe the drawback is how far in the future you can go. NCEP and NARCAAP for some examples I've been working with as well.

Again, I am no expert of the actual details of the models, but you're free to read their sites to learn more.

OK fellas, let's take it easy judging the Japanese on their attempts to model the environment. This stuff is already being done all over the place, especially in the US.

I'm a PhD student in Statistics, and I do a lot of work with the Environmental Sciences. While I am no expert on their Climate Models, I do use their results frequently with my statistical models. There are essentially two kinds of models

1. Global Climate Models (GCMs) which are numerical models trying to predict the effects of any potential environmental changes. They're quite useful for going far into the future, but there is no guarantee that they truly reflect what has happened in the past. CCSM is a model I am currently working with right now.

2. Reanalysis Models which are similar to GCMs, but they take the time to compare its results with actual data observed from the past, making sure that it reflects the trends we have already seen. Bonus is accuracy, but I believe the drawback is how far in the future you can go. NCEP and NARCAAP for some examples I've been working with as well.

Again, I am no expert of the actual details of the models, but you're free to read their sites to learn more.

Solar pyhsics is not my field, hence I have found it rather staggering to read some of the recent advances. Earlier this year, I bought "The Sun" by Jay M. Pasachoff ("The Complete Idiot's Guide To" Series). The TRACE telescope in space observes the sun using different filters. Some of these are in the extreme ultraviolet, including a 195 Angstrom filter that observes Iron (Fe) that has lost 11 of its 26 electrons, an event that occurs at 1,500,00 degrees C. Rather than the sun just being one giant bar magnet, it also has smaller regions of polarity. From these polarized regions, ionized gas loops out hundreds of thousands of km into space. Here is an article I found that simulates the current prevailing theory "that active regions on the solar surface originate from strong toroidal magnetic fields generated by the solar dynamo mechanism at the thin tachocline layer at the base of the solar convection zone." http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrs p-2004-1/ whose author looks kinda cute: http://www.hao.ucar.edu/Public/about/Staff/yfan/

If they're worried about corrosion, what about a nice dose of lightning?

From this page:

http://www.ucar.edu/communications/infopack/lightn ing/faq.html

This extract:

Just before it reaches ground, the step leader induces a huge electric potential (some 10 million volts), enough to bring up surges of positive charge from sharp objects or irregularities near the ground. Once the impulses meet--a few tens of meters above earth--the connection is established and the return stroke zips upward at a rate much faster than the stepped leader's descent. It is this return stroke that produces the visible flash as it heats surrounding air to 30,000 degrees C (54,000 degrees F), which in turn creates the shock wave we hear as thunder.

I claim using a space elevator as a power generator, assuming it lasts long enough to plug in an extension cord...

It's not exactly a neck-and-neck race for the title of "Most Abundend Element."

Nor abundant. Spellcheck would help you. That said, abundance wasn't the issue, and if you were much good at this, you'd realize that; you can fuse the output of hydrogen fusion too. Read what I wrote again, and keep reading it until you understand it.

whatever ridiculous engineering thing we're going to end up doing when it comes time to leave the nest and expand past Sol. Well, before we leave this planet, ...

"This septic tank isn't big enough. It barely handles the staff, and none of the prisoners are in the jail yet." "Well, it's fine *before* the prisoners get here."

Way to miss the point.

And if we're going to be leaving Sol any time soon, we'll have to pass this little thing on the way out called "Jupiter." I hear it has a little bit of raw hydrogen.

Way to continue to miss the exact same point. You really shouldn't take that tone in your voice until you've managed to stop being a dumbass.

"The bulk of stuff that isn't out in the sticks (galactic style) is in gas giants or stars;"

If you're talking interstellar scales, there are nebulae.

[G]alactic nebulae, [] are composed of the interstellar medium (the gas between the stars, with its accompanying small solid particles) within a single galaxy. Today the term nebula generally refers exclusively to the interstellar medium.

Yeah. Except for the stars, the Milky Way is a nebula. In general, wait until you know what you're talking about before you talk back; all you did was to accidentally repeat me. Nebular matter is the result of stellar wind. Now, before you get all huffy and dig up something that says 5% of the galaxy is nebular matter, please try to focus.

(I'm guessing for the sake of the example; don't waste your time getting an almanac.) Ten percent of all oil is bound up in grass. Does that mean grass is a good place to get oil? No: it's spread far too thin over far too big a space (the great plains) to be usable in any realistic fashion. Sure, let's say 80% of the salt on Earth is in the ocean. Why do we mine it? Why don't we just dredge the ocean? Let's say 50% of all topsoil is spread across the dustbowl states. Why don't we collect it? Why do we go to the effort of creating it?

One day, you'll try gathering something on a large scale in the physical world. On that day you will learn about the overhead of doing the actual collection. On that day, remember this post.

"Remember also please that the solar wind isn't really that abundant; it's just that the universe is ginormous."

But Jupiter is.

Wait, let me get this straight. I was talking about a timescale in which stars aren't much of a source of hydrogen, and you're still stuck on mining Jupiter? Has nobody pointed out to you how much bigger Jupiter isn't than our sun?

By the way, have you actually thought through the logistics of mining Jupiter? (No.) The hydrogen starts several hundred miles below the frozen helium. The metallic hydrogen is 6000 MILES down. Are you going to set up a flying mining base, then send big-ass cables down with balloons? Maybe just a really, reallllllly long pipe? (Is it filled with weed?)

Mining Jupiter is ridiculously unrealistic. There are better sources of hydrogen in this solar system. Quit flogging Jupiter.

Heck, there's enough in those to make Bussard ramjets feasable. ... Lay off the Star Trek.

Ahahahhahahahhaha. Lemme get this straight. First you're going to call Ramjets by their star trek name, falling for the wikipedia deception that somehow they're different than the ramjets from 1906 by Ren

You're right, it's not astonishing. Thanks to the Apollo missions and more recent studies it was determined that our moon and many others in the solar system actually have very faint atmospheres. Though the Moon's gravity is very low it's just enough to hold a thin concentration of gas molecules very close to the surface:

I do see your point, common sense would make it seem that it's just a vacuum. What with all the impact craters and the sky being always black over there.

Well, to be fair, the moon does have an atmosphere, just about, though not much of one, to be sure.

I disagree with your assessment of the connection between anticapitalism and belief in global warming. Communist nations despised capitalism, but were much more reluctant than Capitalist nations to believe that their industrial activities hurt the environment. Russia and its Eastern European satellites did much more harm to the environment than all the capitalist nations combined. China, the only surviving Communist nation worth considering, is second only to the United States in greenhouse gas emissions and appears to have no qualms about burning vast quantities of coal.

From a capitalist point of view, we can see the environment as a capital asset and see damage to the environment as economically equivalent to spending our capital on recurring operating expenses: it may work for a time, but eventually we'll have nothing left to invest for the future, but the recurring expenses won't have gone away. It's the same line of reasoning that says the United States is foolish to build up a multi-trillion dollar debt to pay for recurring operating expenses, such as welfare, other entitlements, and routine military expenditures (as opposed to wars, which are non-recurring).

My personal position, as an environmental scientist, is that only industrial capitalism can save us from global warming because only a market economy can produce the kind of rapid and economically efficient innovation that can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions before it's too late. If we took a Communist, planned-economy position, we'd never get the job done in time and it would be much to expensive to afford anyway. The problem, as the libertarian economist Ronald Coase wrote back in 1960, is that a market economy can't manage global warming very well because there are no clear property rights to the atmosphere or the climate. If we assign property rights through auctioning emissions permits or if we correct for externalities via carbon taxes (many mainstream economists think these would be more efficient than the central planning necessary to determine the number of emissions permits to produce) then the market can allocate emissions efficiently and create incentives for entrepreneurs to develop and sell climate-friendly energy technology.

As to believing that humans cause global warming, there is a self-consistency to this theory that I don't see in contrarian pictures. We have models with source code that is available for public scrutiny, such as the GISS model used by Jim Hansen at NASA or NCAR's Community Atmosphere Model, that produce results that are quite consistent with historical data when and only when you include anthropogenic warming terms. If you include all known climate factors except anthropogenic warming terms, you get results that are inconsistent with historical data.

I haven't seen anyone demonstrating that Hansen's model or the CAM have serious scientific flaws, as you imply with your claims that there are big flaws that would be discovered if only scientists would open their code and calculations for detailed scrutiny.

Of course there are problems with the models: there are fudge factors that can be adjusted or manipulated to produce phony agreement between observation and theory and there are places where even with those fudge factors, the models disagree significantly with aspects of the observed climate, but still the agreement between model and observation is fairly close for the most part when, and only when, anthropogenic warming terms are included.

Meanwhile, so far as I am aware, no one who disagrees with th

...hrm...I seem to remember a company called Silicon Graphics, or was it SGI...they had a great filesystem back when they were still in business - cxfs or something, IIRC. Oooh, they left their web site running - must be by mistake since I'm sure they went out of business a while ago...

http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/tech/file_syst ems.html

"...architected to address single files as large as 9 million terabytes..."

"...and filesystems as large as 18 million terabytes...".

the only performance numbers I could find are :

http://www.vets.ucar.edu/Reports/CXFSPerformance/i ndex.html

Of course, those few individuals might be the first taken over by the Blight, or addicted to Aldebaran Hip-Hop music. (And you need at least three legs to dance to it...)

...so I'm about 6 light-nanoseconds tall, the screen I'm facing is about one by one and a half light nanoseconds.

A light-second is about a billion feet or 300,000,000m, roughly the same as the distance to the Moon.

86400 seconds in a day, so a light-day is about 26,000,000,000,000m, or 4-5 times the distance to Pluto and Charon, or 170 times as far away as the Sun is from us.

A light year is 9,500,000,000,000 km; and Proxima Centauri (the nearest star) is about 4 of those away, and the Crab nebula is about 4,000 of those from us.

Putting all of that into scale is kind of difficult. Making the Sun as big as a basketball, gives you a barely-visible Earth about 30m away, Jupiter a squash (or golf) ball about 150m away, and pluto an infinitesimal speck over a kilometer out. A light-day from the basketball sun would be a circle 9km across, and if you put the basketball sun in the middle of the US, the next basketball would be in Greenland, northwest Alaska, or Brasil. If you put it in my home town (Perth, Western Australia), you'd be looking at the next basketball in South Africa, southern Russia, or the middle of the Pacific. And the Crab nebula twenty times as far away as the Moon.

The fastest manned spacecraft has travelled at ~40,000km/h, so it would take about 100,000 years (a thousand lifetimes, two and a half thousand generations) to get to the nearest star and 100,000,000 years to get to the Crab. I imagine that even the spectacular views as you approached would somewhat lose their appeal after a few generations.

Or why not do the same with evolution? So why do you answer a question with a question? By doing so you dodge the question of why not prove something before believing in it. Because if you do it backwards you will end up believing whatever you cultural heritage suggests.

As far as your question goes - Ues starting by questioning evolution or old earth assumptiong is recommended. And yes, there is a preponderance of evidence to support evolution and old earth. Again, as in angular unconformities, I prefer the simple examples as evidence versus detailed technical arguements. For example, any physical geologic separation of life forms such as a continent, island or mountain range are attendent with variations of life forms and formation of related species. Look at Madagascar, Australia, Gelapagos islands, or Sierra Nevada mountains. Predicted and actually required by evolution but not predicted or even suggested by creationism.

Doctor Hovind has not made _any_ contributions to science or geology. He has no formation training in science. If Hovind has been dishonest in his credentials, question everything he has to say. Beware of the individual who is "dishonest for god".

Unconformities do not typically involve bending of rock. Which makes it more difficult to deal with on a short time frame. Many unconformities, such as ones at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, do not have significant bending - so to have them tilted as "soft muds" with no distortions would be improbable if not impossible. To have large sections of the earth move in parallel requires lithification or solidification before tilting and uplift and erosion. A few nice examples:

Example 1 Example 2 Example 3 Example 4

BTW bending of solid rock is not difficult at high hydrostatic pressures and temperatures.

Again, I haven't read a lot of actual science studies on geology I don't think you necessarily need to. You need a little scepticism, discernment and common sense to appreciate angular unconformities and other geological structures. For example, in this photo photo which deposition layer represents the flood. These are gravel layers separted by lava flows. Presumptions are not required to understand the earth is old and tortured.

BTW you last arguemenst sounds a lot like relativism. Truth does not care about your relative view point.

One large, overlooked factor in global warming: tropical forest fires

carbon dioxide (CO2) released was "equivalent to 13 to 40 percent of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and contributed greatly to the largest annual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration detected since records began in 1957."

Tropical forest fires worrisome

"The one thing we've learned is that fires are more important ... than we thought to the amount of greenhouse gases," staff scientist G. James Collatz of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told United Press International. If so, this factor raises important questions about future trends in climate change and in the role of the tropics, either as a sink or a source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, he said.

Are Wildland Fires Fueling the Greenhouse?

Wildland fires are taking tons of carbon out of storage and feeding it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas.

We over here in good old Europe knew that climate change was "manmade" for about some decades. really, in the begining of the 90ties I heard the disscusion about climate change on TV.
Wow! The climate never changes on its own? Quite impotent nature is.

Funny, this is posted as some "breaking news" here, because in Europe it is a "consensus".

That still doesn't make you correct.

Oh, and it is really tragic, that in the US of A, which is with 25% by far the worlds biggest "producer" of CO2, the climate change is seen as a myth.

The worlds biggest "producer" of CO2? I suppose there are no natural CO2 emitters in the world. Here's just a few to ponder:

http://www.canada.com/national/features/fires/stor y.html?id=e91e44d4-2462-49f2-b03a-6c211cd1c50a

http://www.cfl.scf.rncan.gc.ca/ecosys/disturb/fire _e.asphttp://www.cfl.scf.rncan.gc.ca/ecosys/distur b/fire_e.asp>

http://www.ucar.edu/communications/newsreleases/20 02/cocarbon.html

BTW, the climate is constantly changing and probably always will.

Thanks for killing the planet, enjoy your SUV - as long as it is still possible. Thanks for killing the planet, enjoy your SUV - as long as it is still possible.

Ahh, yes. Just some more of the obligatory US bashing. Somehow, I really doubt that you are any friend of the US or the Americas especially since you can't seem to separate the two. Hint: the USA is part of North America. Canada is also a part of North America. Then you have all the central and South American countries who probably don't like getting lumped in with the USA. All of us (note the lower case letters) are Americans.

I saw a speech recently from the director of NCAR, Tim Killeen. NCAR does advanced climate change modelling. According to his speech, they know pretty much every factor now that has a relevant effect on global climate; their only limitation that they are aware of is processing power and data storage. As such, their computing requirements are growing notably faster than Moore's law.

Their current power bill is 40,000$/mo. At their new facility (you can see a design of it in this document), it will be far more. Most of the building will be for computers and associated equipment; the building is being largely designed for dissipating all of the heat. I recall he said it was to consume about 3 MW, so at 0.8 cents/kWh, that would be about 175k$/mo.

As an aside, it was a really fascinating presentation. They showed *their* model of Katrina (which was presented to the White House as an "experimental product"); it was spot on. Very impressive stuff indeed. At one point I asked him about proposed methods to induce global cooling such as dumping iron into iron-deficient waters. He stated that while he hadn't modelled that, their models already take into account natural mineral influxes and their effects on bacteria populations (and thus, the effects of those bacteria on the environment), so they could model that if they needed to. He also pointed me to some newer Vostok core data :)

http://www.rap.ucar.edu/staff/tres/elements.html

This was already answered in the article. (Dumbass.)

Is this an understatement? Last time I looked, gravity is THE weakest fundamental force.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/kids_space/ forces.html

>does the ice cap really reflect that much energy?

51% sun's energy absorbed, 4% reflected, the rest interacts with the atmosphere.
Snow and ice can reflect between 80-90% of incident solar energy.
So it seems that melting all the ice on earth cannot have more than a 4% increase in absorpation, and the corresponding rise of .1-5 degrees, someone with a thermo book can provide a better answer, and this doesn't include the increase caused by the greenhouse gases water and co2.

I hate to Slashdot them, but there are some really good collections of radar and other products here and here

But METAR is not very accessible to developers... just three or four years ago I spent a good deal of time trying to find information on how to break down the METAR codes into something meaningful.

You must have not looked very hard. UCAR has had Perl-based decoders for a lot longer than that.

I found very few resources on METAR format.

You only need one resource:

FMH-1

- Tony

If I want radar, http://wunderground.com/ has nexrad which blows everything else away (storm tracking, angle adjustments, configurable maps)

I haven't found anything (at least as far as radar and other animated maps go) that was more useful and comprehensive than this one: http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/

See here for a atmospheric temperature profile for Mars. It can get close to 350K at high altitudes. You also get a lot of monatomic oxygen at the upper part of the atmosphere.

Silicon is very common on earth, 27.7%. The issue is that a lot of processing is required to get it. IIRC, the amount of energy needed to make a solar cell is in the same order as the amount that it absorbs from the sun. It might be different from cells used on satellites, without the filtering of Earth's atmosphere. Then there's the issue that silicon processing uses a lot of water and also some nasty chemicals, etchants and so on.

NCAR press release: New Analysis Reproduces Graph of Late 20th Century Temperature Rise.

Excerpt: Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.

I'm hoping you will take them up on the offer, and try out their code for yourself.

Then lets build a space ship that can orbit Venus? Would we learn more that way than just using telescopes?

Build an orbiter ?, thats a good idea maybe NASA should try that. And they could use radar to map the surface too.

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu/jsp/index.jsp

"GeoVISTA Studio is an open software development environment designed for geospatial data. Studio is a programming-free environment that allows users to quickly build applications for geocomputation and geographic visualization"

http://www.mancke-software.de/wmsClient/

"This is the Home of a Client vor viewing Maps from an WMS (Web Map Server). "

http://www.mindswap.org/2003/PhotoStuff/

"PhotoStuff - An Image Annotation Tool for the Semantic Web"

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idv/in dex.html

"The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) from Unidata is a Java(TM)-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data. The IDV brings together the ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data, surface observations, balloon soundings, NWS WSR-88D Level II and Level III RADAR data, and NOAA National Profiler Network data, all within a unified interface."

http://opensourcegis.org/

"This effort represents an attempt to build a complete index of Open Source / Free GIS related software projects. The effort has some way to go, especially for projects in languages other than English. The definition of GIS has been kept loose to encompass a broad range of projects which deal with spatial data."

Sometimes, too many links can obfuscate important content instead of helping to direct interested parties to it.

It'd be great if NASA (or someone higher up on the food chain) had the cojones to put an orion drive on a probe.

You mean like Deep Space 1 [nasa.gov]? It sounds like you have a good proposal for a mission. Personally, I think particle and fields science is pretty dull.

No, no, NO! He meains Orion Drive, not Ion Drive. The Orion Drive was thought up in the 50s, when other great ideas, like the Flying Crowbar were being developed. Compare detonating nuclear bomblets as a propulsive force (Orion Drive) with accelerating a harmless, inert gas through an electric field (Ion Drive). Which would you prefer malfunctioning catastrophically?

It may be sad that we live in a world where nuclear weapons research is driving the computing power, but it doesn't mean that the power of BlueGene/L isn't going to be used for thousands of other peaceful scientific applications, too.

"That's because traditionally, with a few notable exceptions, client-side Java apps suck. They're clunky, slow, and they look like arse."

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Guess I better stop downloading F/OSS software like these.

http://argouml.tigris.org/files/documents/4/0/argo uml-0.16.1/jws/argouml-en.jnlp

http://www.johnmunsch.com/projects/HotSheet/HotShe et.jnlp

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idv/we bstart/IDV/idv.jnlp

http://www.crosswire.org/bibledesktop/stable/bible desktop.jnlp

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu/autobuild/gvstud io-full.jnlp

http://molo.concord.org/software/

[There's a LOT of java software out there]
http://community.java.net/projects/alpha.csp?only= hosted

And the fun thing is that on SuSE, Java Web Start is already set up. Click on the JNLP links and it'll automatically download, and set up (Warning some are large downloads).

"A statement that summarizes the results observed in an experiment that is repeated many times by many different scientists. A scientific law is widely accepted as true or as a fact." -- Source

"A general principle or rule that is assumed or that has been proven to hold between expressions." -- Source

This can't be a law. It's been proven wrong, and unless I'm mistaken, it was never proven to be correct in the first place.

Why use the word law, then? Is it a misuse of the word? Generalizing? An attempt to confuse stupid Slashdotters like me? :)

The standard atmosphere surface pressure on earth is 1013.23 millibars (mb), or 29.92 inches of mercury.

A record High Pressure in Siberia made it up to 1083.8 mb/32.01 inches, and a Pacific Typhoon had a record low pressure of 879 mb/25.69 inches of mercury.

So, compared to Earth by altitude (approximately):
5,000 feet - 850 mb, 1 mile high 10,000 ft - 700 mb, 2 miles Oxygen required for unpressurized aircraft 18,000 ft - 500 mb (half the atmosphere is above/below this level), 3 miles 30,000 ft - 300 mb (70% of atmosphere is below), 6 miles high, entering the Stratosphere Dead Zone: Fatal without 100% oxygen source 53,000 ft - 100 mb (90% below, 10 miles, Stratosphere Fatal without Pressure suit: Blood pressure exceedes environment pressure, so oxygen is not absorbed Blood starts to outgas (boil) causing the Bends 68,000 ft - 50 mb (95%) 13 miles 102,000 ft - 10 mb (99%) 20 miles 104,000 ft - 9 mb High pressure on Mars 110,000 ft - 7 mb Average Mars pressure, 24 miles aloft on Earth 120,000 ft - 5 mb (99.5%) Higher terrain Mars pressure 157,000 ft - 1 mb (99.9%) Mars mountain tops, 30 miles on Earth Oh, yes - Earth has 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and all that. Water vapor can be up to 4% or so on hot, humid days.

In other words, Mars Tourists will need to pack much more than a towel and sunscreen.