I'm not suggesting any solution is silver bullet, but if combined with a pollution tax, our forests could provide a huge, reasonably profitable source of fuel, perhaps not as spectacularly profitable as fossil fuels, but profitable none the less.
Biomass solutions such as the ones I discussed are probably profitable in combination with a carbon tax. As you say, not hugely profitable, but greater than zero.
I'm suggesting wood as a substitute for fossil fuels, not compensation.
I don't understand the distinction you're making between a "substitute" and "compensation".
I'm not arguing that no ones though of this (or something better) before. The real problem is that the ones making the decisions are making them for their own political benefit.
The solutions you've mentioned are commonly discussed and are not being politically suppressed. Sheesh. If it's a solution you "haven't heard anyone propose", you haven't been paying attention.
The point of "artificial trees" is to more or less permanently sequester the CO2 they capture (e.g., in geologic formations). The problem with real trees is that they die and release all their carbon back to the atmosphere after a while, so planting trees is only a temporary solution. Fossil fuel emissions are already overwhelming the natural forest carbon sink anyway: the global land biosphere is only taking up about 1/4 of the fossil CO2 we emit.
But does this plan have as much plausibility as the environmentalists' plan to reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions by 200%? (Logically impossible, but this is what would be needed to reverse global warming
What environmentalists? Oh yes, "the" environmentalists, the convenient punching-bag for all strawman arguments.
If you look at the various environmental advocacy groups out there, they are generally advocating policies which will slow global warming, not reverse it (or not anytime soon, at least). The only ones who advocate a reversal are the geoengineering proponents that this article discusses.
Your claim above is also wrong in two ways: reversing global warming doesn't logically require any emissions reductions (if you geoengineer, but that has plenty of other side effects). And although it's logically impossible to "reduce emissions by 200%", it's logically possible to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere (which would ultimately reverse global warming); it would require establishing carbon sinks that are larger than the carbon sources. Not going to happen anytime soon, but not logically or physically impossible.
Finally, actual economists who study this issue don't agree with your claim that slowing the growth of carbon emissions would cause "enormous sacrifices to our standard of living". See Nordhaus's book A Question of Balance for a good semi-technical overview.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
The net warming the planet will experience over the next century or two, that's what. You don't think that the greenhouse effect is going to vanish if we continue to increase greenhouse gas concentrations, do you? You're not confusing weather and climate, are you?
Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
More sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere causes cooling. Black carbon in the troposphere causes warming. A decrease of sulfate aerosols can also cause warming.
Make sense yet? But hey, don't let scientific facts get in the way of a sarcastic political rant. It's more fun to mock those stupid self-contradicting scientists.
The models aren't "correct". Hardly any model is. The question is, how serious are their deficiencies relative to the predictions being made? The models are reasonably good as far as global temperature is concerned, but they're not yet adequate to make really useful regional predictions, especially of precipitation. The basic greenhouse effect of human CO2 is well established, and it's quite likely that significant climate changes will result from that in the future, but it's hard to be locally specific on what exactly may happen to a given place.
(And, by the way, the linked video is a giant pile of dishonest contrarianism. There are legitimate debates about which things the models can predict, but don't expect to learn about them from that video. Read the scientific literature and the IPCC report. The major uncertainties are in cloud feedbacks, regional precipitation, and ice sheet mechanics.)
Only a few years, judging by what happens when large volcanic eruptions do the same thing. So yes, it's reversible, within a decade or so. That's actually a major problem with the scheme: if we fail to maintain our commitment to continuous geoengineering, it all precipitates out and we get all the climate change we've been suppressing, except concentrated into a decade instead of a century (or however long the system has been active).
... a "single large rocket"? According to your link, you'd need to launch an 800 kg stack of these things every 5 minutes for 10 years (the paper says each unit is 1 gram). A Delta IV heavy has a max payload of 13000 kg (but that's just LEO, not L1!), so maybe you could get by with launching a rocket once an hour... every hour... for 10 years. And then in 40 years you'd have to repeat the whole set of launches again... indefinitely... since L1 isn't stable and the mirrors will wander off and need to be replaced periodically. (Paper here.)
Who said the climate is a chaotic system on centennial time scales? It's mostly a boundary value problem, not an initial value problem. That's why we can predict that summer is hotter than winter even though we can't predict the weather in 6 months: you increase the net radiation flux, it will get hotter on average. You can't predict the microstate of the system (which city has what temperature on what day), but you can predict the average macrostate (the system absorbs more heat). Similarly, there is molecular chaos in a pot of water, but that doesn't mean you can't predict the water gets hotter when you turn the stove on.
Now, if the climate system happens to be balanced near a bistable threshold, then you can get chaotic effects, where internal variability can unpredictably flip the system to one state or the other. It's possible that we could cross some threshold with help from anthropogenic climate change, but it's unlikely to happen by itself soon, considering the relative stability of the Holocene climate.
"Chaos" is right up there with "entropy" and "quantum mechanics" with most misused scientific concepts.
I'm not surprised this hasn't been seriously considered though, both sides in this controversy seam more interested in using it for political leverage than approaching the problem with any sense of logic.
Yeah yeah, you're a genius and everyone else who has ever worked on this problem is an idiot, too politically biased to see the plainly obvious solution that only you have thought of.
These ideas have been seriously considered. They're one policy instrument and can address a fraction of the problem. It's not a silver bullet though. Biomass is not a sufficiently large energy source to meet the world's present energy needs and it's not a large enough carbon sink to completely counteract fossil fuel emissions. (Fossil fuels are the concentrated form of millions of years worth of dead organic matter; if we burn all of them, you're not going to cancel that out with a century's worth of new growth.) But it can contribute to a portfolio of solutions.
If coal burning were to be restricted or coal made more expensive via a carbon price, biomass cofiring (mixing harvested vegetation in with coal at coal-fired power plants) would probably be one of the first alternatives to appear. It hasn't yet because coal is still cheap and plentiful and there are few restrictions on its use, and biomass has a comparatively much lower energy density. (Fossil fuels are just super-concentrated biomass, after all.) If there are disincentives for fossil fuel use, then it will become a more prominent alternative. Like I said, it's a near-term strategy and isn't scalable to eliminate fossil fuel emissions, but it can help some, if you sequester the biomass carbon somewhere so it doesn't return to the atmosphere.
Scientists have called used the term climate change for decades (I found papers going back to at least the 1960s last time I checked, and that's just from what's available online).
The term "global warming" is a relatively recent, which was popularized in the media. It came to real public prominence after Jim Hansen's 1988 testimony to Congress, in which he used the phrase. The media as well as environmental groups embraced the term "global warming". The phrase had been used occasionally by scientists as early as 1975, but it has never been a common substitute for "climate change" in peer reviewed climate journals. In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not "Global Warming") was commissioned.
In 2002, U.S. Republican strategist Frank Luntz wrote a memo to President Bush advocating he revert to the term "climate change", because "while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds like a more controllable and less emotional challenge".
Climate scientists have also traditionally preferred the term "climate change" (and have been using it both before and after "global warming" ever cropped up), since it encompasses all the changes to the climate which may occur and not just global warming.
In an example of having their cake and eating it too, some Republicans, after their party itself advocated the term "climate change", now claim the term was recently invented as some kind of liberal conspiracy to hide the "fact" that the globe warming has stopped.
do not reply with strawman arguements that you attribute to me as if you have some sort of refutation for my actual argument
You don't have an actual argument, you're just attempting guilt-by-association. Whether or not you like the peer review has nothing to do with the validity of the statistics in the paper being discussed. If you want to impugn their statistics, you need to actually discuss said statistics, not just make veiled libelous insinuations about random scientists on the basis of unrelated publications.
An error margin greater than 50%? Presuming that this is based on a typical 3 standard deviations...
Actually, reading the paper, it looks to me that 80 km^3 is just 1 standard deviation. (They say the GRACE errors were calculated as 1-sigma, and the ice volume error is obtained by sum-of-squared GRACE errors, so it too is presumably 1-sigma.) If so, a 95% interval includes the possibility of zero volume change (but barely).
I don't see any statistics experts mentioned in that link, so I gotta assume that we cannot expect a normally distributed error, that in fact they have no idea what the distribution might be.
Ah, the old "I don't like Mike Mann, therefore nobody in the world except a professional statistician knows what a normal distribution is" argument. Very compelling.
Anyway, if you want to know about the distribution of the errors, read this. They find that the aggregate residuals are normal, but the RMS errors — after standardizing against the spatial and time dependence of the residuals — are non-normal. They discuss the consequences of making a normal approximation. The normal approximation is what they used in the above Science paper.
Falling into a black hole does not allow you to see the end of the universe. (The FAQ I linked to discusses one case in which a perfectly symmetric, rotating vacuum black hole does experience infinite blueshift, but the existence of matter or quantum gravity effects very likely destroy that property of the black hole.)
The previous poster is right; there is no local experiment you can perform at the horizon to determine whether you're at the horizon. You can see a lot of radiation if you hover at the horizon, but that's because you're expending energy to hover. Polar X-ray jets have nothing to do with the horizon, "quantum foam", Hawking radiation, or black hole entropy: they're due to matter and magnetic fields outside of the black hole.
It's hard to define "radius" in a Schwarzschild spacetime. Outside and up to the event horizon, the radial coordinate is defined indirectly by the surface area of a sphere, which is sqrt(area/4pi) and is finite. (The circumference is also finite.) However, the proper distance between points at two different radii is not equal to the difference of their radial coordinates.
Inside a black hole, you can't even define a radius this way, because spacetime inside the horizon is no longer static, and there's no unique geometric way to separate time and space to define what a "spherical spatial surface" means.
From the point of view of an infalling observer, they hit the singularity rather quickly. There is an exercise in Wald's textbook which shows that the maximum amount of time which can elapse before hitting the singularity is experienced by a freely falling observer, and (IIRC) is equal to pi*G*M/c^3 where M is the mass of the hole (G is the gravitational constant and c is the speed of light). That works out to be about 15 microseconds per solar mass. And that's the longest time you can experience. If you try to accelerate "away", you actually hit the singularity faster, according to your own proper time, due to time dilation effects.
Ord's work does not address the "notoriously conflicting relativity and quantum mechanical models of spacetime". The notorious conflict here is between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Ord's work only addresses the relationship between special relativity and quantum mechanics. (Unless he has newer work of which I am unaware.) Specifically, he shows you can use fractal geometry to derive Dirac's equation for a relativistic free electron in Minkowski spacetime. (Or at least, in 2D spacetime; I don't know if he ever generalized it to 4D.)
Well, Dirac wrote down his equation for a relativistic quantum electron back in the 1920s. SR and QM are already known to be compatible. Ord just showed you can reproduce Dirac's equation using a different formalism, with some classical physics coupled to a fractal spacetime. (Presumably; I haven't actually read his papers to evaluate how his theory works.)
The real question is how to reconcile QM with a spacetime that is (a) macroscopically curved and (b) whose curvature depends dynamically on the matter content of the theory. Perhaps fractal geometry may ultimately have insights into that question, but right now it hasn't addressed it.
Your logic is bizarre. Whether or not other bodies in the solar system are warming or cooling has nothing to do with the evidence that CO2 on Earth is contributing to warming here. It's like saying, "Hey, these forests burned down due to lightning, therefore this other forest here with the matches and the campfire didn't burn down due to humans".
And "every other body in the solar system"? Why don't you ever hear about warming trends on Mercury or Venus? Or the Moon? Or Saturn? Maybe because people who like to rant about "the radical policies of the global warm-mongers" like to pick out the planets which have experienced warming at some point, and ignore the others?
The insinuation that all planets in the solar system are experiencing warming due to some common cause falls apart when you actually look at those planets and what is affecting the climate there, which have little in common. e.g., dust storms at the south pole of Mars, shifts in convection patterns on Jupiter, summer on Pluto, etc.
I know people are puzzled by it, but once again, the Pioneer anomaly does not prove that "we don't understand gravity". We don't understand the Pioneer anomaly. Whether it has to do with gravity is another question.
That doesn't mean we don't understand gravity. Your own link gives a long list of possible explanations of the Pioneer anomaly other than gravitational anomalies. It just means we don't know what it is we don't understand — maybe gravity, maybe something even more exotic, maybe something mundane.
The re-radiated IR is in a much wider wavelength distribution, only a very tiny portion of which can be re-absorbed by CO2.
Yes, IR is radiated over a wide distribution. The same is true of radiation from the Earth's surface. That doesn't prevent a non-negligible portion from being absorbed by CO2 as it radiates upward.
The world may have been warming up until 2007 but it was obviously not due to rising carbon dioxide levels.
A non sequitur. As I noted in my first response, the models do have an approximately logarithmic forcing-concentration relationship, and they do predict an unamplified 1.2 C warming to 2xCO2. Citing these facts as if they somehow contradict model predictions of CO2-induced warming is completely bizarre. If you want to make an argument that models overpredict CO2-induced warming, you can't do it by agreeing with their quantification of radiative transfer. Try again.
NAt CURRENT production rates, there are an estimated 133 years of coal reserves remaining.
There is certainly more than "133 years" worth of coal remaining. A proven reserve is not "the amount of exploitable fuel in the ground". OPEC roughly doubled their "proven reserves" of oil overnight in the 1980s merely by changing their extraction policies. Did twice as much oil magically appear under their soil? No. A "proven reserve" is something that is economically likely to be extracted under today's demand, under today's market regulations, and with today's technology.
(Note also that the amount of time before we run out of coal isn't even the right figure if you're talking about 2100 CO2 concentrations . If production rates increase and we run out sooner, then that just increases the amount of CO2 that gets burned by 2100, since you're running through the same supply only faster.)
Personally, I'm "optimistic" that the coal supply will end up limiting us to 2x preindustrial CO2 this century, absent uncertain carbon cycle feedbacks (which could add a couple hundred ppm). (Optimistic as far as the climate is concerned; of course, from a broader perspective it's not good to run out of a cheap energy source.) But there's certainly enough coal there for more, and whether we end up extracting more depends on how quickly the world (not just the U.S.) can universally transition to non-fossil energy sources. I'm not so optimistic about that.
The basic chemistry of coal means that 'Coal liquifaction' is never going to be a commercial source of internal combustion fuel. That has only been done in a time of war and desperation, produced a very low quality fuel, and was abandoned as soon as possible.
As I said, it depends on whether it's economical; otherwise, electric vehicles will be the alternative. Whether it's economical in turn depends on how desperate we are for liquid fuel when petroleum starts to run out. And by "we", I mean the world, not just the U.S.
Most new electricity generation is coming from natural gas turbines, hydroelectric , and wind power.
Tell that to China, who has been building more than one new coal plant per week. That will probably run its course over the next few decades, but other developing countries are lining up to do the same. Coal is cheap and although its price will increase, it's likely to remain the cheapest electricity generation alternative for quite some time to come. Excluding emissions regulations, the marginal cost of building a new coal plant is lower than other technologies of equivalent capacity, excepting hydro which is already mostly tapped out. Coal isn't being ramped up in the U.S. for power generation because they're afraid of getting hit with an emissions cap or carbon taxes over the lifetime of a new plant (which they probably will be), not because other technologies are so much cheaper in comparison. When I talk about "business-as-usual" emissions scenarios, I'm r
Slashdot Mirror
This book.
I'm not suggesting any solution is silver bullet, but if combined with a pollution tax, our forests could provide a huge, reasonably profitable source of fuel, perhaps not as spectacularly profitable as fossil fuels, but profitable none the less.
Biomass solutions such as the ones I discussed are probably profitable in combination with a carbon tax. As you say, not hugely profitable, but greater than zero.
I'm suggesting wood as a substitute for fossil fuels, not compensation.
I don't understand the distinction you're making between a "substitute" and "compensation".
I'm not arguing that no ones though of this (or something better) before. The real problem is that the ones making the decisions are making them for their own political benefit.
The solutions you've mentioned are commonly discussed and are not being politically suppressed. Sheesh. If it's a solution you "haven't heard anyone propose", you haven't been paying attention.
The point of "artificial trees" is to more or less permanently sequester the CO2 they capture (e.g., in geologic formations). The problem with real trees is that they die and release all their carbon back to the atmosphere after a while, so planting trees is only a temporary solution. Fossil fuel emissions are already overwhelming the natural forest carbon sink anyway: the global land biosphere is only taking up about 1/4 of the fossil CO2 we emit.
But does this plan have as much plausibility as the environmentalists' plan to reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions by 200%? (Logically impossible, but this is what would be needed to reverse global warming
What environmentalists? Oh yes, "the" environmentalists, the convenient punching-bag for all strawman arguments.
If you look at the various environmental advocacy groups out there, they are generally advocating policies which will slow global warming, not reverse it (or not anytime soon, at least). The only ones who advocate a reversal are the geoengineering proponents that this article discusses.
Your claim above is also wrong in two ways: reversing global warming doesn't logically require any emissions reductions (if you geoengineer, but that has plenty of other side effects). And although it's logically impossible to "reduce emissions by 200%", it's logically possible to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere (which would ultimately reverse global warming); it would require establishing carbon sinks that are larger than the carbon sources. Not going to happen anytime soon, but not
logically or physically impossible.
Finally, actual economists who study this issue don't agree with your claim that slowing the growth of carbon emissions would cause "enormous sacrifices to our standard of living". See Nordhaus's book A Question of Balance for a good semi-technical overview.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
The net warming the planet will experience over the next century or two, that's what. You don't think that the greenhouse effect is going to vanish if we continue to increase greenhouse gas concentrations, do you? You're not confusing weather and climate, are you?
Supposedly pollutants in the air increased the global temperature but now we want to inject more of them into the air to decrease global temperature? How does that make sense?
More sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere causes cooling. Black carbon in the troposphere causes warming. A decrease of sulfate aerosols can also cause warming.
Make sense yet? But hey, don't let scientific facts get in the way of a sarcastic political rant. It's more fun to mock those stupid self-contradicting scientists.
The models aren't "correct". Hardly any model is. The question is, how serious are their deficiencies relative to the predictions being made? The models are reasonably good as far as global temperature is concerned, but they're not yet adequate to make really useful regional predictions, especially of precipitation. The basic greenhouse effect of human CO2 is well established, and it's quite likely that significant climate changes will result from that in the future, but it's hard to be locally specific on what exactly may happen to a given place.
(And, by the way, the linked video is a giant pile of dishonest contrarianism. There are legitimate debates about which things the models can predict, but don't expect to learn about them from that video. Read the scientific literature and the IPCC report. The major uncertainties are in cloud feedbacks, regional precipitation, and ice sheet mechanics.)
Only a few years, judging by what happens when large volcanic eruptions do the same thing. So yes, it's reversible, within a decade or so. That's actually a major problem with the scheme: if we fail to maintain our commitment to continuous geoengineering, it all precipitates out and we get all the climate change we've been suppressing, except concentrated into a decade instead of a century (or however long the system has been active).
... a "single large rocket"? According to your link, you'd need to launch an 800 kg stack of these things every 5 minutes for 10 years (the paper says each unit is 1 gram). A Delta IV heavy has a max payload of 13000 kg (but that's just LEO, not L1!), so maybe you could get by with launching a rocket once an hour ... every hour ... for 10 years. And then in 40 years you'd have to repeat the whole set of launches again ... indefinitely ... since L1 isn't stable and the mirrors will wander off and need to be replaced periodically. (Paper here.)
Who said the climate is a chaotic system on centennial time scales? It's mostly a boundary value problem, not an initial value problem. That's why we can predict that summer is hotter than winter even though we can't predict the weather in 6 months: you increase the net radiation flux, it will get hotter on average. You can't predict the microstate of the system (which city has what temperature on what day), but you can predict the average macrostate (the system absorbs more heat). Similarly, there is molecular chaos in a pot of water, but that doesn't mean you can't predict the water gets hotter when you turn the stove on.
Now, if the climate system happens to be balanced near a bistable threshold, then you can get chaotic effects, where internal variability can unpredictably flip the system to one state or the other. It's possible that we could cross some threshold with help from anthropogenic climate change, but it's unlikely to happen by itself soon, considering the relative stability of the Holocene climate.
"Chaos" is right up there with "entropy" and "quantum mechanics" with most misused scientific concepts.
I'm not surprised this hasn't been seriously considered though, both sides in this controversy seam more interested in using it for political leverage than approaching the problem with any sense of logic.
Yeah yeah, you're a genius and everyone else who has ever worked on this problem is an idiot, too politically biased to see the plainly obvious solution that only you have thought of.
These ideas have been seriously considered. They're one policy instrument and can address a fraction of the problem. It's not a silver bullet though. Biomass is not a sufficiently large energy source to meet the world's present energy needs and it's not a large enough carbon sink to completely counteract fossil fuel emissions. (Fossil fuels are the concentrated form of millions of years worth of dead organic matter; if we burn all of them, you're not going to cancel that out with a century's worth of new growth.) But it can contribute to a portfolio of solutions.
If coal burning were to be restricted or coal made more expensive via a carbon price, biomass cofiring (mixing harvested vegetation in with coal at coal-fired power plants) would probably be one of the first alternatives to appear. It hasn't yet because coal is still cheap and plentiful and there are few restrictions on its use, and biomass has a comparatively much lower energy density. (Fossil fuels are just super-concentrated biomass, after all.) If there are disincentives for fossil fuel use, then it will become a more prominent alternative. Like I said, it's a near-term strategy and isn't scalable to eliminate fossil fuel emissions, but it can help some, if you sequester the biomass carbon somewhere so it doesn't return to the atmosphere.
See here, here, here.
Ok, so apparently you were too dumb to figure out why the second link didn't contradict the first. You had to have it spelled out for you.
You totally didn't pay any attention to what he said, did you?
Hint: your second link does not contradict your first link. Can you guess why?
The President's budget basically goes and gathers up all these CO2 taxes and then spends it on health care.
No. About 75-80% of the revenues go to the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, and the remainder go to non-carbon energy and technology initiatives.
Yes, the ice shelf can be rebuilt on glacial time scales (e.g., in the next ice age).
As for the climate impact of ozone loss, your own Wikipedia link has a decent summary: the net affect appears to be slight surface cooling.
Scientists have called used the term climate change for decades (I found papers going back to at least the 1960s last time I checked, and that's just from what's available online).
The term "global warming" is a relatively recent, which was popularized in the media. It came to real public prominence after Jim Hansen's 1988 testimony to Congress, in which he used the phrase. The media as well as environmental groups embraced the term "global warming". The phrase had been used occasionally by scientists as early as 1975, but it has never been a common substitute for "climate change" in peer reviewed climate journals. In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not "Global Warming") was commissioned.
In 2002, U.S. Republican strategist Frank Luntz wrote a memo to President Bush advocating he revert to the term "climate change", because "while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds like a more controllable and less emotional challenge".
Climate scientists have also traditionally preferred the term "climate change" (and have been using it both before and after "global warming" ever cropped up), since it encompasses all the changes to the climate which may occur and not just global warming.
In an example of having their cake and eating it too, some Republicans, after their party itself advocated the term "climate change", now claim the term was recently invented as some kind of liberal conspiracy to hide the "fact" that the globe warming has stopped.
do not reply with strawman arguements that you attribute to me as if you have some sort of refutation for my actual argument
You don't have an actual argument, you're just attempting guilt-by-association. Whether or not you like the peer review has nothing to do with the validity of the statistics in the paper being discussed. If you want to impugn their statistics, you need to actually discuss said statistics, not just make veiled libelous insinuations about random scientists on the basis of unrelated publications.
An error margin greater than 50%? Presuming that this is based on a typical 3 standard deviations...
Actually, reading the paper, it looks to me that 80 km^3 is just 1 standard deviation. (They say the GRACE errors were calculated as 1-sigma, and the ice volume error is obtained by sum-of-squared GRACE errors, so it too is presumably 1-sigma.) If so, a 95% interval includes the possibility of zero volume change (but barely).
I don't see any statistics experts mentioned in that link, so I gotta assume that we cannot expect a normally distributed error, that in fact they have no idea what the distribution might be.
Ah, the old "I don't like Mike Mann, therefore nobody in the world except a professional statistician knows what a normal distribution is" argument. Very compelling.
Anyway, if you want to know about the distribution of the errors, read this. They find that the aggregate residuals are normal, but the RMS errors — after standardizing against the spatial and time dependence of the residuals — are non-normal. They discuss the consequences of making a normal approximation. The normal approximation is what they used in the above Science paper.
Falling into a black hole does not allow you to see the end of the universe. (The FAQ I linked to discusses one case in which a perfectly symmetric, rotating vacuum black hole does experience infinite blueshift, but the existence of matter or quantum gravity effects very likely destroy that property of the black hole.)
The previous poster is right; there is no local experiment you can perform at the horizon to determine whether you're at the horizon. You can see a lot of radiation if you hover at the horizon, but that's because you're expending energy to hover. Polar X-ray jets have nothing to do with the horizon, "quantum foam", Hawking radiation, or black hole entropy: they're due to matter and magnetic fields outside of the black hole.
It's hard to define "radius" in a Schwarzschild spacetime. Outside and up to the event horizon, the radial coordinate is defined indirectly by the surface area of a sphere, which is sqrt(area/4pi) and is finite. (The circumference is also finite.) However, the proper distance between points at two different radii is not equal to the difference of their radial coordinates.
Inside a black hole, you can't even define a radius this way, because spacetime inside the horizon is no longer static, and there's no unique geometric way to separate time and space to define what a "spherical spatial surface" means.
From the point of view of an infalling observer, they hit the singularity rather quickly. There is an exercise in Wald's textbook which shows that the maximum amount of time which can elapse before hitting the singularity is experienced by a freely falling observer, and (IIRC) is equal to pi*G*M/c^3 where M is the mass of the hole (G is the gravitational constant and c is the speed of light). That works out to be about 15 microseconds per solar mass. And that's the longest time you can experience. If you try to accelerate "away", you actually hit the singularity faster, according to your own proper time, due to time dilation effects.
Ord's work does not address the "notoriously conflicting relativity and quantum mechanical models of spacetime". The notorious conflict here is between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Ord's work only addresses the relationship between special relativity and quantum mechanics. (Unless he has newer work of which I am unaware.) Specifically, he shows you can use fractal geometry to derive Dirac's equation for a relativistic free electron in Minkowski spacetime. (Or at least, in 2D spacetime; I don't know if he ever generalized it to 4D.)
Well, Dirac wrote down his equation for a relativistic quantum electron back in the 1920s. SR and QM are already known to be compatible. Ord just showed you can reproduce Dirac's equation using a different formalism, with some classical physics coupled to a fractal spacetime. (Presumably; I haven't actually read his papers to evaluate how his theory works.)
The real question is how to reconcile QM with a spacetime that is (a) macroscopically curved and (b) whose curvature depends dynamically on the matter content of the theory. Perhaps fractal geometry may ultimately have insights into that question, but right now it hasn't addressed it.
Your logic is bizarre. Whether or not other bodies in the solar system are warming or cooling has nothing to do with the evidence that CO2 on Earth is contributing to warming here. It's like saying, "Hey, these forests burned down due to lightning, therefore this other forest here with the matches and the campfire didn't burn down due to humans".
And "every other body in the solar system"? Why don't you ever hear about warming trends on Mercury or Venus? Or the Moon? Or Saturn? Maybe because people who like to rant about "the radical policies of the global warm-mongers" like to pick out the planets which have experienced warming at some point, and ignore the others?
The insinuation that all planets in the solar system are experiencing warming due to some common cause falls apart when you actually look at those planets and what is affecting the climate there, which have little in common. e.g., dust storms at the south pole of Mars, shifts in convection patterns on Jupiter, summer on Pluto, etc.
I know people are puzzled by it, but once again, the Pioneer anomaly does not prove that "we don't understand gravity". We don't understand the Pioneer anomaly. Whether it has to do with gravity is another question.
That doesn't mean we don't understand gravity. Your own link gives a long list of possible explanations of the Pioneer anomaly other than gravitational anomalies. It just means we don't know what it is we don't understand — maybe gravity, maybe something even more exotic, maybe something mundane.
The re-radiated IR is in a much wider wavelength distribution, only a very tiny portion of which can be re-absorbed by CO2.
Yes, IR is radiated over a wide distribution. The same is true of radiation from the Earth's surface. That doesn't prevent a non-negligible portion from being absorbed by CO2 as it radiates upward.
The world may have been warming up until 2007 but it was obviously not due to rising carbon dioxide levels.
A non sequitur. As I noted in my first response, the models do have an approximately logarithmic forcing-concentration relationship, and they do predict an unamplified 1.2 C warming to 2xCO2. Citing these facts as if they somehow contradict model predictions of CO2-induced warming is completely bizarre. If you want to make an argument that models overpredict CO2-induced warming, you can't do it by agreeing with their quantification of radiative transfer. Try again.
NAt CURRENT production rates, there are an estimated 133 years of coal reserves remaining.
There is certainly more than "133 years" worth of coal remaining. A proven reserve is not "the amount of exploitable fuel in the ground". OPEC roughly doubled their "proven reserves" of oil overnight in the 1980s merely by changing their extraction policies. Did twice as much oil magically appear under their soil? No. A "proven reserve" is something that is economically likely to be extracted under today's demand, under today's market regulations, and with today's technology.
(Note also that the amount of time before we run out of coal isn't even the right figure if you're talking about 2100 CO2 concentrations . If production rates increase and we run out sooner, then that just increases the amount of CO2 that gets burned by 2100, since you're running through the same supply only faster.)
Personally, I'm "optimistic" that the coal supply will end up limiting us to 2x preindustrial CO2 this century, absent uncertain carbon cycle feedbacks (which could add a couple hundred ppm). (Optimistic as far as the climate is concerned; of course, from a broader perspective it's not good to run out of a cheap energy source.) But there's certainly enough coal there for more, and whether we end up extracting more depends on how quickly the world (not just the U.S.) can universally transition to non-fossil energy sources. I'm not so optimistic about that.
The basic chemistry of coal means that 'Coal liquifaction' is never going to be a commercial source of internal combustion fuel. That has only been done in a time of war and desperation, produced a very low quality fuel, and was abandoned as soon as possible.
As I said, it depends on whether it's economical; otherwise, electric vehicles will be the alternative. Whether it's economical in turn depends on how desperate we are for liquid fuel when petroleum starts to run out. And by "we", I mean the world, not just the U.S.
Most new electricity generation is coming from natural gas turbines, hydroelectric , and wind power.
Tell that to China, who has been building more than one new coal plant per week. That will probably run its course over the next few decades, but other developing countries are lining up to do the same. Coal is cheap and although its price will increase, it's likely to remain the cheapest electricity generation alternative for quite some time to come. Excluding emissions regulations, the marginal cost of building a new coal plant is lower than other technologies of equivalent capacity, excepting hydro which is already mostly tapped out. Coal isn't being ramped up in the U.S. for power generation because they're afraid of getting hit with an emissions cap or carbon taxes over the lifetime of a new plant (which they probably will be), not because other technologies are so much cheaper in comparison. When I talk about "business-as-usual" emissions scenarios, I'm r