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Such optimism!

Ultimately, perhaps even within the next few centuries,

We may not have a few centuries. If we continue our current 2.3% energy growth per year, then in a bit above 400 years the earth's surface temperature will reach the boiling point. Something has to give long before that, and that may put a wrench in our space dreams.

we're going to see a situation where the abundant resources in our solar system are harvested and processed by mostly automated engines,

It's far from clear that the EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) of space resources is ever going to be greater than 1. Even for ores where the EROEI is less relevant, the energy cost still has to be compared to that of earth-based mining solutions and it's unlikely to be competitive. It looks like we will at most be able to capture a select few light asteroids (those coming close to the earth with just the right speed), but that won't provide abundant resources to everyone on earth. Note that even having a StarTram on one side won't help for the return trip.

*You* should think before you reply.
Your comment is so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.
Really, please take the time to read this blog post :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Sorry to burst your bubble!

"Post-scarcity society" ???
What a load of bullshit.
Have you ever heard of peak-oil? Do you realise 80% of our energy demand is covered by fossil fuels? Have you heard of global warming?

Do yourself a favor, and go read this :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

More in-depth discussion on why space colonization isn't actually feasible from a different AC: "Why Not Space?" from Do The Math blog and "The High Frontier, Redux" by Charlie Stross (he also has other blog articles on that).

Okay... so I couldn't visualize a huge phyto-plankton bloom and TFA was no help. Here's something.

http://spiff.ucsd.edu/chaos.gif

I genuinely feared a resurrection of goatse when contemplating clicking this link...

Okay... so I couldn't visualize a huge phyto-plankton bloom and TFA was no help. Here's something.

http://spiff.ucsd.edu/chaos.gif

For the system as a whole, LESS resources are used if you do some skilled labor for someone and trade that labor for solar cells than if you were doing hard labor in your own backyard.

So, for example, you believe Jack Daniels uses less resources per bottle of whiskey than a moonshiner? Unless you have some figures that support your premise, I'm gonna have to call bullshit on that one.

Sure, people USED to do everything on their own lands, but the population has been too high for this to be possible for centuries now.

Not from the midwest, I take it? Or perhaps you are under the misconception that I actually care about anyone other than myself having access to cheap, renewable energy?

If the rest of the world wants to run their cars and equipment on petrol, or natural gas, or unicorn farts is of no consequence to me - while you and the rest of the globe continue hemorrhaging money hand over fist into the coffers of the energy cartels, I'll be laughing all the way to the still.

2. I'm saying that anyone BUT a hillbilly with no education or capital will get more usable energy, faster with solar cells than wasting time with ethanol.

Doesn't matter - point always was and still is renewable DIY energy production. Not that I take issue with solar power, mind you, but until someone comes up with a way to cheaply manufacture them at home, they are non sequitur to the point.

As for "wasting time with ethanol," that's obviously a subjective statement and thus, I don't really give a rat's ass what you think.

3. The thermoelectric effect is useless for energy production of any noticeable quantity. Go take a few math and physics classes. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

You know, that's exactly the kind of narcissistic, self-righteous statement that makes it difficult for me to continue being polite and not tell you to go fuck yourself.

1. That's what I am saying. For the system as a whole, LESS resources are used if you do some skilled labor for someone and trade that labor for solar cells than if you were doing hard labor in your own backyard. Sure, people USED to do everything on their own lands, but the population has been too high for this to be possible for centuries now.

2. I'm saying that anyone BUT a hillbilly with no education or capital will get more usable energy, faster with solar cells than wasting time with ethanol.

3. The thermoelectric effect is useless for energy production of any noticeable quantity. Go take a few math and physics classes. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

hilarious about these blog posts is how they assume that somehow their few hours with a pen, paper and Google has somehow uncovered a huge flaw in a plan that academics

Well, this blogger is actually an associate professor in the physics department at UCSD, and a member of CASS, the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences..

There is a reason they're absent: the numbers don't work.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

People are skeptical about paying more for power precisely because of boondoggles like that. How are we to know if the money is going to scientifically sound solutions or to someone's infeasible pet project, or worse, to their brother in law.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

0% growth is incompatible with our current financial/economic system. That's why it will fail.
As for that economist's viewpoint, read http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/.

id make a cursory assertion that the lock-step rise in cancer rates is probably related somehow to the twin revolving-doors of the EPA and FDA

You woudn't if you'd been alive before the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act like I was. The difference between now and 1969 is incredible, especially around factories.

Back then, when cars didn't have air conditioning, you had to have the windows rolled up when driving past a Monsanto plant because the air literally burned your lungs and made your eyes water. What little vegetation there was anywhere near these plants was brown and sickly. Now drive past a Monsanto plant and you might catch a whiff of bleach at worst, and usually smell nothing at all, and there's now healthy green vegetation.

Before the EPA, rivers and streams were so polluted that they actually caught fire.

This graph (PDF) shows cancer rates between 1930 and 2000. There's a slow rise in lung cancers from 1930 to the late 1940s, when they rose far faster until around 1990 when they started dropping. It makes me suspect radiation is the primary culprit, since above ground atom bomb testing started in the mid '40s and stopped in the 1960s.

Your primary source of chemical carcinogens (you being a desk-bound nerd as opposed to someone working at Monsanto) is probably your automobile. Both the fumes from the gasoline and the exhaust from your tailpipe are highly carcinogenic.

I googled BPE and found no chemical with that name.

.500 Black Powder Express
Bachelor of Physical Education
Ballpark estimate
Banco Popular Español, banking group in Spain
Barclays Private Equity
Bataan Provincial Expressway in the Philippines
Before Present Era - a year numbering system often used in archaeology in which the year 1950 is used as the epoch marker, an alternative to Before Present.
Berliner Parkeisenbahn, a ridable miniature railway near Berlin Wuhlheide station
Bureau of Public Enterprises in Nigeria
Byte pair encoding in computing
Spanish ship Juan Carlos I (L61), initially known as Buque de ProyecciÃn Estratégica

I doubt you were referring to Byte Pair Encoding. The chemical that makes plastic stiff maybe? I can't remember what the stuff is called.

"Unlimited economic growth" is utterly impossible. Fundamentally, as Tom Murphy points out here and here,

a) all activity requires energy, and
b) there are fundamental limits to efficiency, guaranteed by the second law of thermodynamics.

Read the article. Both of these facts together mean that continued growth is impossible. Even the most optimistic scenarios lead to absurd conclusions i.e. the energy needed for continued growth exceeds that available to a civilization which operates at the best possible efficiency, and which uses all conceivable resources within a spherical volume expanding outward at the speed of light.

In other words, all possible efficiency combined with all possible resources are not enough. Period. Growth must come to a stop, at some point.

As soon as I read this I stopped reading.

"However, the study said "unlimited economic growth" is still possible if world governments enact policies and invest in green technologies that help limit the expansion of our ecological footprint."

Firstly, "unlimited economic growth" isn't possible unless we get off this rock (difficult), and even that just opens the timescale up quite a bit. Here is a great (if depressing) discussion prompted by the same book mentioned in the article. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/

Second, the statement turns what seemed an interesting research conclusion into "the sky is falling, but give us enough money and you'll all be fine." It could be that this wording is different than what is in the actual report, but I can't find a link to it.

A focus on increasing the efficiency with which we use our resources is important, but this sounds like an unrealistic promise in order to obtain funding. This close to the wall we should be focused on how to make a transition to the steady state economy more orderly and less disruptive so that we can keep chugging towards the next breakthrough technology that will get us back into growth for a while, and perhaps eventually off earth so that we can delay the inevitable even more. Allocating large amounts of resources to finding that next breakthrough only gets us relatively little time if it succeeds, and it neglects the risk that if we fail we could have a sudden transition to steady state which would cause a great deal more suffering than is necessary.

Better rechargable batteries are not that unlikely. Zinc-air batteries have your large factor, and are only blocked by dendritic formation that happens in the recharge cycle, limiting the number of charge-discharges they can go through. But this is precisely the sort of thing clever chemistry and/or engineering can eventually overcome, and there are a couple of companies out there either working hard on it or (possibly) already in possession of all or part of the solution and actively testing and developing an engineering and manufacturing cycle. A zinc-air battery with no memory effect, mass-producable at modest cost, would solve many problems -- cheap, long range electric cars, storage for intermittent renewable energy sources (PV solar generated by day and delivered by night), laptops that run for 24 hours on a charge and can be recharged for years.

Obviously there is a substantial pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow, so you have people very interested in pursuing it. No guarantees, of course, but it is hardly inconceivable that within the decade somebody will figure out an assembly that gives you the energy density of zinc-air with the necessary number of recharging cycles before the need to rebuild the battery. Lead-acid batteries have the same problem (and tend to work for at most a handful of years before they have to be rebuilt) and their lifetime and reliability has been greatly increased in my lifetime.

With that said, it is still difficult to beat good old gasoline in terms of energy density. 37 kw-hours per gallon, IIRC -- enough energy in a 10 gallon tank to push a car hundreds of miles or run an entire house for a day or more, even paying a hefty penalty in thermodynamic efficiency. What one really wants is a process that takes air and water in on one side and expels octane and oxygen on the other side, using CO_2 extracted from the air. Or fuel-grade oil, "diesel". Plants do the latter already, and people are certainly working on it:

http://spg.ucsd.edu/algae/pdf/Mayfield_UCSD%20biofuels%201-29.pdf

I have a lot of confidence that all of these obstacles will be overcome in a decadal time frame. The wild card is commercial nuclear fusion -- that one is game, set and match, and establishes human civilization for longer than it will take for us to evolve into something other than human. But we can get there without it (and probably will) within the next 30 years regardless. There is plenty of sunlight, huge amounts of unused land, and raw materials in abundance and eventually we'll work out economical generation of energy that doesn't burn relatively scarce and valuable (for other purposes) biomolecules left over from long, long ago.

rgb

My own back off the envelope calculation gives me around 70000 years. Other people got around 500 years.

You will find out that as soon as oil peaks (in the next ten years I would think) it will be extremely hard to implement any alternative technologies.

Have a look at the following article by somebody who is more suited to explain the topic:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

You should read the rest of his site too, also trying to do the math yourself can help.

Don't be fooled by the 150 years until depletion, it is way more interesting to figure out how much net energy society has available.

Space solar is not likely to be a win under realistic assumptions, especially when we could be deploying solar on the ground right now. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

The answer is a solid NO .

1. The spender prepares N tokens, which each contain K hashes of pairs of XOR shares of the spender's identity and a randomly chosen serial number, and uses blinding to send copies to the bank (blinding means the bank cannot see the tokens, but can still sign them).
2. The bank chooses N-1 to be unblinded, to check that the tokens are valid. If any token is invalid, the spender is trying to cheat and appropriate action may be taken (e.g. the spender can be arrested, have his identity blacklisted, etc.). The spender also reveals the XOR shares for each blinded token, which the bank checks for consistency with the hashes and with the spender's identity.
3. The bank signs the remaining blinded token, which can now be spent.

Transaction Protocol

1. The spender gives the merchant a token.
2. The merchant checks the token for a valid signature from the bank.
3. The merchant sends the spender a randomly generated K bit string.
4. For each bit in the string b[i], the sender reveals x[i,b[i]], one of two XOR shares of his identity (the other will be required to compute his identity).
5. The merchant accepts the payment if each of the shares is consistent with the hash

Now, if the spender tries to double-spend, it is almost impossible for the spender to avoid reveal both of the XOR shares in some position i. When the merchants deposit the payments in the bank, the bank checks to see if the serial number has been deposited before; if it has, the bank checks the received shares of the spender identity, and if these differ in any position then the spender cheated and his identity will be revealed (by XORing the shares). If all of the shares are identical, the merchant is trying to cheat by making a double-deposit which will be rejected.

Clearly, this is not a perfect system; it is pretty inefficient (quadratic token sizes in the security parameter and correspondingly heavy storage requirements for the bank), and it does not allow arbitrary-length transaction chains (i.e. tokens can only be used once before the bank must be involved). It does possess the desired property, however: the bank does not know the serial numbers of the currency units that it issues until those units are received, and spender identities are only revealed in cases of double spending. Chaum published quite a bit of work on this; it is worth the time to read if you are interested in secure electronic payments.

Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have.

There's an interesting post on Do the Math on the topic of energy storage, including flyweels. They seem to be workable but not necessarily the most economic approach.

Sorry, the quote I was referring to:

"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
  - Hans Oeschger in Environ Sci. & Pollut. Res. 2 (1) 1995, pp. 60-61.

Why not? I don't see that the physics don't fit.

Well, back of the napkin, if you take all the UHI, and all the CO2 humans have ever emitted, and compare it to all the CO2 that is naturally emitted, and any sort of baseline temperature from when humans didn't exist, we're a speck - a fraction of a fraction. Models which take that fraction of a fraction, and amplify it with speculative feedback effects fail to address the problem of "why didn't this amplification happen before during natural variation?"

We simply don't have enough human based joules to push the globe into a tipping point, *assuming* that these tipping points exist.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

"Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?"

Solar energy levels are *so* much greater than our energy use it's difficult to compare them.

Anyway, that's the back of the napkin physics :)

Theodor Seuss Geisel was good at condensing something to a caricature of reality, and environmentalism was no exception. Like his World War 2 cartoons, which in the case of the Japanese were unremittingly racist, the Lorax's enemy became unrecognizable. Who, really, needs a "thneed"? This was obvious to me even as a child. I knew that people built houses and published newspapers from forest products. By eliding those things, Seuss managed to condense an entire string of arguments down to one easy-to-digest -- but wholly false -- narrative. For that reason, I have always rated The Lorax as the least of his children's books.

FWIW, this seems to be just the latest in research that has been coming out in the last few years that seem to add to the evidence that autism onset is really early or preterm.

For instance, that this paper that came out in 2005 attempted to more systematically document the early signs of autism by using a longitudinal study which comparing a set of high risk infants (who had an older sibling diagnosed w/ some ASD), with a control set at 6 months, 12 months, and 24 months.

Of course today, autism is defined in terms of behavior. The key is the origin or eitology of autism. Is this odd brain scan an indicator of the origin, or is it something else and this is merely correlated. Nobody knows.

However, we do seem to have strong indication of certain specific chromosomal problems that can lead to autistic behavior: FragileX, Rett Syndrome, and Tuberous Sclerosis. Fragile X and Rett's are X chromosome related. This is suspiciously related to the observation that incidence of ASD are higher in boys and boys only have 1 "X" chromosome. TS is not X related, but can cause calcium deposits to develop in the brain or in some cases tuber-like growths in the brain (as special case, since tuber-like growths occur all over the body w/ this condition).

Because of the accumulated research, many people speculate that there are actually many pathways to autistic behaviour. You might even think of autism as a symptom of many diseases and conditions (like a cough is a symptom of many diseases), so many experts are not optimistic that will be a "cure" for autism, but perhaps in the future there will be a way in some situations to blunt the symptoms early enough to avoid many of the problems in many of the common cases.

Reality is often much more complicated that the headlines.

I am not an astronomer but here is some info based on some basic understanding and our friend Google. Maybe someone else can contribute more.

Short answer:

1) We can see some things on the moon, especially some mirrors we left there, I think we can see the lunar lander too.

2) Just watch this video it rocks. You can match the light from a telescope against the light seen absorbed or emitted from atoms and molecules in the laboratory to tell what is out there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4yg4HTm3uk&feature=related

Long answer:

First of all, we have indeed gone back and taken closeups of the Moon lots of times. You can see the lander. Also, NASA left mirrors called retroreflectors on the moon that reflect light back to you from any angle, and you can bounce a beam of light off them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/04-15MoonLight.asp

Regarding your main question, when light strikes an atom it may be absorbed or reflected. If absorbed, an electron of the atom is boosted into a higher energy state and when that electron drops back down it emits light of a given wavelength that matches the drop in energy of that electron. It works similarly with molecules made of lots of atoms.

If you spread the light you get from the telescope through a prism, you can see the spectrum of the light and it will show lines at wavelengths matching these electron transitions, so you will see lines representing the elements or molecules that are out there.

If you are looking in the microwave part of the spectrum you may see a microwave emission that comes from the vibration and rotation of asymmetric molecules like carbon monoxide.

And there are nebulae out in space that are being irradiated by ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars, which emit their own characteristic wavelengths, these are emission nebulae.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_nebula

So you can do experiments in the lab to see what wavelengths are absorbed and emitted by a given molecule, and try to match that to the wavelengths you see in the telescope.

Anyway, apparently for the buckyball molecules C60 and C70 (that's 60 or 70 carbon atoms in each spherical molecule) there are certain peaks in the spectra seen at energy levels 3.7eV, 4.7eV, and 5.7eV. These actual energy levels are in fact due to physical properties of the molecules, for example the difference between the C60 and C70 spectra has to do with the difference in shapes, one is a soccer ball and the other is a rugby ball.
(Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9401055)

Apparently when they discovered C60 (buckminsterfullerene) in 1991 they were found characteristic emission lines in the infrared part of the spectrum that matched C60 and no other known substance.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0009261491902455

Finally there seems to be a characteristic spectrum you get when these balls start stacking to make ordered arrays like pyramids or what have you. That's what they found. I guess they could see what shape the substance is in the lab with a scanning-tunnelling microscope (hey that's a pyramid) or maybe just theorize what a pyramid of buckyballs should look like, and then they happen to find the same wavelength in a telescope. Maybe the process was just the reverse of what I just described and they finally figured out what that wierd spectrum was.

This page explains a lot about how astronomers can tell what kinds of atoms and molecules are in space:
http://stars.astro.illinois.e

Monckton also believes he has a cure for cancer, aids, graves disease and multiple-sclerosis.

Not sure about aids, graves disease and multiple sclerosis, but I know the cure for cancer - stop eating carbohydrates. Lustig and Gary Taubes do pretty good exposes on the chronic toxicity of carbohydrates. But again, the point is, Monckton is simply a caricature, much like Al Gore, James Hansen or Michael Mann.

If we double every 20 years, then that means we will use more energy in the next 20 years then we have used since the beginning of civilisation. Obviously something is going to break there eventually.

Fair enough, we certainly going to plateau, and if one is really desirous of being pessimistic, you can read this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

That all being said, I suppose one could make the statement that we need to grow our energy faster than our population - which means population controls (anathema to ideas of freedom - see David Wingrove's "Chung Kuo" for an interesting scifi novel based on the premise of unlimited birth rate), or more aggressive exploitation, or a combination of both. We're lucky, of course, that it seems that wealth tends to slow growth rates down, so aggressive exploitation might actually drive natural population control.

The price of energy should reflect its future availability.

NOOOOOO!!!!! That's what Big Oil *wants* you to think! Artificial scarcity is anathema to free markets, and the psychological trick of publishing stats on "proven reserves" in scary ways only distorts the market. The price of energy should reflect supply and demand. Increasing supply will lower prices.

Only took 20 years for the North Atlantic fish populations to tank, and we needed a moratorium on fishing.

Actually, we didn't need a moratorium - the natural economics work themselves out naturally. Once it becomes uneconomical to fish an area, people stop fishing it. Yes, this can be devastating to people who have bet their lives on the idea that they will always be able to economically fish an area, but making those kinds of plans isn't very prudent.

You complain that AGW isn't happening or it isn't a problem. But what you really mean is that you don't want to do anything about it. Hence the attack on the science.

No, I really do mean that AGW isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, or there is nothing we can do about it in terms of *mitigation*. I'm open to adaptation if necessary. My attack on the premise of significant or catastrophic AGW is based on my popperian view of science as falsifiable hypotheses, and comes from an honest conviction. My dislike for big government comes from a completely separate honest conviction regarding the proper place for government based on the works of classic liberals like Bastiat. I'm simply lucky that the two convictions aren't in conflict with each other :)

Just remember what you said and where you stood today, and tell it to your grand-children, when you give them sage advice about politics.

Absolutely. And I hope if our grand-children are living in a Maunder minimum event with historically low temperatures for decades, you'll have the integrity to admit to them you had it figured wrong :)

In the end, I think it's just as rare to find a gun-toting gay republican as it is to find a libertarian AGW believer, or big-government AGW skeptic. One can assert that the big/small government views is what drives the AGW views, but I think that sells people short, and is mostly an artifact of how it has been politicized. I think the problem that you rightfully point out is that often the argument over the science (be it of a

Energy can very easily be stored by pumping water up hill. It doesn't even have to be drinkable water.

Unfortunately pumping up water uphill is far from adequate and far from easy. To sum up, to store just one day of the US energy needs would require 388 reservoirs 250m high, that is higher than Hoover Dam, each with 600MW of production capacity, where the US currently only has 24.

But it's not just pump hydro storage that falls short, all storage options are either hard or impossible.

Energy can very easily be stored by pumping water up hill. It doesn't even have to be drinkable water.

Unfortunately pumping up water uphill is far from adequate and far from easy. To sum up, to store just one day of the US energy needs would require 388 reservoirs 250m high, that is higher than Hoover Dam, each with 600MW of production capacity, where the US currently only has 24.

But it's not just pump hydro storage that falls short, all storage options are either hard or impossible.

Even though I wish you succeeded, it's an impossible Utopia. We do NOT have unlimited resources, especially energetic (for lots of good, sceptical and scientific read about it go to http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/) and if we spread all of the resources used by humanity equally over every living person on this globe, we would meet at the level of living of Bangladesh (I've read an interesting article about it in Polish periodic "Wiedza i ycie").
Of course, we could stop our economy based on artificially increasing demand, but even if it was easy, it would take generations to adjust -- me and You are already raised in a society where everyone wants more and more - so we debt ourselves and fall into a trap. I don't think these connections in our brains can be undone, perhaps there would be a chance for our grandchildren at best.

Yeah right.
Keep ignoring problems and using straw man, it will surely help to solve small technicalities such as global warming or peak oil.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/12/the-future-needs-an-attitude-adjustment/

People often misinterpret my message that “we risk collapse,” believing me to say instead that “we’re going to collapse.” It’s interesting to me that the concept of collapse is taboo to the point of coming across as an offensive slap in the face. It clearly touches an emotional nerve. I think we should try to understand that. Personally, this reaction scares me. It suggests an irrational faith that we cannot collapse. If I did not think the possibility for collapse was real, I might just find this reaction intellectually intriguing. But when the elements for collapse are in place (unprecedented stresses, energy challenges, resource limitations, possible overshoot of carrying capacity), the aversion to this possible fate leaves me wondering how we can mitigate a problem we cannot even look in the eye.

Others react by an over-use of the word “just.” We just need to get fusion working. We’ll just paint Arizona with solar panels. We’ll just switch to electric cars. We just need to go full-on nuclear, preferably with thorium reactors. We just need to exploit the oil shales in the Rocky Mountain states. We just need to get the environmentalists off our backs so we can drill, baby, drill. This is the technofix approach. I am trying to chip away at this on Do the Math: the numbers often don’t pan out, or the challenges are much bigger than people appreciate. I have looked for solutions to things we can just do to alleviate the pressures on the system. With the exception of just reducing how much we personally demand, I have been disappointed again and again. I’ll come back to personal reduction in the months to come: lots to say here.

Another common reaction (that I have had myself) is to get excited about a technology that is not yet demonstrated, but seems awfully promising. Some refer to the effect as “hopium,” and yes, it is addictive. What I have found in myself is that the less I know about something, the more prone I am to the “hopium” effect. This is another part of human nature. I have noticed in my professional life that when multiple people are involved in the diagnosis of a complex problem involving many interacting components/subsystems to which each member has contributed some piece, there is a tendency for each person to cast suspicion on the component they understand the least. Conversely, when looking for a solution, we give a pass to the concepts with fewer known, demonstrated hangups.

But I'm choosing to ignore it all, entirely based on font.
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lgrupp/CV.pdf

It isn't a problem with theoretical physics. It isn't a problem at all. If having post hoc explanations is a problem for a theory then no theory in existence meets your insane standard. The problem is when people aren't aware that an explanation is essentially post hoc (like say certain cosmologists attitude towards dark matter). There are, admittedly somewhat theoretically ugly, approaches to unifying physics that treat GR as sacrosanct and modify quantum mechanics. So no, it isn't obvious at all that general relativity is in disagreement with experiment. It is obvious that either quantum mechanics, or general relativity or both have problems, but it is not clear where those problems lie.

Last time I looked there were plenty of predictions kicking about regarding local changes in temperatures over the next 100 years, so we can put that one to bed (heck you yourself suggest cyclone frequency is a prediction of global warming). Talking about global average temperature as though it is the only thing these models predict strongly suggests to me that you haven't actually read the literature. Weather only matter to plants or animals on a day to day basis. Climate is what matters over the course of a year or so. You tell me it will be a couple of degrees hotter in some region on average I can go calculate what impact that will have on crop yields. So no, climate science predictions are useful.

CO2 lagging temperature changes in the ice core record is a prediction of climate science, not a problem. The end of this paper does a decent enough job explaining why:
http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf

Ocean heat content has been rising, for an explanation see
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf

Whether or not recent trends in global average temperature are wholly consistent with existing models is in dispute. Phil Jones certainly thinks that the existing anomaly is a problem, others disagree. I'm not in a position to comment since I'm not current on that. What I can point out is that suggesting that a dispute about small anomalies in the present data somehow invalidates the entirety of climate science is absurd.

Reductions in cyclone frequency, and increase in intensity, is a prediction not a refutation
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/full/ngeo779.html
Worth keeping in mind that to my knowledge these predictions are still considered a bit questionable, and variability in the cyclone record makes this kind of thing difficult, but I'm not exactly current on that so don't quote me.

The impact of the UHI effect is negligible
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/population/article2abstract.pdf

Finding these things papers took all of five minutes. If you had wanted to know what climatologists actually think you could have done the same. I grant you reading these papers took me a while (although I had read two before so it wasn't that big a deal), but why am I doing this for you? Stop parroting denialists websites, read the damn papers and develop an informed opinion. If you want to come back with objections then I will be all ears but repeating some bullshit a meteorologist, lawyer or an economist told as though it was an informed opinion just makes you look like a prat.

There will never be a Moon base, we will never live on Mars, get over it
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/category/space/

"It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. "

There is so much uneducated FUD about biofuel which only goes to show that the best of intentions among environmentalists and world hunger activists can have adverse environmental and social impacts. If use of corn for ethanol was an issue I would expect the vulnerable third world countries to be crying out for the US to sell them corn, but that isn't the case. The third world is attempting to curb the expansion of US production of corn. See e.g. http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/index.php/2010/04/nafta-and-u-s-corn-subsidies-explaining-the-displacement-of-mexicos-corn-farmers/ http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/truth.pdf

If people want to solve a problem, at least decide what the problem is. What is the greater evil, too much or too little corn?

As a side note, seaweed biofuels may be a better solution to bio-fuels - or it may not. Treating the environment and problems of world hunger as questions with such a simple answer is dangerous.

Unlike you, I own a Volt, so, unlike you, I don't need to lie about the numbers.

It gets 25 (winter) to 46 (mild weather) miles per charge for me. When the battery runs low and the gas engine is powering the car, it delivers 38-40 MPG depending on speed. My lifetime economy (4.75 months, 4350 miles) is 255 MPG. I'd say that's pretty good, considering my Lexus was getting 19 MPG on the same commute.

Apparently you're also not smart enough to do the math, it turns out the Volt is cheaper than the average car.

$45.5k sticker (loaded)
$7.5k tax credit (complain about this and I'll complain about the child deductions I'm funding with my six figure income)
$11k gas savings (5 years, for me)
= $27k gas vehicle equivalent (the average new car sale price in the US is ~$29k )

If you're still not convinced the Volt is a good idea, I suggest you start reading this blog http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

The most interesting case I've seen of subtle differences in prepositions within the English language was when describing what one does when embarking or disembarking. In America, it's not uncommon to say either, "He got off the bus," or, "He got off of the bus," but the latter sounds as odd to someone from the UK as, "He got on of the bus," would sound to someone in America (or so I've been told). This fact came up in one of my graduate research seminars when we were studying a paper entitled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud. The Chinese and Indian students, many of whom had been taught British English in school, thought the usage was incorrect, while all of the American students insisted it was acceptable. As it turned out, it really didn't matter, since the name of the paper being discussed was a reference to a Rolling Stones song, so grammar really didn't apply, but it was a fun discussion, nonetheless.

For future reference, it is indeed considered acceptable in American English, but if you're writing for an international audience, you'd do well to avoid its use.

This from "Do the math" kind of answers your question, although not in Joules but in years :)

There is another reason why earth may become unhabitable due to heat within this timeframe.

According to simple calculations on this blog
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
and assuming we follow our historical 2.9% energy increase per year, earth average ambient temperature will reach 100C in less than 400 years.

Our destiny is in space.

Incorrect. Our destiny, whatever it may be, will be played out here on Earth. If you doubt that then the following two articles from Do the Math, Galactic-Scale Energy and Why Not Space?, should make it clear that any promises of a "destiny in space" are false at best and may even be dangerous if they distract us from solving our pressing problems here on Earth.

Our destiny is in space.

Incorrect. Our destiny, whatever it may be, will be played out here on Earth. If you doubt that then the following two articles from Do the Math, Galactic-Scale Energy and Why Not Space?, should make it clear that any promises of a "destiny in space" are false at best and may even be dangerous if they distract us from solving our pressing problems here on Earth.

Our destiny is in space.

Incorrect. Our destiny, whatever it may be, will be played out here on Earth. If you doubt that then the following two articles from Do the Math, Galactic-Scale Energy and Why Not Space?, should make it clear that any promises of a "destiny in space" are false at best and may even be dangerous if they distract us from solving our pressing problems here on Earth.

If we don't force ourselves down this path, we're never going to get off this rock.

There will probably never be large numbers of people living anywhere but here on Earth. The notion that mankind has a "destiny in space" is a false hope at best and a potentially dangerous distraction if we permit it to interfere with needed steps to preserve our planet for future generations. For those interested in the details, may I suggest the following two articles from Do the Math: Galactic-Scale Energy and Why Not Space?

If we don't force ourselves down this path, we're never going to get off this rock.

There will probably never be large numbers of people living anywhere but here on Earth. The notion that mankind has a "destiny in space" is a false hope at best and a potentially dangerous distraction if we permit it to interfere with needed steps to preserve our planet for future generations. For those interested in the details, may I suggest the following two articles from Do the Math: Galactic-Scale Energy and Why Not Space?

If we don't force ourselves down this path, we're never going to get off this rock.

There will probably never be large numbers of people living anywhere but here on Earth. The notion that mankind has a "destiny in space" is a false hope at best and a potentially dangerous distraction if we permit it to interfere with needed steps to preserve our planet for future generations. For those interested in the details, may I suggest the following two articles from Do the Math: Galactic-Scale Energy and Why Not Space?

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04y.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/the_economics_o.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_9_115/ai_n27050480/?tag=content;col1

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/space-power/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/01/08/january-8-2011/#Voyager+Launches+the+Third+Age+of+Discovery

http://www.economist.com/node/18897425

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

Space Nutters generally also have an overabundance of blind, naive enthusiasm for almost anything vaguely sci-fi sounding, the limitless growth of the human species, that there will even BE a human species 100000 years from now, etc... But mention life extension research and all of a sudden they turn into the most rabid anti-technological, skeptical "don't mess with Nature" types.

We'll never understand biological processes that occur all over the planet and require little energy, but we'll have Martian colonies (entire COLONIES) and all the other space garbage that require stupendous resource-inputs for zero return, no problem.

Oh, and the absolute Bible for Space Nutters:

http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323225862&sr=8-1

The amount of delusion and flat-out denial needed to believe in the claptrap that Space Nutters do makes it a religion to me.

Indeed, sperm cells from the rhesus macaque have been clocked at over 200 um/sec, or 12000 microns/minute, which is 2300 times faster than the 5.2 microns/minute winner in this race.

HDDerase should do. There may be other software that can send the command (it's part of the ATA command set). Remember, if you're using a SATA drive, to set your motherboard controller to 'IDE' or 'compatibility' mode, rather than AHCI.

http://destructdata.com/blog/?page_id=27

DBAN is no longer the most secure method of non-recoverable data destruction short of destroying the drive. According to the linked article, CPR's "Hammer" is the best. The article contains a link to free softwares that operate in the same fashion.

I invite you to read The Energy Trap.
Enjoy the other articles on that blog too.

bjd