Also, are you afraid of old age, taxes, your gut bacteria, accepting the existence of people who hold different beliefs to you, and being struck by a planet-sterilising asteroid.
All are as avoidable as radioactivity. The dose of each is what matters, and to a lesser degree, your response to it.
But it may find my proposed small brown dwarf (which may have a fairly significant heat signature) orbiting around the Sun in a very elliptical orbit that at its closest pass is still well beyond the orbit of Pluto--probably beyond the orbit of Sedna, too.
That, a brown dwarf, would be a minimum of about 80 Jupiter masses by current (reasonably accurate) astrophysics. We do things like blow up bombs which probe the physics of this behaviour - we're reasonably sure that those masses are reasonably accurate. Let's be generous and put a 50% error bound on that mass, so that the lower bound for a "brown dwarf" is 40 Jupiter masses. That's around 40*318=)12720 Earth masses, or around 1272 times as big as the Brown-Batygin proposal for Planet9. You're talking about a different object.
Such a large object would have far larger gravitational effects than what we have seen. Essentially, it would have scattered most of the observed population of Kuiper Belt objects. The more eccentric the orbit, the greater the range of KBOs it would have scattered. We observe these KBOs because they exist, therefore your brown dwarf does not exist. Sorry - beautiful hypothesis slain by ugly fact and all that jazz.
Could a smaller gas giant (well below the deuterium-burning limit that defines "brown dwarf") exist out there, and not have been seen yet? Well, since Jupiter is still radiating more heat than it receives from the Sun (due to internal differentiation, principally the settling of helium and "metals" (astrophysics meaning) into it's core from it's mantle, releasing gravitational energy), then we can be sure that anything of Jupiter mass would be radiating so much infrared that we'd have detected in all-sky surveys of the 1980s. Neptune mass planets (17 earth masses) - their detection is much more dubious. We might detect some with current detectors, but that is still being assessed. Whether to assign telescope time from existing projects to searching for this (putative) planet, and how much time to assign, with what instruments and which telescopes, at which times of year... are active matters of discussion.
My suggestion makes more sense given that binary star systems are a lot more common than people think.
Binary and other multiple star systems are indeed far more common than most people think. with all due respect, I've been interested in astronomy for around 4 decades now, and for almost all (3.8 to 3.9 decades) I've been well aware that around 50% of star systems in this galaxy are binaries (e.g. the Sirius A+B system, the brightest star in our sky and only 8 light years away), a couple of percent are ternaries (e.g. our closest known neighbour, the Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri system), and a small fraction are higher multiples, with the highest well-known one being 6-fold. Working out the numbers, for 100 systems, that's about 65 singletons, 60 in binaries, 9-12 in ternaries, and maybe another 5 in higher-multiple systems. total of 134 to 137 stars with 47-46% of them singletons. Most people might not know this ; anyone who has devoted more than a couple of months of after-school study to this knows this. Despite the failure of the Slashdot aspiration to be "news for nerds", here you've got a far higher probability of meeting people who have this level of knowledge than in the general population.
Your suggestions are reasonable. And most of them have been reasoned through decades ago. And most of them shown to be not true. But they were reasonable suggestions to consider.
They've already got a history of mismanaging the site. Now we're supposed to believe that they're going to do it right in the future? Nofuckingway
So... doing nothing is an option?
And when the levees around the cooling water ponds finally fail, you'll do nothing.
And when the relatively radioactive silt at the bottom of the ponds starts to blow around and blow off-site as the ponds finally dry out... do nothing?
Your argument about the management history is actually one for having competent people involved and doing things in a transparent, well-reported manner. "Do nothing" will inevitably result in mismanagement of the site.
Does your idiom have the phrase "caught between the devil and the deep blue sea"?
With no venting of the gasses generated from isotopic decay.
Helium manages to escape from the middle of zircon grains. It will get out of artificial vitrified glass, eventually. It will actually be helped to escape by radiation damage from the entrained radioactive material. For example, first-year geology students who are learning microscopic petrography (description of rocks) will see what we call "pleochroic halos" of radiation damage around zircon crystals in rocks. (Sometimes you can even make an educated guess as to the nuclides in the zircon, from the radius of the halo! Sometimes you get multiple concentric halos.)
Managing gas permeability while minimising ionic leachability is actually part of the design of the glass compositions proposed for vitrification. People have thought through this problem, and quite probably thought through it before you were born.
If you store waste on a contaminated area, you cannot really measure if there are small leaks.
Ummm, why not? You do know that not only are there three different major types of "radiation" (alpha, beta and gamma), but that each one has it's own wide range of possible particle energies, each one characteristic of particular decays from particular nuclides (though the energy does get degraded by collision with atmospheric particles). If you design the monitoring system sanely, then even quite small leaks will be detectable, as long as you know (1) what the background radiation is (including existing contamination) and (2) you know what you're putting into the dump. I don't think this objection holds water.
Also, an area like this will only be habitable again if there are no leaks
There is an implicit "ever" in there. As a geologist, I take "ever" to mean another Earth-lifetime. What do you mean by "ever"? And...
if there are leaks, it will never recover.
Since the area is already owned by the state, and is almost unoccupied, is this actually an objection? Guessing that you're an American, your government were willing to make Yucca mountain, the Hanford Valley site, Area 51 and Oak Ridge all essentially off-limits to human habitation for centuries to millennia. If you're a Brit, you might want to think about Anthrax Island as well as our proposed waste sites in Cumbria (which I think should be in Central London). Other nationalities almost certainly have sites which will not be available for habitation for millennia. So what? It's their land ; it's their choice.
I think with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018, this may be the instrument that could find that supposed large object--based on its infrared signature--orbiting a long distance from the Sun
I think there has already been some work on that and the expected dimensions (therefore surface area) and temperature (assume it formed similarly to Uranus and Neptune, but received less solar irradiation ; deduce a plausible range of temperatures) put it outside the likely sensitive range for current IR space telescopes and ground-based telescopes. I'm not so sure about the JWST though. I'm sure I read a couple of papers on this in the "Planet-9 kerfuffle" of early this year, but I can't find them now.
Doing a "can this telescope possibly see this target?" analysis is a routine thing. Saves a lot of wasted time.
It is probably too late in the JWST's design and construction programme to develop a sensor specifically for this task. Whether the already-planned sensors can do it is, I'm sure, under consideration.
They piled on a bunch of additional justifications, like a planet had to be round due to gravitation,
That was one of the proposed criteria. If you believe that it was one of the accepted grounds, then you either haven't followed the actual science (highly likely), or you've been listening to really poor press reporting (of which there is a lot) and misunderstood the science.
For what it's worth, I argued for the roundness criterion (sometimes described by the orbits and dynamics people as "a materials science argument," which considerably misstates the point). But since I haven't earned my chops as a planetary scientist (just another geologist), I didn't get a vote, and would have lost anyway. Roundness is not a criterion for whether or not something is a planet.
This is what happens when you write naming conventions in order to "get" a planet for political reasons!
If you, for whatever reasons you have, think that is what happened, then nothing short of full-blown ECT is going to argue you out of it.
If you're actually interested in what happened, then here's some information for you. The discovery of Eris (by Mike Brown a.k.a @PlutoKiller and team) which was probably bigger than Pluto and clearly had not in any sense "cleared it's orbit," then it became obvious that the definition of "planet" needed firming up. There were several proposals as to how to do that, and a wording was settled. What exactly that wording means isn't so clear.
Hal Levison (if I need to write a potted biography of him, then you clearly need to strengthen your planetary science) wrote up his "hand-waving" version a while ago at SWRI, which uses an argument balancing the effects of accretion and ejection. There are other ways of expressing the discussion though - there were a couple of papers on Arxiv a month or so ago about search possibilities for "Putative" (otherwise known as "Planet9".
We see other examples of this "gravity shepherding". For example, Pluto and the Plutinos stay in a 3:2 resonance orbit with Neptune, because Neptune's gravity keeps them there.
Trojan "moons" (or "asteroids" ; pick a category) might be better examples. Much better established, with the math having been accepted for several centuries now.
A large planet - similar to other planets seen in the Solar System and other planetary systems - odds are in the 50-50 range.
A "rogue planet" (as in, one not gravitationally bound to any star) in that part of the Sun's environment, in a relatively short (few thousands of years) period of time is from first principles much less likely. But it wouldn't produce this pattern of orbits (with the appropriate KBOs at different parts of their orbit then and now) anyway.
A putative spacecraft would literally have to be planetary mass. No real world materials are known which are strong enough to hold a planetary mass into a non-spherical shape. So your spacecraft is now a planet. Even if it is artificial. So you're reduced to one of the previous tow options you raised.
Pericles' plague during the Penelopesian War (?50%) ; Spanish Flu (
and continued with the Spanish Flu's 1% mortality, then the 50-90% mortality in Central America after the arrival of the Conquistadores. "Pick an event to try to survive through."
There are many instances of rapid climate change in earth's history that have not caused mass extinctions. The PETM is one example, and so is the current glaciation cycle.
You still don't understand the point about the Paleocene-Eocene events being called the Paleocene-Eocene events (NB - the names are likely to change again, in the next few years, as we're getting better data on the events). So I'll run through it in very small steps for you.
There was a set of faunas and floras found in various parts of the world. These were recognised as occurring at the same time period (because some elements of one flora or fauna extended into other floras or faunas, allowing the correlation of the strata in which these floras and faunas). One of these sets of correlated floras and faunas was named as the "Paleocene" ; a different, overlying (where relatable) set of floras and faunas was called the Eocene.
Between the two there were LARGE changes. Not as large as the changes between, for example, the Permian and Triassic, or between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, but large changes nonetheless. This is called an "extinction event".
It's not one of the "Big Five" (Kret-Tert, Trias-Jur, Perm-Trias, Fras-Fam, Ord-Sil). Or the "Big Seven" (Big Five plus two possibly larger ones in the Canbrian). Or the "Big Eight" (Big Seven, plus at least one (if not more) as the Ediacaran fauna was replaced by more modern metazoans). We shouldn't forget either about the GOBE (Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event, which had a large net increase in life forms and ecotomes, as well as many extinctions, but had a net increase in diversity which jibes somewhat with most meanings of "extinction event") either, one of the more profound events in the history of metazoan life. In fact, the Pal-Eo events probably don't make it into the top ten of "extinction events". But that doesn't mean that there weren't major extinctions at that time.
Quick question - pick a pandemic (and approximate mortality rate) to choose to live through : first (~50%) or second (~30%) round of the Black Death ; Justinian Plague (? 50%) ; Pericles' plague during the Penelopesian War (?50%) ; Spanish Flu (As for the current extinction event ("Holocene," or "Anthropocene" ; again terminology is being argued over), how severe that is going to be is too soon to tell. Come back in a couple of hundred thousand years.
by Anonymous Coward on 2016-03-24 14:28 (#51768351)
I wouldn't put it past the FBI to pay someone $100k for an exploit which Apple already fixed.
Such a scurrilous and baseless allegation! I cannot for one second imagine why you chose to anonymously post this. It's not like the target of the allegation would be likely to send the SWAT team round to plant some good evidence on your computer and a cap in your ass.
Did you actually READ the original PETM paper? You remember - the Nature one in 1999 (vol 401, p 775)?
Yes, did you? It's right in the abstract:
Yes, I did, I remember the dead-tree version flopping onto my doormat. Back when I paid around £100/year of my own money to have access to the science.
So, you're seeing that large perturbations have happened in the past, and that they lead to large climate perturbations, and significant extinctions (hint : the extinctions are why the event is at the boundary of two time eras ; the carbon release explanation came somewhat over 130 years after the fact of the change was recognised). So, if you accept that, are you claiming that all the accountancy of tonnes of oil and gas and coal sold and burned are a colossal multinational fraud, and really we aren't turning those gigatonnes of carbon-containing compounds into atmospheric carbon? You have got some serious disconnects in your logic.
Agreed, although these numbers should be taken with a bit of a margin, I think.
If you ever saw a number without a confidence interval on it (you know - the plus-or-minus figures, not necessarily symmetrical about the most-likely value), then you were looking at reportage, not the actual science (or approximately pre-WW2). Some journalists are better than others about preserving the necessary caution, but they very rarely get past the sub-editor.
After all, they are assumptions, based on how materials react or are deposited under current environmental circumstances.
Errr, no. You do dozens or hundreds of experimental runs to determine (for example) that 57degC upper limit for the precipitation of the gypsum (monoclinic) calcium sulphate mineral instead of the anhydrite (orthorhombic, anhydrous) form. You also checked if that value changes significantly with the ionic composition of the precipitating solution. (Incidentally, the crystal class gives you the information you need to distinguish the crystals under the microscope, should you feel the need to replicate the experiment.)
That phase diagram is the result of hundreds of measurements. Not assumptions.
So the conclusion that temperatures in January have never been higher, is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion.
Are you reading the reportage, or the science? In fact, even from the reportage, I'm not seeing that claim. I'm seeing things like "Earthâ(TM)s warmest month in the satellite record," which is not the same thing at all as what you're claiming to see.
That being said: I do think were burning through our resources in a very high pace
Evidently. We're burning stored sunshine, and unless we get fusion going on Earth, we're ultimately limited to the rate of energy production by the sun at this time.
and that should change, if we plan to live on this planet for a million years to come.
Those are policy decisions which I don't think humanity has made yet. In fact, I don't think that "humanity" as a whole actually has a unified communication system, let alone has reached an informed consensus on the question.
Of course, before we get to there, we may well be committed to 3, 4 or 10 degrees of centigrade temperature increase over pre-industrial levels for thousands of years.
(Note also that nobody knows how fast temperatures were rising back then; we only know an upper limit on the time period, not a lower limit.)
Did you actually READ the original PETM paper? You remember - the Nature one in 1999 (vol 401, p 775)? The one demonstrating the Milankovich cycles along with the carbon isotope excursion. Unless someone has been changing the major components of the solar system that affect the Earth's orbit (Jupiter, Venus, Mars, in that order, with minor contributions from other planets), Milankovch's system remains valid. So, yes, we do know how long it took.
Note: the thermometer was invented in the early 1600's
... which is precisely why historical scientists have over the last couple of centuries developed a whole series of what we call "temperature proxies." For example, if you find billion year old rocks made of silty mud and with raindrop impressions on some bedding surfaces, then you know that the temperature was between 0degC and 100degC. If you find gypsum crystals pseudomorphous after anhydrite, then you know that they were deposited at temperatures above 57degC. As time has gone on, the proxies have got more accurate.
But hey, that's science. It's time consuming and difficult to understand. But it is the only effective method we have for advancing knowledge.
I suspect the changes would mostly be to thin laptops, and to cable modems and home routers
As for "thin laptops", [SHRUG]. Cable modems and home routers... really should be in the closet. Who wants to see that gear in the middle of the living room?
I mean, personally I'm fine with a wired connection to my laptop. But then the wife flaps her lips about there being wires all over the living room, as if that were a problem, not a feature.
Running a business with no employees inevitably results in a business with no customers (because people without incomes won't be customers).
This is only inevitable if ALL businesses act like this (or if all customers are customers of your business, and of no other business). That, or the word "inevitable" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Slashdot Mirror
All are as avoidable as radioactivity. The dose of each is what matters, and to a lesser degree, your response to it.
That, a brown dwarf, would be a minimum of about 80 Jupiter masses by current (reasonably accurate) astrophysics. We do things like blow up bombs which probe the physics of this behaviour - we're reasonably sure that those masses are reasonably accurate. Let's be generous and put a 50% error bound on that mass, so that the lower bound for a "brown dwarf" is 40 Jupiter masses. That's around 40*318=)12720 Earth masses, or around 1272 times as big as the Brown-Batygin proposal for Planet9. You're talking about a different object.
Such a large object would have far larger gravitational effects than what we have seen. Essentially, it would have scattered most of the observed population of Kuiper Belt objects. The more eccentric the orbit, the greater the range of KBOs it would have scattered. We observe these KBOs because they exist, therefore your brown dwarf does not exist. Sorry - beautiful hypothesis slain by ugly fact and all that jazz.
Could a smaller gas giant (well below the deuterium-burning limit that defines "brown dwarf") exist out there, and not have been seen yet? Well, since Jupiter is still radiating more heat than it receives from the Sun (due to internal differentiation, principally the settling of helium and "metals" (astrophysics meaning) into it's core from it's mantle, releasing gravitational energy), then we can be sure that anything of Jupiter mass would be radiating so much infrared that we'd have detected in all-sky surveys of the 1980s. Neptune mass planets (17 earth masses) - their detection is much more dubious. We might detect some with current detectors, but that is still being assessed. Whether to assign telescope time from existing projects to searching for this (putative) planet, and how much time to assign, with what instruments and which telescopes, at which times of year ... are active matters of discussion.
Binary and other multiple star systems are indeed far more common than most people think. with all due respect, I've been interested in astronomy for around 4 decades now, and for almost all (3.8 to 3.9 decades) I've been well aware that around 50% of star systems in this galaxy are binaries (e.g. the Sirius A+B system, the brightest star in our sky and only 8 light years away), a couple of percent are ternaries (e.g. our closest known neighbour, the Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri system), and a small fraction are higher multiples, with the highest well-known one being 6-fold. Working out the numbers, for 100 systems, that's about 65 singletons, 60 in binaries, 9-12 in ternaries, and maybe another 5 in higher-multiple systems. total of 134 to 137 stars with 47-46% of them singletons. Most people might not know this ; anyone who has devoted more than a couple of months of after-school study to this knows this. Despite the failure of the Slashdot aspiration to be "news for nerds", here you've got a far higher probability of meeting people who have this level of knowledge than in the general population.
Your suggestions are reasonable. And most of them have been reasoned through decades ago. And most of them shown to be not true. But they were reasonable suggestions to consider.
So ... doing nothing is an option?
And when the levees around the cooling water ponds finally fail, you'll do nothing.
And when the relatively radioactive silt at the bottom of the ponds starts to blow around and blow off-site as the ponds finally dry out ... do nothing?
Your argument about the management history is actually one for having competent people involved and doing things in a transparent, well-reported manner. "Do nothing" will inevitably result in mismanagement of the site.
Does your idiom have the phrase "caught between the devil and the deep blue sea"?
Helium manages to escape from the middle of zircon grains. It will get out of artificial vitrified glass, eventually. It will actually be helped to escape by radiation damage from the entrained radioactive material. For example, first-year geology students who are learning microscopic petrography (description of rocks) will see what we call "pleochroic halos" of radiation damage around zircon crystals in rocks. (Sometimes you can even make an educated guess as to the nuclides in the zircon, from the radius of the halo! Sometimes you get multiple concentric halos.)
Managing gas permeability while minimising ionic leachability is actually part of the design of the glass compositions proposed for vitrification. People have thought through this problem, and quite probably thought through it before you were born.
Ummm, why not? You do know that not only are there three different major types of "radiation" (alpha, beta and gamma), but that each one has it's own wide range of possible particle energies, each one characteristic of particular decays from particular nuclides (though the energy does get degraded by collision with atmospheric particles). If you design the monitoring system sanely, then even quite small leaks will be detectable, as long as you know (1) what the background radiation is (including existing contamination) and (2) you know what you're putting into the dump. I don't think this objection holds water.
There is an implicit "ever" in there. As a geologist, I take "ever" to mean another Earth-lifetime. What do you mean by "ever"? And ...
Since the area is already owned by the state, and is almost unoccupied, is this actually an objection? Guessing that you're an American, your government were willing to make Yucca mountain, the Hanford Valley site, Area 51 and Oak Ridge all essentially off-limits to human habitation for centuries to millennia. If you're a Brit, you might want to think about Anthrax Island as well as our proposed waste sites in Cumbria (which I think should be in Central London). Other nationalities almost certainly have sites which will not be available for habitation for millennia. So what? It's their land ; it's their choice.
I think there has already been some work on that and the expected dimensions (therefore surface area) and temperature (assume it formed similarly to Uranus and Neptune, but received less solar irradiation ; deduce a plausible range of temperatures) put it outside the likely sensitive range for current IR space telescopes and ground-based telescopes. I'm not so sure about the JWST though. I'm sure I read a couple of papers on this in the "Planet-9 kerfuffle" of early this year, but I can't find them now.
Doing a "can this telescope possibly see this target?" analysis is a routine thing. Saves a lot of wasted time.
It is probably too late in the JWST's design and construction programme to develop a sensor specifically for this task. Whether the already-planned sensors can do it is, I'm sure, under consideration.
That was one of the proposed criteria. If you believe that it was one of the accepted grounds, then you either haven't followed the actual science (highly likely), or you've been listening to really poor press reporting (of which there is a lot) and misunderstood the science.
For what it's worth, I argued for the roundness criterion (sometimes described by the orbits and dynamics people as "a materials science argument," which considerably misstates the point). But since I haven't earned my chops as a planetary scientist (just another geologist), I didn't get a vote, and would have lost anyway. Roundness is not a criterion for whether or not something is a planet.
If you, for whatever reasons you have, think that is what happened, then nothing short of full-blown ECT is going to argue you out of it.
If you're actually interested in what happened, then here's some information for you. The discovery of Eris (by Mike Brown a.k.a @PlutoKiller and team) which was probably bigger than Pluto and clearly had not in any sense "cleared it's orbit," then it became obvious that the definition of "planet" needed firming up. There were several proposals as to how to do that, and a wording was settled. What exactly that wording means isn't so clear.
Hal Levison (if I need to write a potted biography of him, then you clearly need to strengthen your planetary science) wrote up his "hand-waving" version a while ago at SWRI, which uses an argument balancing the effects of accretion and ejection. There are other ways of expressing the discussion though - there were a couple of papers on Arxiv a month or so ago about search possibilities for "Putative" (otherwise known as "Planet9".
Trojan "moons" (or "asteroids" ; pick a category) might be better examples. Much better established, with the math having been accepted for several centuries now.
A "rogue planet" (as in, one not gravitationally bound to any star) in that part of the Sun's environment, in a relatively short (few thousands of years) period of time is from first principles much less likely. But it wouldn't produce this pattern of orbits (with the appropriate KBOs at different parts of their orbit then and now) anyway.
A putative spacecraft would literally have to be planetary mass. No real world materials are known which are strong enough to hold a planetary mass into a non-spherical shape. So your spacecraft is now a planet. Even if it is artificial. So you're reduced to one of the previous tow options you raised.
and continued with the Spanish Flu's 1% mortality, then the 50-90% mortality in Central America after the arrival of the Conquistadores. "Pick an event to try to survive through."
You still don't understand the point about the Paleocene-Eocene events being called the Paleocene-Eocene events (NB - the names are likely to change again, in the next few years, as we're getting better data on the events). So I'll run through it in very small steps for you.
There was a set of faunas and floras found in various parts of the world. These were recognised as occurring at the same time period (because some elements of one flora or fauna extended into other floras or faunas, allowing the correlation of the strata in which these floras and faunas). One of these sets of correlated floras and faunas was named as the "Paleocene" ; a different, overlying (where relatable) set of floras and faunas was called the Eocene.
Between the two there were LARGE changes. Not as large as the changes between, for example, the Permian and Triassic, or between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, but large changes nonetheless. This is called an "extinction event".
It's not one of the "Big Five" (Kret-Tert, Trias-Jur, Perm-Trias, Fras-Fam, Ord-Sil). Or the "Big Seven" (Big Five plus two possibly larger ones in the Canbrian). Or the "Big Eight" (Big Seven, plus at least one (if not more) as the Ediacaran fauna was replaced by more modern metazoans). We shouldn't forget either about the GOBE (Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event, which had a large net increase in life forms and ecotomes, as well as many extinctions, but had a net increase in diversity which jibes somewhat with most meanings of "extinction event") either, one of the more profound events in the history of metazoan life. In fact, the Pal-Eo events probably don't make it into the top ten of "extinction events". But that doesn't mean that there weren't major extinctions at that time.
Quick question - pick a pandemic (and approximate mortality rate) to choose to live through : first (~50%) or second (~30%) round of the Black Death ; Justinian Plague (? 50%) ; Pericles' plague during the Penelopesian War (?50%) ; Spanish Flu (As for the current extinction event ("Holocene," or "Anthropocene" ; again terminology is being argued over), how severe that is going to be is too soon to tell. Come back in a couple of hundred thousand years.
Such a scurrilous and baseless allegation! I cannot for one second imagine why you chose to anonymously post this. It's not like the target of the allegation would be likely to send the SWAT team round to plant some good evidence on your computer and a cap in your ass.
Probably even more dangerous for a Frenchman, once they invaded and oppressed the Britons, Welsh and Saxons.
Yes, I did, I remember the dead-tree version flopping onto my doormat. Back when I paid around £100/year of my own money to have access to the science.
So, you're seeing that large perturbations have happened in the past, and that they lead to large climate perturbations, and significant extinctions (hint : the extinctions are why the event is at the boundary of two time eras ; the carbon release explanation came somewhat over 130 years after the fact of the change was recognised). So, if you accept that, are you claiming that all the accountancy of tonnes of oil and gas and coal sold and burned are a colossal multinational fraud, and really we aren't turning those gigatonnes of carbon-containing compounds into atmospheric carbon? You have got some serious disconnects in your logic.
If you ever saw a number without a confidence interval on it (you know - the plus-or-minus figures, not necessarily symmetrical about the most-likely value), then you were looking at reportage, not the actual science (or approximately pre-WW2). Some journalists are better than others about preserving the necessary caution, but they very rarely get past the sub-editor.
Errr, no. You do dozens or hundreds of experimental runs to determine (for example) that 57degC upper limit for the precipitation of the gypsum (monoclinic) calcium sulphate mineral instead of the anhydrite (orthorhombic, anhydrous) form. You also checked if that value changes significantly with the ionic composition of the precipitating solution. (Incidentally, the crystal class gives you the information you need to distinguish the crystals under the microscope, should you feel the need to replicate the experiment.)
That phase diagram is the result of hundreds of measurements. Not assumptions.
Are you reading the reportage, or the science? In fact, even from the reportage, I'm not seeing that claim. I'm seeing things like "Earthâ(TM)s warmest month in the satellite record," which is not the same thing at all as what you're claiming to see.
Evidently. We're burning stored sunshine, and unless we get fusion going on Earth, we're ultimately limited to the rate of energy production by the sun at this time.
Those are policy decisions which I don't think humanity has made yet. In fact, I don't think that "humanity" as a whole actually has a unified communication system, let alone has reached an informed consensus on the question.
Of course, before we get to there, we may well be committed to 3, 4 or 10 degrees of centigrade temperature increase over pre-industrial levels for thousands of years.
Which convenience is that?
So ... exactly what am I going to lose?
You don't need to bet. It's a matter of record that many of the terrorists are from the second-generation of their families to live in Europe.
and I'm still not interested.
Did you actually READ the original PETM paper? You remember - the Nature one in 1999 (vol 401, p 775)? The one demonstrating the Milankovich cycles along with the carbon isotope excursion. Unless someone has been changing the major components of the solar system that affect the Earth's orbit (Jupiter, Venus, Mars, in that order, with minor contributions from other planets), Milankovch's system remains valid. So, yes, we do know how long it took.
... which is precisely why historical scientists have over the last couple of centuries developed a whole series of what we call "temperature proxies." For example, if you find billion year old rocks made of silty mud and with raindrop impressions on some bedding surfaces, then you know that the temperature was between 0degC and 100degC. If you find gypsum crystals pseudomorphous after anhydrite, then you know that they were deposited at temperatures above 57degC. As time has gone on, the proxies have got more accurate.
But hey, that's science. It's time consuming and difficult to understand. But it is the only effective method we have for advancing knowledge.
As for "thin laptops", [SHRUG]. Cable modems and home routers ... really should be in the closet. Who wants to see that gear in the middle of the living room?
I mean, personally I'm fine with a wired connection to my laptop. But then the wife flaps her lips about there being wires all over the living room, as if that were a problem, not a feature.
This is only inevitable if ALL businesses act like this (or if all customers are customers of your business, and of no other business). That, or the word "inevitable" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
So, what is your project?