I was always under the impression that superclusters would stay with w>-1. The paper I cited doesn't seem very confident about that outcome. Since superclusters only slow expansion, rather than resisting it completely, there could be a critical size beyond which an accelerating expansion cannot be resisted. Indeed, this paper purports to do such a calculation (in a spherical approximation), and claims that existing definitions of "superclusters" are vague and are not always fully bound.
I'm not sure what your point is. The proposal here, to remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, is insufficient to reverse global warming. It will only slow it. What are you disagreeing with?
One easy to falsify this theory is to measure the equation of state of dark energy, and find that it's incompatible with a Big Rip scenario, i.e., w>=-1. In fact, the observations are leaning that way already, IMHO.
Assuming the big bang/crunch theory is correct and (here's the unlikely bit) time and space are not relative (unlikely I know) what are our odds of ever being able to detect the preceding receeding universe "shells". We can't; they're forever outside of our causal horizon. The best we can do is find indirect evidence for them (e.g., a dark energy theory, verified by cosmological observations, which has these "causal patches" as a predicted but unobservable side effect ).
Final stupid question, with the constant speed of light providing an indication of a "stopped" position in space is the centre of the known universe stationary or moving? There is no center of the universe. (See this FAQ.)
I didn't slander anyone. Nor did I claim that science has an answer to the question, "Why are we here?" (FYI, I don't think that religion answers it either, or that the question in the metaphysical sense even has an answer, but that's a separate issue.)
For example, I know I am going to be disliked for saying it, but the theory of evolution is full of this very thing. It is a non-reproducible theory which is called "science". That is, of course, completely absurd. It is a highly explanatory theory which has been extensively tested for over a hundred years. Its predictions are far more detailed than "time and chance did it", and far more successful.
But to point out its flaws publicly means far le$$ grant money and ridicule. Scientists point out flaws in evolutionary theory every day. They get more money for doing so. It leads to improved versions of evolution. The ones who are ridiculed are the creationist idiots who claim that evolution has been falsified.
Meanwhile, anything that happens to overlap religion is instantly "not science" Evolution and Big Bang cosmology arguably overlap religion, but they are science. "Intelligent design", if that's what you're thinking of, is not science.
Taking a billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year isn't going to be drastically bad, since that's still significantly less than what we put in every year. Even if we halted CO2 emissions entirely, that's still not worse than pre-industrial times when we weren't putting large amounts in.
You are at least half right though: too much change too suddenly can have negative impacts. What would be the impact of instantaneously cutting CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow? Maybe still not that bad. Reducing CO2 concentrations to pre-industrial levels instantaneously? Probably bad.
The point here, though, is that the proposal being discussed in this story is not to reverse global warming, but merely to slow it.
Geenpeace, the green party, WWF, and the Sierra Club are well known leftist organizations. These groups and their affiliates fund many AGW global warming studies. The vast majority of climate research comes from places like the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy, etc. What you get out of the Sierra Club and the like is mostly political policy papers, not much in the way of climatology research appearing in scientific journals.
Doesn't matter how many times the universe blows up and recombines into smaller universes (thus explaining the remarkable order), there will still be condescending egoists who deny that a person who believes in God can be rational, scientific, and clear-headed. Is that a non sequitur, or are you accusing me of something?
This new theory is just like any of the other "parallel universe" hypotheses in that it doesn't actually solve the origin question, it just rephrases another old one just because there are some neat mathematics that fall out of it. No, it is a (proposed) solution to the origin question. However, even if you have a solution which explains how the universe as we know it came into existence (or that it is eternal and never "came into existence") through physical law, no science-based solution will ever tell us why the physical laws exist in the first place. (I would say that religion can't either, but that's another issue.)
That's highly disingenuous. Science is far more specific than "time and chance did it" about the origins of lightning, mountains, etc. It proposes detailed mechanistic processes which can be tested, it makes independent predictions which can also later be tested to make sure you don't have a non-predictive "just so" story, and so on.
It's very easy to make up just-so stories after the fact, but the difference between your explanations and science's is that the first must be taken on faith, and the second can be tested and supported by evidence other than "personal revelation".
How can I tell the difference between:
1. There is disease because you did something wrong. 2. There is disease to teach you your own mortality 3. There is disease because the devil is in control. 4. There is disease because the Inivisible Pink Unicorn was sick and contaminated the Earth. 5. There is disease because of small microorganisms which are passed from person to person.
The latter case you can test. The first four, take your pick.
Saying that "God did it" is inadequately explanatory is not the same thing as saying that science is perfectly explanatory. There are many questions that science likely can never answer. (This does not imply in turn that they are answered by religion; some of them may be, but "either science explains it or religion does" is a false dichotomy.)
I don't wholly agree with your analysis. An atom is an electromagnetically bound system and resists expansion; you can't just take a straight Friedmann GR solution and make conclusions from that. That's why the Big Rip scenario was invented: it is an acceleration so severe that even bound systems become unbound by the cosmological expansion. A cosmological constant (w=-1) is right on the boundary: atoms become unbound only asymptotically. There is no actual finite time at which atoms (or galaxies) fall apart; a simple analysis on the basis of comparing the system size to the Hubble radius doesn't work. What actually happens is that space in the vicinity of the atom doesn't expand as fast as the rest of the universe; it's the same reason why your atoms aren't expanding with the universe right now.
One single, three-letter word is all we need to answer this question, no models necessary: "GOD."
I don't understand why we need to make up so many other ideas. Yeah, why have science at all?
"Why is there lightning?" "God did it." "How did mountains form?" "God did it." "Why do massive bodies attract each other?" "God did it." "How do cells reproduce?" "God did it." "Why is there disease?" "God did it."
Who needs those complicated science models. Three words, no models necessary: "God"
Theories of early universe cosmology are testable in various ways, such as their predictions of the cosmic microwave background power spectrum, patterns of early structure formation, etc. Also, dark energy predictions about the accelerating expansion may depend on the details of particle physics which could be tested in accelerators or astronomically. Cosmology is not just "making stuff up"; in fact, cosmology is in closer contact with experiment now than it ever has been: some astronomers call this the era of "precision cosmology".
This theory really is a Big Bang theory, analogous to the "cyclic" Big Bang theories in which new Bangs happen over and over. The Steady State theory claimed that there was just one universe, which is eternal and is always the same in space and time. (So, to explain why the density of the universe doesn't decrease as it expands, they had to postulate that new matter is continuously created to "fill in the gaps".)
Greenpeace, the green party, WWF, Sierra Club, Chirac [...] In other words, you are still ignoring the fact that global warming is real and has real consequences, as do our choices concerning emissions. As I said, I don't care what your political fantasies are. It doesn't matter what New World Order you imagine the dirty socialists are trying to construct. Global warming is not an imagined phenomenon, CO2 is its primary cause, and CO2 emissions have to be dealt with.
If the amount of water vapor has risen in the past 200 years, then its capacity to trap heat has also risen. This makes it just as much to blame as CO2. Your logic is broken. "Traps more heat" != "just as much to blame".
Water vapor has increased at a far lesser rate than CO2. Water vapor traps more heat than it did in pre-industrial times, but CO2 traps even more. Water is not "just as much to blame" as CO2; its radiative forcing is comparatively minor. You would realize this if you had bothered to look at the table to which I referred you.
Even if CO2 cutbacks are needed and the threat is real, it doesn't change the fact that global warming is being used by leftists as a tool to gain power. That is not a "fact", it is your paranoid fantasy, which I am not particularly interested in discussing.
Incidentally, the climate science community does not get any significant amount of funding from "leftist groups", most of them have nothing to do with the UN, and skeptical climatologists are not being fired from their jobs.
I think the work being referred to may be in this paper, in which the universes are "causal patches" which are disconnected from each other causally by the Big Rip.
Right now, the theory with the most evidence in its favor is the theory which includes a dark energy described by Einstein's cosmological constant. In that theory, the universe's expansion will continue to accelerate forever, although not at such a great rate that there is a "Big Rip" which tears atoms apart. That is the "heat death" scenario, in which the universe lasts forever and runs down until nothing much is going on. Because of the accelerating expansion, we will see fewer and fewer distant galaxies as time goes on, because they will accelerate away from us faster than light can reach us. Ultimately we will only see a few local galaxies in the cluster in which we are bound.
However, it's possible that the dark energy is dynamical instead of constant, and so the expansion of the universe could accelerate or possibly even reverse and decelerate. With enough deceleration, a Big Crunch is still feasible. There are also the scenarios in which our universe spawns new "universes", such as the one discussed here.
The government is supposed to govern and protect. If a company is poisoning the public space, then this falls under governance and protection. However, this is not what is behind the global warming movement. I don't particularly care about what your paranoid fantasies are. The fact is, global warming is real and has real consequences, as do our choices concerning emissions.
They couldn't use "water vapor" even though it is a much worse greenhouse "gas" because people would just laugh. Water vapor is not responsible for global warming. Water vapor is the reason why the Earth averages ~60 degrees instead of 0 degrees. CO2 is the reason why the temperature of the Earth has increased since pre-industrial times, i.e., global warming.
They couldn't use methane or other chemicals because the market has a chance of solving these issues Global warming is also not due primarily to methane. As far as global warming is concerned, increases in CO2 dominate the effects of increases in methane or water vapor. Methane matters, and we need to consider cutbacks there too, but its total radiative forcing even today is less than 1/3 that of CO2. See Figure SPM-2 of the IPCC FAR summary I linked earlier.
Once again, you demonstrate that your objections to global warming are based on your political fantasies, not on science.
I agree with that 100%, however competition is a very necessary part of the monetary incentive equation. It is what adds diversity of invention into the equation and pushes people to move faster and do better. I agree with that. The government can't solve things by fiat. However, unlike in libertarian fantasyland, the government is needed sometimes to step in when pure monetary incentives are lacking. Right now, there is an insufficient market penalty on emissions for sufficient change to take place. A carbon tax is one such incentive. As for innovation, companies can innovate however they see fit in order to reduce costs. The carbon tax only puts a cost on emissions; it does not mandate particular solutions to the problem. This is in contrast to, say, California's proposal to eliminate incandescent bulbs. Singling out a specific technology or market is mis-targeted: instead of telling people what technologies they can use, it is better to focus attention on energy use as a whole, no matter what the source. If you think you can reduce your energy use (& indirectly, emissions) while still using incandescent bulbs, more power to you: do as whatever you see fit.
Slashdot Mirror
I was always under the impression that superclusters would stay with w>-1. The paper I cited doesn't seem very confident about that outcome. Since superclusters only slow expansion, rather than resisting it completely, there could be a critical size beyond which an accelerating expansion cannot be resisted. Indeed, this paper purports to do such a calculation (in a spherical approximation), and claims that existing definitions of "superclusters" are vague and are not always fully bound.
I'm not sure what your point is. The proposal here, to remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, is insufficient to reverse global warming. It will only slow it. What are you disagreeing with?
One easy to falsify this theory is to measure the equation of state of dark energy, and find that it's incompatible with a Big Rip scenario, i.e., w>=-1. In fact, the observations are leaning that way already, IMHO.
Ok, thanks. The paper I cited did mention causal patches, but they weren't the main focus, which was why I wasn't sure it was the right one.
I didn't slander anyone. Nor did I claim that science has an answer to the question, "Why are we here?" (FYI, I don't think that religion answers it either, or that the question in the metaphysical sense even has an answer, but that's a separate issue.)
Easy enough to find. Here is one graph that goes to 2004. To 2006 should be possible to find with some searching.
Taking a billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year isn't going to be drastically bad, since that's still significantly less than what we put in every year. Even if we halted CO2 emissions entirely, that's still not worse than pre-industrial times when we weren't putting large amounts in.
You are at least half right though: too much change too suddenly can have negative impacts. What would be the impact of instantaneously cutting CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow? Maybe still not that bad. Reducing CO2 concentrations to pre-industrial levels instantaneously? Probably bad.
The point here, though, is that the proposal being discussed in this story is not to reverse global warming, but merely to slow it.
I like your response the best. +1 Funny if I could.
Forty two?
That's highly disingenuous. Science is far more specific than "time and chance did it" about the origins of lightning, mountains, etc. It proposes detailed mechanistic processes which can be tested, it makes independent predictions which can also later be tested to make sure you don't have a non-predictive "just so" story, and so on.
It's very easy to make up just-so stories after the fact, but the difference between your explanations and science's is that the first must be taken on faith, and the second can be tested and supported by evidence other than "personal revelation".
How can I tell the difference between:
1. There is disease because you did something wrong.
2. There is disease to teach you your own mortality
3. There is disease because the devil is in control.
4. There is disease because the Inivisible Pink Unicorn was sick and contaminated the Earth.
5. There is disease because of small microorganisms which are passed from person to person.
The latter case you can test. The first four, take your pick.
Saying that "God did it" is inadequately explanatory is not the same thing as saying that science is perfectly explanatory. There are many questions that science likely can never answer. (This does not imply in turn that they are answered by religion; some of them may be, but "either science explains it or religion does" is a false dichotomy.)
I don't wholly agree with your analysis. An atom is an electromagnetically bound system and resists expansion; you can't just take a straight Friedmann GR solution and make conclusions from that. That's why the Big Rip scenario was invented: it is an acceleration so severe that even bound systems become unbound by the cosmological expansion. A cosmological constant (w=-1) is right on the boundary: atoms become unbound only asymptotically. There is no actual finite time at which atoms (or galaxies) fall apart; a simple analysis on the basis of comparing the system size to the Hubble radius doesn't work. What actually happens is that space in the vicinity of the atom doesn't expand as fast as the rest of the universe; it's the same reason why your atoms aren't expanding with the universe right now.
See the Big Rip paper, page 2.
I don't understand why we need to make up so many other ideas. Yeah, why have science at all?
"Why is there lightning?" "God did it."
"How did mountains form?" "God did it."
"Why do massive bodies attract each other?" "God did it."
"How do cells reproduce?" "God did it."
"Why is there disease?" "God did it."
Who needs those complicated science models. Three words, no models necessary: "God"
Theories of early universe cosmology are testable in various ways, such as their predictions of the cosmic microwave background power spectrum, patterns of early structure formation, etc. Also, dark energy predictions about the accelerating expansion may depend on the details of particle physics which could be tested in accelerators or astronomically. Cosmology is not just "making stuff up"; in fact, cosmology is in closer contact with experiment now than it ever has been: some astronomers call this the era of "precision cosmology".
This theory really is a Big Bang theory, analogous to the "cyclic" Big Bang theories in which new Bangs happen over and over. The Steady State theory claimed that there was just one universe, which is eternal and is always the same in space and time. (So, to explain why the density of the universe doesn't decrease as it expands, they had to postulate that new matter is continuously created to "fill in the gaps".)
Water vapor has increased at a far lesser rate than CO2. Water vapor traps more heat than it did in pre-industrial times, but CO2 traps even more. Water is not "just as much to blame" as CO2; its radiative forcing is comparatively minor. You would realize this if you had bothered to look at the table to which I referred you. Even if CO2 cutbacks are needed and the threat is real, it doesn't change the fact that global warming is being used by leftists as a tool to gain power. That is not a "fact", it is your paranoid fantasy, which I am not particularly interested in discussing.
Incidentally, the climate science community does not get any significant amount of funding from "leftist groups", most of them have nothing to do with the UN, and skeptical climatologists are not being fired from their jobs.
I think the work being referred to may be in this paper, in which the universes are "causal patches" which are disconnected from each other causally by the Big Rip.
Right now, the theory with the most evidence in its favor is the theory which includes a dark energy described by Einstein's cosmological constant. In that theory, the universe's expansion will continue to accelerate forever, although not at such a great rate that there is a "Big Rip" which tears atoms apart. That is the "heat death" scenario, in which the universe lasts forever and runs down until nothing much is going on. Because of the accelerating expansion, we will see fewer and fewer distant galaxies as time goes on, because they will accelerate away from us faster than light can reach us. Ultimately we will only see a few local galaxies in the cluster in which we are bound.
This scenario is explored in more detail here.
However, it's possible that the dark energy is dynamical instead of constant, and so the expansion of the universe could accelerate or possibly even reverse and decelerate. With enough deceleration, a Big Crunch is still feasible. There are also the scenarios in which our universe spawns new "universes", such as the one discussed here.
Once again, you demonstrate that your objections to global warming are based on your political fantasies, not on science.