The magnetic poles have been shifting (they travel a lot, and sometimes reverse; there's been dramatic movement in the recent decade), and this can alter magma flows and screw with global weather patterns.
The last time I checked, neither average magma nor air were strongly magnetic.
Which is why, when people first started researching magnetism (Harvey et al ; around 1580 on our calendar), they had to go an find (or have found) unusual minerals which they described as "lodestone" and similar names. Otherwise they could have gone to any random lump of lava and used that. Tools for measuring such weak magnetic fields took until well into the 19th century to be designed... along with electrical meters and the like.
The causal link just isn't there, as far as I can tell. It could very well be that the glaciers melt/freeze due to slight shifts in the poles' positions and variations in the Sun's output.
I have just moved my house 2m south to benefit from the significantly improved climate further south and the reduced heating bills. That should do in those consdarned energy companies.
The pole is drifting South East : towards the Greenland ice sheets. Therefore, the glaciers are moving North West. Which should be taking them from relatively warm areas to relatively cold areas. Just what you need to encourage melting!
Oh, and BTW, I've been told since grade school that the earth wobbles on its axis.
Which "wobble" were your "grade school" (whatever that is? 6 or 7 year old?) teachers talking about? Precession, nutation, the Chandler Wobble? Or all three, bucketed into one amorphous wobble?
This used to be true. It hasn't been true since... about when I entered university (I remember reading the NS article in the canteen one lunchtime). Your cart and horse need to undergo a spatial rearrangement.
To quote your source more fully, because the differences are significant:
The nautical mile (symbol M, NM or nmi) is a unit of length that is about one minute of arc of latitude measured along any meridian, or about one minute of arc of longitude at the equator. By international agreement it has been set at 1,852 metres exactly (about 6,076 feet).
The reason for that weasel word "about" is that the Earth is not spherical. Trying to do the maths to allow for this non-spherical body, even if you make the (inaccurate) assumption that the Earth is a regular non-spheroid.
I have to try steering oil wells to an accuracy of a fraction of a metre ; the differences are appreciable. And the maths is ugly.
The ratio is going to vary with latitude, because the Earth is decidedly not spherical. It's not even really regular.
I've tried implementing the maths (for directional calculations in oil well steering) ; it's ugly. Too ugly for me (though I feel that I may have to re-visit it in the near future).
Your Sudoku analogy is flawed in many many respects, but one clear one is this : Sudoku puzzles as published always have at least one solution , and you know that, because it's part of the rules of the game. But not all arrangements that look like Sudoku puzzles actually have a solution under the rules of the Sudoku game. however, there is no "easy" way of deciding whether a particular putative Sudoku puzzle has a valid solution, or doesn't. ("easy" meaning "No way that is easier than trying to solve the puzzle." Which isn't terribly hard. I like doing 16x16 Sudokus in hexadecimal : a factor of around 10 harder than a 9x9 one.)
In mathematics, you don't ever know if the conjecture that you're trying to prove really is true, or false. Until you've proved it. You don't know if your pattern is a Sudoku, or a random jumble of numbers on a grid.
For example, Fermat's famous Last Theorem has been proved true ; but given the detail of the work that was taken to achieve the proof, and that many of the tools were not discovered until long after Fermat's death. So Fermat's plea that "this margin is too small", is true (by a factor of several thousand), and his claimed proof was very probably wrong. Or maybe he did have a proof that is remarkably simpler than Wile's 1995 proof? Nobody knows.
I think that you need to go and actually learn about the problem.
(1) DDT has lots of real, and significant, problems of it's own.
(2) Mosquitoes are developing significant degrees of resistance to DDT.
and (3) whatever you substitute for DDT is almost certain to eventually suffer from problem 2, if it's used as a single solution to the problem ; suffering from problem (1) is not so hard to avoid.
Actually, writing that, I realised there's another problem with your analysis of the problem. with at least two different species of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, and several (at least 3) different strains of malaria parasite, then you've actually got around a half-dozen malaria problems. And you're looking for a one-size-fits-all solution?
Do a job that is poorly defined, highly variable, and which very few other people do worldwide so that there's little market incentive for a robot designer to replace you. Whenever someone tries automating a part of your job, submit a lot of contradictory bug reports on version 0.1 which are calculated to make version 0.2 work better, but at doing the wrong job.
I don't see my job being gone until a long time after I retire (at 70+).
Hmmm, how many people do my job, worldwide? 1000 to 1500 ; about what I'd thought. That's not likely to be a good target for any automation project, not when there a plenty of million-plus unit targets.
Some days, it really does seem like your local government is waging war on the populace
Doesn't the proliferation of indirect taxes like this suggest that your direct taxation levels are too low, or that your tax enforcement system is too lax?
If you're looking at comparing proportionate changes in temperatures, you need to work in Kelvin (or if you really insist on sticking with Fahrenheit, degrees Rankine). I'm not sure what numbers you're pulling out of Wikipedia, but you seem to be saying that average temperatures are 14degC, and current temperature is 14.4degC ; that's 287.16 and 287.56 K respectively, or a 0.14% relative change. I completely fail to see where you're getting a 5.6% relative change from.
Similarly, going to 400ppm from 280ppm is a 42.8% increase on the original reading. The zero for levels of CO2 is, unsurprisingly, 0ppm (also 0%, 0 [bloody Slashcode : incapable of displaying the permil character entity], 0ppb, 0ppt and zero by lots of other measures of concentration).
I suppose that you could make a case for using a temperature difference between the Earth's surface and the cosmic microwave background radiation, as the planet doesn't actually live in a cryostat. That would make the relative increase in temperature (against background) 0.13%.
But I really can't understand what your numbers are, or where you're trying to come from or where you're trying to go.
You're right about the decimal point. I've actually googled a "ppm to percent conversion calculator" today.
I... am lost for words. Don't people get taught arithmetic these decades? I'm not talking about having memorised more than a few dozens of logarithms (for estimating things mentally), but some basic arithmetic. How do you make change at the cash drawer, or check values/ whatever currency you're using today at the supermarket? Do your overseas expenses claims, even?
Hint : "ppm" is parts per million ; "percent" is parts per centum, and as you'll remember from your Latin (or French, or Spanish, depending on which foreign languages you learned), "centum" is a hundred. So the conversion factor is *10000. Or just slip the decimal point 4 places to the right. 1% = 10,000ppm ; 1ppm = 0.0001%.
There are claims that "no till" agriculture via the dreaded "roundup ready" plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially.
This is a conflation of two different motivations. "No Till" agricultural techniques were promoted in the 1970s (and I was taught about them in my Soil Science classes in the 1980s ; not that I ever used it seriously) for improving and preventing damage to soil meso-structure (between the scale of the sand grain and the several metres of a well-developed soil profile), and thereby promoting the development of good (or improved) drainage and access of roots to mineral resources from the sub-soil.
Distinctly, the development of powerful, broad-spectrum herbicides (and simultaneous development of GM techniques that can make particular plant strains immune to these herbicides) has allowed the concept of "no till" techniques whereby the plants are harvested and the grain separated from the chaff in the field, depositing the chaff onto the field, AND simultaneous drilling of the next harvest's seed. But there is then no stage of ploughing or harrowing to get the seed into the soil. The alleged carbon footprint changes come from the chaff not being burned.
To be honest though, I'm severely dubious about how effective this would be in the real world. If the herbicides are effective enough and broad-enough in their action, then they're going to have drastic effects on the soil microbiology ; they're going to make breakdown of the chaff by fungi and/ or insect maceration much harder ; and if the chaff doesn't get broken down, then pretty rapidly your soil is going to loose it's organic matter component. Which normally leads rapidly to loss of water absorption capacity, and you're going to either get drought or drowning.
I don't follow Soil Science any more (though it has been surprisingly useful to me in oil drilling), but I suspect that the downsides of herbicidal no-till methods as described above are going to be so prevalent that there are only going to be limited areas where it is of benefit. Of course, that doesn't mean that farmers are not going to try it. But after a decade or two of accumulating damage to their soils, they'll need to spend a century or so trying to repair the damage. Unless you trial it properly, and bear in mind that soils are variable on a metre-by metre scale, and what is the right solution *here* may not be the right solution half-way across the field. (A bit different in massive loess areas like the "Great Plains", but they're not the whole world.) A student of the history of statistics would spend an awful lot of time reading about techniques developed for soil science research, precisely because of the difficulty of determining "effects" against a variable background.
Your original claim, that you couldn't eat anything with more than 4 legs, seemed quite bizarre to me.
So, eating spiders or scorpions would be fine for you? Vastly different biochemistry, though IIRC their exoskeleton is still chitinous. Squid and cuttlefish (10 tentacles)? Centipedes and millipedes - also a lot more than 4 legs, but not crustaceans.
Incidentally, I think you'd find that health-care professionals would generally reserve the phrase "highly allergic" for people who are likely to be dead before an (air) ambulance can get to them to get them intubated. The normal cause of this is inflammation of the throat causing strangulation. Being "laid up for a whole day" as said in one of your other posts may well be an allergic reaction, but it's hardly a "severe". Drama queenery aside, that's the sort of misdescription that makes life really difficult for emergency responders. But you'd probably know that and have the actual details of your allergy written out on your emergency injection kit (nor-adrenaline, isn't it, normally).
IF there were agreement about what constitutes a "plant" (it's an extremely polyphyletic grout) ; AND if algae were within that group, and IF they were (ALL) protists.... Well, I've got to wash my hair - you'll have an rssive intervoewers;.
I'm sure that thorium has the technical possibility of being a very interesting energy source. However, politically I deeply doubt that it will ever make any headway against techniques that offer improved possibilities for (deliberately or "accidentally") creating "killstoff". This is no reflection on the interesting technical possibilities of the fuel ; it's a nod to the cynicism and lies of politicians.
I do get pissed off when trolls who couldn't find out if a mains cable is live using their tongues then go on to accuse people working in the sciences of being part of a huge conspiracy, without any conception of what they're actually proposing.
I used to hang out on news://sci.geo.earthquakes (I popped back in there a few minutes ago, for old times sake) ; between the idiot who believes that he can predict earthquakes by looking at last weeks weather, and a French prick who claims to have been cheated out of a copper mine... oh man, there are some severe idiots out there.
I thought that the US didn't (effectively) have a national electricity grid. Are you proposing some sort of neo-communist government investment in infrastructure for the public good, instead of government investment for private profit?
As anyone who's been there knows they have three alarms 1) evacuate 2) shelter in place and 3) you are going to die and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Evidence, please.
If there were a hazard management system that broke down to three such starkly different outcomes, I'd have to seriously question the point of raising your putative "you're going to die" alarm. Just quietly lock the gates around that part of the plant to keep people in, than contact people by radio/ telephone to issue revised instructions ("turn valve X to position Y ; then kiss your arse good bye. Do you have any messages for your next of kin?"). If they're really dead meat walking, there's no benefit to be had from getting them upset.
Of course, this would have been explained in detail during the hiring process. Possibly you'd have to restrict work in such areas to people already signed up into the military, who've already committed their lives to the job.
I notice that the AC who claims to have worked at the Hanford Vitrification plant said nothing about this alleged alarm system.
Actually, the whole point of fast breeders, is that they "Burn" the fuel at a tremendously accelerated pace,
No, that's NOT the whole point of fast breeders. The point of fast breeders is to run a high enough neutron flux to convert non-fissile material in the core into fissile material, with or without reprocessing. That flux may conceivably be high enough to accelerate the breakdown of nuclear waste (or certain nucleides in your waste), which may be a net benefit, but AFAIK that hasn't been demonstrated for any reactor, and is only likely to work for some nucleides anyway ; others are likely to be uninfluenced by neutron impact, or conceivably made worse.
At best, consumption of nuclear waste could be a beneficial side effect of a fast breeder.
It's not inconceivable that a reactor system could be designed that could achieve this, for some nucleides. But you'd probably need a different reactor system for other nucleides. There are dozens of nucleides in "nuclear waste" (I got bored counting in the Wikipedia article at 20 distinct nucleides).
Slashdot Mirror
It'll affect your children more than it will affect me.
The last time I checked, neither average magma nor air were strongly magnetic.
Which is why, when people first started researching magnetism (Harvey et al ; around 1580 on our calendar), they had to go an find (or have found) unusual minerals which they described as "lodestone" and similar names. Otherwise they could have gone to any random lump of lava and used that. Tools for measuring such weak magnetic fields took until well into the 19th century to be designed ... along with electrical meters and the like.
I have just moved my house 2m south to benefit from the significantly improved climate further south and the reduced heating bills. That should do in those consdarned energy companies.
The pole is drifting South East : towards the Greenland ice sheets. Therefore, the glaciers are moving North West. Which should be taking them from relatively warm areas to relatively cold areas. Just what you need to encourage melting!
Why go to the effort of inventing new taxes when there are so many old ones which can be re-activated.
Oblig Micro$oft-bash : Window Tax, anyone?
"Abuse" is down the corridor, just opposite "Contradiction".
The poles move even without ice sheet melting. The movement of the poles had been well calculated by the turn of the LAST century.
Which "wobble" were your "grade school" (whatever that is? 6 or 7 year old?) teachers talking about? Precession, nutation, the Chandler Wobble? Or all three, bucketed into one amorphous wobble?
This used to be true. It hasn't been true since ... about when I entered university (I remember reading the NS article in the canteen one lunchtime). Your cart and horse need to undergo a spatial rearrangement.
The reason for that weasel word "about" is that the Earth is not spherical. Trying to do the maths to allow for this non-spherical body, even if you make the (inaccurate) assumption that the Earth is a regular non-spheroid.
I have to try steering oil wells to an accuracy of a fraction of a metre ; the differences are appreciable. And the maths is ugly.
I've tried implementing the maths (for directional calculations in oil well steering) ; it's ugly. Too ugly for me (though I feel that I may have to re-visit it in the near future).
That's 160 degrees of longitude difference between the two directions ; 20 degrees off co-linear. Which is plenty of difference to work with.
In mathematics, you don't ever know if the conjecture that you're trying to prove really is true, or false. Until you've proved it. You don't know if your pattern is a Sudoku, or a random jumble of numbers on a grid.
For example, Fermat's famous Last Theorem has been proved true ; but given the detail of the work that was taken to achieve the proof, and that many of the tools were not discovered until long after Fermat's death. So Fermat's plea that "this margin is too small", is true (by a factor of several thousand), and his claimed proof was very probably wrong. Or maybe he did have a proof that is remarkably simpler than Wile's 1995 proof? Nobody knows.
(1) DDT has lots of real, and significant, problems of it's own.
(2) Mosquitoes are developing significant degrees of resistance to DDT.
and (3) whatever you substitute for DDT is almost certain to eventually suffer from problem 2, if it's used as a single solution to the problem ; suffering from problem (1) is not so hard to avoid.
Actually, writing that, I realised there's another problem with your analysis of the problem. with at least two different species of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, and several (at least 3) different strains of malaria parasite, then you've actually got around a half-dozen malaria problems. And you're looking for a one-size-fits-all solution?
I don't see my job being gone until a long time after I retire (at 70+).
Hmmm, how many people do my job, worldwide? 1000 to 1500 ; about what I'd thought. That's not likely to be a good target for any automation project, not when there a plenty of million-plus unit targets.
Doesn't the proliferation of indirect taxes like this suggest that your direct taxation levels are too low, or that your tax enforcement system is too lax?
Similarly, going to 400ppm from 280ppm is a 42.8% increase on the original reading. The zero for levels of CO2 is, unsurprisingly, 0ppm (also 0%, 0 [bloody Slashcode : incapable of displaying the permil character entity], 0ppb, 0ppt and zero by lots of other measures of concentration).
I suppose that you could make a case for using a temperature difference between the Earth's surface and the cosmic microwave background radiation, as the planet doesn't actually live in a cryostat. That would make the relative increase in temperature (against background) 0.13%.
But I really can't understand what your numbers are, or where you're trying to come from or where you're trying to go.
I ... am lost for words. Don't people get taught arithmetic these decades? I'm not talking about having memorised more than a few dozens of logarithms (for estimating things mentally), but some basic arithmetic. How do you make change at the cash drawer, or check values/ whatever currency you're using today at the supermarket? Do your overseas expenses claims, even?
Hint : "ppm" is parts per million ; "percent" is parts per centum, and as you'll remember from your Latin (or French, or Spanish, depending on which foreign languages you learned), "centum" is a hundred. So the conversion factor is *10000. Or just slip the decimal point 4 places to the right. 1% = 10,000ppm ; 1ppm = 0.0001%.
This is a conflation of two different motivations. "No Till" agricultural techniques were promoted in the 1970s (and I was taught about them in my Soil Science classes in the 1980s ; not that I ever used it seriously) for improving and preventing damage to soil meso-structure (between the scale of the sand grain and the several metres of a well-developed soil profile), and thereby promoting the development of good (or improved) drainage and access of roots to mineral resources from the sub-soil.
Distinctly, the development of powerful, broad-spectrum herbicides (and simultaneous development of GM techniques that can make particular plant strains immune to these herbicides) has allowed the concept of "no till" techniques whereby the plants are harvested and the grain separated from the chaff in the field, depositing the chaff onto the field, AND simultaneous drilling of the next harvest's seed. But there is then no stage of ploughing or harrowing to get the seed into the soil. The alleged carbon footprint changes come from the chaff not being burned.
To be honest though, I'm severely dubious about how effective this would be in the real world. If the herbicides are effective enough and broad-enough in their action, then they're going to have drastic effects on the soil microbiology ; they're going to make breakdown of the chaff by fungi and/ or insect maceration much harder ; and if the chaff doesn't get broken down, then pretty rapidly your soil is going to loose it's organic matter component. Which normally leads rapidly to loss of water absorption capacity, and you're going to either get drought or drowning.
I don't follow Soil Science any more (though it has been surprisingly useful to me in oil drilling), but I suspect that the downsides of herbicidal no-till methods as described above are going to be so prevalent that there are only going to be limited areas where it is of benefit. Of course, that doesn't mean that farmers are not going to try it. But after a decade or two of accumulating damage to their soils, they'll need to spend a century or so trying to repair the damage. Unless you trial it properly, and bear in mind that soils are variable on a metre-by metre scale, and what is the right solution *here* may not be the right solution half-way across the field. (A bit different in massive loess areas like the "Great Plains", but they're not the whole world.) A student of the history of statistics would spend an awful lot of time reading about techniques developed for soil science research, precisely because of the difficulty of determining "effects" against a variable background.
Your original claim, that you couldn't eat anything with more than 4 legs, seemed quite bizarre to me.
So, eating spiders or scorpions would be fine for you? Vastly different biochemistry, though IIRC their exoskeleton is still chitinous. Squid and cuttlefish (10 tentacles)? Centipedes and millipedes - also a lot more than 4 legs, but not crustaceans.
Incidentally, I think you'd find that health-care professionals would generally reserve the phrase "highly allergic" for people who are likely to be dead before an (air) ambulance can get to them to get them intubated. The normal cause of this is inflammation of the throat causing strangulation. Being "laid up for a whole day" as said in one of your other posts may well be an allergic reaction, but it's hardly a "severe". Drama queenery aside, that's the sort of misdescription that makes life really difficult for emergency responders. But you'd probably know that and have the actual details of your allergy written out on your emergency injection kit (nor-adrenaline, isn't it, normally).
IF there were agreement about what constitutes a "plant" (it's an extremely polyphyletic grout) ; AND if algae were within that group, and IF they were (ALL) protists .... Well, I've got to wash my hair - you'll have an rssive intervoewers;.
I'm sure that thorium has the technical possibility of being a very interesting energy source. However, politically I deeply doubt that it will ever make any headway against techniques that offer improved possibilities for (deliberately or "accidentally") creating "killstoff". This is no reflection on the interesting technical possibilities of the fuel ; it's a nod to the cynicism and lies of politicians.
I do get pissed off when trolls who couldn't find out if a mains cable is live using their tongues then go on to accuse people working in the sciences of being part of a huge conspiracy, without any conception of what they're actually proposing.
I used to hang out on news://sci.geo.earthquakes (I popped back in there a few minutes ago, for old times sake) ; between the idiot who believes that he can predict earthquakes by looking at last weeks weather, and a French prick who claims to have been cheated out of a copper mine ... oh man, there are some severe idiots out there.
I thought that the US didn't (effectively) have a national electricity grid. Are you proposing some sort of neo-communist government investment in infrastructure for the public good, instead of government investment for private profit?
Evidence, please.
If there were a hazard management system that broke down to three such starkly different outcomes, I'd have to seriously question the point of raising your putative "you're going to die" alarm. Just quietly lock the gates around that part of the plant to keep people in, than contact people by radio/ telephone to issue revised instructions ("turn valve X to position Y ; then kiss your arse good bye. Do you have any messages for your next of kin?"). If they're really dead meat walking, there's no benefit to be had from getting them upset.
Of course, this would have been explained in detail during the hiring process. Possibly you'd have to restrict work in such areas to people already signed up into the military, who've already committed their lives to the job.
I notice that the AC who claims to have worked at the Hanford Vitrification plant said nothing about this alleged alarm system.
France certainly has reprocessing plants and experience. Does Canada?
No, that's NOT the whole point of fast breeders. The point of fast breeders is to run a high enough neutron flux to convert non-fissile material in the core into fissile material, with or without reprocessing. That flux may conceivably be high enough to accelerate the breakdown of nuclear waste (or certain nucleides in your waste), which may be a net benefit, but AFAIK that hasn't been demonstrated for any reactor, and is only likely to work for some nucleides anyway ; others are likely to be uninfluenced by neutron impact, or conceivably made worse.
At best, consumption of nuclear waste could be a beneficial side effect of a fast breeder.
It's not inconceivable that a reactor system could be designed that could achieve this, for some nucleides. But you'd probably need a different reactor system for other nucleides. There are dozens of nucleides in "nuclear waste" (I got bored counting in the Wikipedia article at 20 distinct nucleides).