NASA however, do not have the defense budget. They only get what congress gives them. If this looks bad, then they'll get even less. $200m is a lot of money, and it's definately a lot of money to them.
As an anonymous coward has pointed out this is a mis-reading of the KDS page. To get the 80 foot extension you have to connect 5 x 16 foot extension cables. I am repeating the anonymous coward's observation as I have a higher karma rating.
Well as quite a few people probably know, its today possible to build a PC for $199 if you get the right components.
It can be fun to build your own computer, once you know how. It isn't too hard, once you know how. It can be impressive, to those who haven't tried it themselves. I've built quite a few myself, over the years.
But I no longer try do so. Why? Because I can't save money doing so. I keep an eye on prices, and I can't build one for as cheap as my local clone shops. I can't build one as cheap, even if count the value of my labour at $0 per hour. So, I am going to buy a clone next time, at a place where they look clueful.
A friend of mine isn't convinced by this argument. She has started to build computers for her friends. So far she is doing for fun, and love, and is only charging for the parts. (But she thinks she could be making a profit, if she just got her volume up a couple of hundred percent.) And sometimes her buddies bring them back. I am cruel. When she asks for my advice, I tell her. "Just take it back to the manufacturer, and let them worry about it."
You can buy a brand new $199 PC (Yeah yeah minus the monitor) from this place and website...
Worth noting that while these computers may be "new", they are not really comparable to other new computers. Here in Toronto the slowest new computers are all 1 gigahertz. The computer you pointed uses a motherboard that maxes out at only 800 megahertz. Why is that? It is an old motherboard -- released in June 1999. Is it really fair to call it a "new" computer if it uses such an old motherboard? This motherboard is the old AT form factor version, not an ATX form factor.
Its a very decent configuration with an ASUS
motherboard and can be easily upgraded later to a higher speed Pentium III CPU...
Okay, I just did a google search on this motherboard. It got some okay reviews, and some crappy ones. Here is the.pdf version of the manual. FWIW the manual doesn't say a word about mounting a Pentium III. Maybe the ability to mount a socket 370 Celeron implies that? I wouldn't know. I have stuck with AMD processors the last five or six years.
I'm also ignoring the fact that you really only have to get out of the 1/6th lunar gravity and into Earth's. Gravity would provide a free ride back.
Good. Because I believe it is just not true. If your craft reaches the moon's escape velocity won't it still be way up there in an orbit pretty similar to the moon's? It cost energy to climb out of the Earth's gravity well, to get to vicinity of the moon. And I believe it costs the same amount of energy to climb back down Earth's gravity well.
...their biggest claim to fame is the fact that they have the largest collection of Russian Space artifacts outside Russia...
Interesting. I visited the space museum outside Huntsville Alabama, where they first tested the engines for the Saturn V. I visited in 1990, and there was practically no mention that the Soviets had ever had a Space program. The only hint that the Soviets had had one was a prop hung high in the rafters. The 1969 film marooned has a Soviet cosmonaut disobey orders, changes his orbit, and tosses a couple of crucial oxygen cylinders to American astronauts whose capsule had malfunctioned, so they can't return to Earth. The producers of the film had donated the Soyuz prop. But it was hung so it was very poorly lit, and it would have been very easy to miss. NIH syndrome. Petty too.
I have a soft spot for that film, I went all the way downtown to see it when I was twelve years old.
You can't control the range of modern ballistic missiles by cutting off their fuel. They use solid fuel, like a 4th of July fireworks rocket. They can't be turned off.
The trajectory of a ballistic missile is an arc from an ellipse, with one foci at the centre of the Earth. Presumably ballistic missiles are normally programmed to use the minimum energy trajectory, that is, the one with the greatest range. But they could be programmed to use a more wasteful trajectory, less efficient trajectory, with a shorter range, by pointing the missile higher in the sky.
Did you ever get to play with the garden hose on a hot day when you were a kid? Point it at about 45 degrees to vertical and the water jet travels the farthest distance. Start pointing it higher in the sky, and you reduce the range.
Point it straight up, and you can reduce the range so it lands right on top of you! Exciting fun on a hot day if you are a kid. Not so much fun if you are playing with nuclear warheads.
Yes, a shorter range ballistic missile would not only be cheaper, but would have a shorter flight time.
Google is our friend. It has a cached link here. The page will take a while to load, unless you turn off images, because they are slashdotted, or reasonable equivalent. But the text is there...
There is a 1993 film called "Watch it!" There is a childhood rivalry between these two guys. They are competing for the same gal. The bad one
escalates things by asking her to marry him, even though he couldn't care less about her. There is a scene where they go shopping for rings. The jeweler shows them some rings, and says something like, "These two rings look similar, but one is worth only $N, and the other one is worth 5 x $N."
The bad guy asks his fiance to step aside to talk with him. "Of course I am going to get you the expensive one honey. Now I need to negotiate with him. This is guy stuff, so wait here for me, okay?"
Then he goes over the jeweler, and says. I want you to pretend we are negotiating. Do you remember those two rings, that looked practically identical, where one was worth $N and the other 5 x $N? What I want is to buy the cheap ring, for the price you mentioned. And I am going to give you an extra $100 if you pretend, for my fiance, that I sprung for the expensive one.
Your great-grandmother's ring has another advantage. With a diamond ring bought today you can't be sure it is not a " blood diamond". But a really old one will predate the mining of blood diamonds.
If you don't have the treasured ring of an older relative, how about buying a vintage ring. Other correspondents have said that diamond rings have a very low resale value. So, buying a vintage ring this should be in your favour. Buying one from a pawnbroker is probably going to seem like bad luck. How about doing a google search for estate jewelry?
On the other hand some fraction of the gold jewelry made prior to 1960 is contaminated with recycled gold that was radioactive because it had been used to enclose Radon seeds implanted as a cancer therapy. As the Radon decayed radioactive decay products got plated onto the gold
From all appearances, the hard drive is a standard Seagate model, but... Win98 saw the drive, but [failed...] Win2k could see the drive... but [failed...] Linux would either lock-up or report an error when attempting to read the partition table.
Our experience suggests that Microsoft is using a standard IDE drive, but that it is has proprietary flash ROM firmware that sends back erroneous data when the partition table is scanned.
Hmmm. I wonder what he would have found if Van had used dd to read the first hundred sectors?
Only problem is, whats the altnerative to air travel?
Rail? Here in North America we expect the fare box to pay for the rail infrastructure. But we subsidize the construction of highways. Rail is more energy efficient than air travel. Probably just as vulnerable to terrorists though.
The previous post said "represented 3%...", indicating that the 3% was part of that total.
Let me encourage you again to read this article. It is quite interesting. And the questions you have all show my summary of it didn't do it justice. Your question about the depth of the permafrost is answered.
Once you get below the active layer, which
is the surface layer of the soil that thaws every
year, it can be permanently frozen. And most
permafrost we know in the north has been frozen
for a long period of time. And it can be really thick,
sometimes even over a thousand meters thick.
The article describes the process of climbing down 30 feet into Tuktoyaktuk's community freezer.
You ask:
But then why doesn't the soil in Kansas have over 1,000 feet of black soil?
"Black soil"? You mean "top soil"? Top soil is full of dead plant matter. Well, it rots. It decomposes. At least in Kansas it does.
How deeply does oxygen penetrate permafrost? I think the answer is that it doesn't. Apparently it doesn't even penetrate marshes and bogs that well, or we wouldn't be turning up 2000 year old bog men.
Maybe they would wake you because they needed a good laugh?
And then there is the kind of altruism you can do without.
On waking, someone tells you, "I have some good news and I have some bad news.
"The bad news is that we can't cure your cancer.
"The good news is that everyone on Earth has FOUND GOD. We are all going to live eternally! Those Heaven's Gate people from your own time were on the right path. Since eternity is around the corner, most of us have chosen to be promoted over to God's care.
But we just couldn't leave you and the other corpsicles to spend eternity in hell!
So we have been thawing you out to tell you the good word. It is amazing!
"Oh, you are still in pain? Oh, sorry, what with one thing and another we weren't able to get any painkillers out of storage for you guys.
"But I better get cracking here at page one, chapter one, of the first book of our new holy writ. If I read really quickly I should be able to finish the first book, and get you baptized, before your cancer polishes you off.
"No, don't try and thank me. Seeing you in Heaven is all the reward I need."
Re:Kicking it off course by a few mm takes 1000 ye
on
Tilting at Asteroids
·
· Score: 2
This is only a test run. I imagine that if we were to actualy try to save the planet, we would hit it with a MUCH bigger satalite, moving MUCH faster. And paint it white. And maybe hit it with some nukes. Add it all up, and you'll get more than just that.
Sure, it would make sense to give an Earth striking asteroid every thing we have got. But the goldarn BBC article didn't say which asteroid they were planning to use as a target. 2002 NT7 is 2 kilometres in diameter. There was an earlier asteroid to hit the news a couple of months ago which was something like 200 meters in diameter. Since the volume, and hence the mass would differ by the cube of the difference in radius, diverting the first one would require 1/1000ths as big a nudge as the larger one.
I'd like to know how large the target of this mission is.
Oh yeah, some slashdotters were suggesting that if we were going to go to the trouble of diverting an asteroid, like 2002 NT7, so it didn't hit us, why didn't we go all the way, and divert it enough to capture it in a useful low earth orbit?
The simple answer is that would be a cost a lot more energy. 2002 NT7 would have hit Earth with a velocity of 28 km per second. Earth's escape velocity is 11 km per second. To divert it
so it wouldn't hit earth required changing its velocity by something like 28 centimeters per second. Capturing it in LEO would require changing its velocity by close to 28 kilometers per second.
Those velocities differ by a factor of 10^5.
Now maybe my Physics is really rusty, but the formula for kinetic energy is one half mass times the square of the velocity. So, unless my physics is rusty, the energy to capture 2002 NT7 would be 10^10 times greater than just diverting it.
If we really needed a big pile of rock in LEO wouldn't we be better off just quarrying the moon?
Kicking it off course by a few mm takes 1000 years
on
Tilting at Asteroids
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...If all goes to plan, the asteroid's orbit will be disturbed in the beginning by a few fractions of a millimetre...
That asteroid was thought to have something like one chance in 300,000 of hitting the Earth in 16 years. I chose 10 years as the amount of time it would take to get something out there to divert it. I assumed it was headed straight at the Earth's center. Then I asked myself how much of a nudge we would have to give the asteroid so it would no longer hit the Earth?
If an asteroid were headed right towards the Earth, we would have to give ti a big enough nudge to change its target by d-day by something like 5,000 kilometres. That is 5*10^9 millimetres. So if gave an asteroid that was going to hit Earth a nudge of one millimetre per second at right angles to its current trajectory, wouldn't it take at least 5*10^9 seconds to change a direct hit to a near miss?
There are only 3.1*10^7 seconds in a year.
So a course change of 1 mm per second will protect us if we have something like 150 years lead time. But adding in a safety margin, and considering they only plan to divert the asteroid fractions of a mm, then that sounds like at least 1000 years.
You're trying to compare a non-fossil fuel to combustion of fossil fuels. You need to find how much carbon dioxide is naturally released and compare to that.
Combustion is not required for Carbon to enter the atmosphere. Ordinary rotting of organic matter is also a source of both CO2 and Methane.
The original article stated, and I quoted, the amount of CO2 that the scientist believed entered the atmosphere as a result of the decomposition of previously frozen permafrost. His estimate was that it was 3/100ths as much as entered the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. And he suggested the rate was rapidly increasing.
This is not like the natural release of carbon from a carbon sink, like a forest, when the forest burns. Permafrost is, well, permanent. It was laid down from at least the beginning of the last ice age. Possibly before the current cycles of ice ages. Ie. tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
Following up my wn post with some further info. This article touches on the repeat of the first west to east voyage through the Northwest Passage. But it also talks about the threat of melting permafrost.
In the high Arctic the soil is frozen year round. Normally the top six inches or so melts long enough for plants to grow during the brief Arctic summer. But the soil below that top six inches remains frozen.
Now it is melting, and this is a terrible development. This article says:
When plants grow here in the Arctic, they absorb carbon from the air. But when they die they don't decay like plants in the south because they are frozen so much of the year. Eventually all that dead plant matter becomes part of the permafrost. And that makes Arctic tundra, at least until now, an important carbon sink. In fact, Arctic tundra contains one-third of the earth's stored soil carbon.
But now the permafrost is melting, releasing eons of stored carbon. Much of this carbon will be released as Methane, which is 30 times more damaging than Carbon Dioxide.
The scientist being interviewed estimated that recently thawed rotting vegetation from melting permafrost represented 3% of the amount of carbon flowing into the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Global warming frightens me. And now I have learned of yet another reason to worry.
Okay so contrails are bad... unless you live in a cold climate ( that is )...
Bzzt. Naive. Global warming affects all climate zones. Some naive Canadian journalists have naively suggested that global warming would benefit Canada, because areas too cold for farming would now become arable. Or they have suggested it would be good for the summer tourist industry. Dim.
But the effects are proving unpredictable. Will there be enough rain? Currently arable areas are experiencing drought. I have already written here about the shocking results of the Repeat of Henry Larsen's voyages through the Northwest passage. The first traversal of the Northwest passage, in 1903, took Amundsen three years, because of the ice. Larsen's first trip took him 850 days, because of the ice. The vessel that repeated the voyage in 2000, easily traversed the passage, from Vancouver to Halifax in just 100 days, and encountered almost no ice...
Wouldn't you need to be able to repeat the experiment several times before you could rule out a fluke?
Hmmm. Can I remind you that this "experiment" covered every part of the USA? Since the USA is a big country, finding the same effect all over is better than just testing a single location.
I'd be willing to ground the entire US commercial air-fleet for another experiment, to build more confidence though.
I see it as a reminder that, sometimes, anonymous cowards are just that cowards. This guy can't summon up the courage to post his poisonous views under his own name.
Also most doctors the moment they see high blood sugar (say mid 200's) will say "I want you to tak these medications or go on insulin, instead of trying any modification of diet or any other thing.
Really? This surprises me. I wonder if this is an American experience? Most working Americans have their health care rationaled by their HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations?). And the news of this kind of health care that filters up here to Canada is that patients find that the HMO will supply them with inferior care on the basis of cost. Is it possible that the anecdotal reports you summarize here are due to Doctors following the HMOs advice that prescribing drugs are cheaper, require less followup visits, than monitoring a serious weight loss and exercise program?
Americans believe that Canadians, and the citizens of other developed nations that have socialized medicine (ie just about all of them) get inferior care -- care plagued by wasteful red tape. But I heard an interview with a doctor who had practiced in both the USA and Canada. His experience was that he had to waste much more time over red-tape while practicing in the USA. In Canada he only had to look in one place to see if a procedure was insured. But in the USA each of his patients had a different private health care insurer. And they each had constantly changing, different rules about which procedures they covered. The way he characterized it was, "In the USA serious medical decisions about what care a patient should get aren't made by doctors or other trained medical personnel. They are made by the HMO's poorly-paid clerks, who have no medical training whatsoever."
Slashdot Mirror
As an anonymous coward has pointed out this is a mis-reading of the KDS page. To get the 80 foot extension you have to connect 5 x 16 foot extension cables. I am repeating the anonymous coward's observation as I have a higher karma rating.
It can be fun to build your own computer, once you know how. It isn't too hard, once you know how. It can be impressive, to those who haven't tried it themselves. I've built quite a few myself, over the years.
But I no longer try do so. Why? Because I can't save money doing so. I keep an eye on prices, and I can't build one for as cheap as my local clone shops. I can't build one as cheap, even if count the value of my labour at $0 per hour. So, I am going to buy a clone next time, at a place where they look clueful.
A friend of mine isn't convinced by this argument. She has started to build computers for her friends. So far she is doing for fun, and love, and is only charging for the parts. (But she thinks she could be making a profit, if she just got her volume up a couple of hundred percent.) And sometimes her buddies bring them back. I am cruel. When she asks for my advice, I tell her. "Just take it back to the manufacturer, and let them worry about it."
Worth noting that while these computers may be "new", they are not really comparable to other new computers. Here in Toronto the slowest new computers are all 1 gigahertz. The computer you pointed uses a motherboard that maxes out at only 800 megahertz. Why is that? It is an old motherboard -- released in June 1999. Is it really fair to call it a "new" computer if it uses such an old motherboard? This motherboard is the old AT form factor version, not an ATX form factor.
Okay, I just did a google search on this motherboard. It got some okay reviews, and some crappy ones. Here is the .pdf version of the manual. FWIW the manual doesn't say a word about mounting a Pentium III. Maybe the ability to mount a socket 370 Celeron implies that? I wouldn't know. I have stuck with AMD processors the last five or six years.
Good. Because I believe it is just not true. If your craft reaches the moon's escape velocity won't it still be way up there in an orbit pretty similar to the moon's? It cost energy to climb out of the Earth's gravity well, to get to vicinity of the moon. And I believe it costs the same amount of energy to climb back down Earth's gravity well.
Interesting. I visited the space museum outside Huntsville Alabama, where they first tested the engines for the Saturn V. I visited in 1990, and there was practically no mention that the Soviets had ever had a Space program. The only hint that the Soviets had had one was a prop hung high in the rafters. The 1969 film marooned has a Soviet cosmonaut disobey orders, changes his orbit, and tosses a couple of crucial oxygen cylinders to American astronauts whose capsule had malfunctioned, so they can't return to Earth. The producers of the film had donated the Soyuz prop. But it was hung so it was very poorly lit, and it would have been very easy to miss. NIH syndrome. Petty too.
I have a soft spot for that film, I went all the way downtown to see it when I was twelve years old.
You can't control the range of modern ballistic missiles by cutting off their fuel. They use solid fuel, like a 4th of July fireworks rocket. They can't be turned off.
The trajectory of a ballistic missile is an arc from an ellipse, with one foci at the centre of the Earth. Presumably ballistic missiles are normally programmed to use the minimum energy trajectory, that is, the one with the greatest range. But they could be programmed to use a more wasteful trajectory, less efficient trajectory, with a shorter range, by pointing the missile higher in the sky.
Did you ever get to play with the garden hose on a hot day when you were a kid? Point it at about 45 degrees to vertical and the water jet travels the farthest distance. Start pointing it higher in the sky, and you reduce the range.
Point it straight up, and you can reduce the range so it lands right on top of you! Exciting fun on a hot day if you are a kid. Not so much fun if you are playing with nuclear warheads.
Yes, a shorter range ballistic missile would not only be cheaper, but would have a shorter flight time.
Woops that was the link to the interview with six KDE developers. The link to the interview with Guido Van Rossum is here.
Google is our friend. It has a cached link here. The page will take a while to load, unless you turn off images, because they are slashdotted, or reasonable equivalent. But the text is there...
There is a 1993 film called "Watch it!" There is a childhood rivalry between these two guys. They are competing for the same gal. The bad one escalates things by asking her to marry him, even though he couldn't care less about her. There is a scene where they go shopping for rings. The jeweler shows them some rings, and says something like, "These two rings look similar, but one is worth only $N, and the other one is worth 5 x $N."
The bad guy asks his fiance to step aside to talk with him. "Of course I am going to get you the expensive one honey. Now I need to negotiate with him. This is guy stuff, so wait here for me, okay?"
Then he goes over the jeweler, and says. I want you to pretend we are negotiating. Do you remember those two rings, that looked practically identical, where one was worth $N and the other 5 x $N? What I want is to buy the cheap ring, for the price you mentioned. And I am going to give you an extra $100 if you pretend, for my fiance, that I sprung for the expensive one.
If you don't have the treasured ring of an older relative, how about buying a vintage ring. Other correspondents have said that diamond rings have a very low resale value. So, buying a vintage ring this should be in your favour. Buying one from a pawnbroker is probably going to seem like bad luck. How about doing a google search for estate jewelry?
On the other hand some fraction of the gold jewelry made prior to 1960 is contaminated with recycled gold that was radioactive because it had been used to enclose Radon seeds implanted as a cancer therapy. As the Radon decayed radioactive decay products got plated onto the gold
Hmmm. I wonder what he would have found if Van had used dd to read the first hundred sectors?
Let me encourage you again to read this article. It is quite interesting. And the questions you have all show my summary of it didn't do it justice. Your question about the depth of the permafrost is answered.
The article describes the process of climbing down 30 feet into Tuktoyaktuk's community freezer.
You ask:
"Black soil"? You mean "top soil"? Top soil is full of dead plant matter. Well, it rots. It decomposes. At least in Kansas it does.
How deeply does oxygen penetrate permafrost? I think the answer is that it doesn't. Apparently it doesn't even penetrate marshes and bogs that well, or we wouldn't be turning up 2000 year old bog men.
Maybe they would wake you because they needed a good laugh?
And then there is the kind of altruism you can do without.
On waking, someone tells you, "I have some good news and I have some bad news.
"The bad news is that we can't cure your cancer.
"The good news is that everyone on Earth has FOUND GOD . We are all going to live eternally! Those Heaven's Gate people from your own time were on the right path. Since eternity is around the corner, most of us have chosen to be promoted over to God's care.
But we just couldn't leave you and the other corpsicles to spend eternity in hell!
So we have been thawing you out to tell you the good word. It is amazing!
"Oh, you are still in pain? Oh, sorry, what with one thing and another we weren't able to get any painkillers out of storage for you guys.
"But I better get cracking here at page one, chapter one, of the first book of our new holy writ. If I read really quickly I should be able to finish the first book, and get you baptized, before your cancer polishes you off.
"No, don't try and thank me. Seeing you in Heaven is all the reward I need."
Sure, it would make sense to give an Earth striking asteroid every thing we have got. But the goldarn BBC article didn't say which asteroid they were planning to use as a target. 2002 NT7 is 2 kilometres in diameter. There was an earlier asteroid to hit the news a couple of months ago which was something like 200 meters in diameter. Since the volume, and hence the mass would differ by the cube of the difference in radius, diverting the first one would require 1/1000ths as big a nudge as the larger one.
I'd like to know how large the target of this mission is.
The simple answer is that would be a cost a lot more energy. 2002 NT7 would have hit Earth with a velocity of 28 km per second. Earth's escape velocity is 11 km per second. To divert it so it wouldn't hit earth required changing its velocity by something like 28 centimeters per second. Capturing it in LEO would require changing its velocity by close to 28 kilometers per second.
Those velocities differ by a factor of 10^5.
Now maybe my Physics is really rusty, but the formula for kinetic energy is one half mass times the square of the velocity. So, unless my physics is rusty, the energy to capture 2002 NT7 would be 10^10 times greater than just diverting it.
If we really needed a big pile of rock in LEO wouldn't we be better off just quarrying the moon?
I did some of the math for this, on the back of an envelope, when we were this asteroid story from late July.
That asteroid was thought to have something like one chance in 300,000 of hitting the Earth in 16 years. I chose 10 years as the amount of time it would take to get something out there to divert it. I assumed it was headed straight at the Earth's center. Then I asked myself how much of a nudge we would have to give the asteroid so it would no longer hit the Earth?
If an asteroid were headed right towards the Earth, we would have to give ti a big enough nudge to change its target by d-day by something like 5,000 kilometres. That is 5*10^9 millimetres. So if gave an asteroid that was going to hit Earth a nudge of one millimetre per second at right angles to its current trajectory, wouldn't it take at least 5*10^9 seconds to change a direct hit to a near miss?
There are only 3.1*10^7 seconds in a year.
So a course change of 1 mm per second will protect us if we have something like 150 years lead time. But adding in a safety margin, and considering they only plan to divert the asteroid fractions of a mm, then that sounds like at least 1000 years.
No. Granted, the executive could have been braver. But his view was solicitied by Greg Santoval, the journalist who wrote the article you linked to.
Also worth noting is that his view is not directly attacking an ethnic group.
And, note that Santoval's article has no clues as to the executive's ethnic group.
Combustion is not required for Carbon to enter the atmosphere. Ordinary rotting of organic matter is also a source of both CO2 and Methane.
The original article stated, and I quoted, the amount of CO2 that the scientist believed entered the atmosphere as a result of the decomposition of previously frozen permafrost. His estimate was that it was 3/100ths as much as entered the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. And he suggested the rate was rapidly increasing.
This is not like the natural release of carbon from a carbon sink, like a forest, when the forest burns. Permafrost is, well, permanent. It was laid down from at least the beginning of the last ice age. Possibly before the current cycles of ice ages. Ie. tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
In the high Arctic the soil is frozen year round. Normally the top six inches or so melts long enough for plants to grow during the brief Arctic summer. But the soil below that top six inches remains frozen.
Now it is melting, and this is a terrible development. This article says:
But now the permafrost is melting, releasing eons of stored carbon. Much of this carbon will be released as Methane, which is 30 times more damaging than Carbon Dioxide.
The scientist being interviewed estimated that recently thawed rotting vegetation from melting permafrost represented 3% of the amount of carbon flowing into the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Global warming frightens me. And now I have learned of yet another reason to worry.
Bzzt. Naive. Global warming affects all climate zones. Some naive Canadian journalists have naively suggested that global warming would benefit Canada, because areas too cold for farming would now become arable. Or they have suggested it would be good for the summer tourist industry. Dim.
But the effects are proving unpredictable. Will there be enough rain? Currently arable areas are experiencing drought. I have already written here about the shocking results of the Repeat of Henry Larsen's voyages through the Northwest passage. The first traversal of the Northwest passage, in 1903, took Amundsen three years, because of the ice. Larsen's first trip took him 850 days, because of the ice. The vessel that repeated the voyage in 2000, easily traversed the passage, from Vancouver to Halifax in just 100 days, and encountered almost no ice...
Hmmm. Can I remind you that this "experiment" covered every part of the USA? Since the USA is a big country, finding the same effect all over is better than just testing a single location.
I'd be willing to ground the entire US commercial air-fleet for another experiment, to build more confidence though.
I see it as a reminder that, sometimes, anonymous cowards are just that cowards. This guy can't summon up the courage to post his poisonous views under his own name.
Really? This surprises me. I wonder if this is an American experience? Most working Americans have their health care rationaled by their HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations?). And the news of this kind of health care that filters up here to Canada is that patients find that the HMO will supply them with inferior care on the basis of cost. Is it possible that the anecdotal reports you summarize here are due to Doctors following the HMOs advice that prescribing drugs are cheaper, require less followup visits, than monitoring a serious weight loss and exercise program?
Americans believe that Canadians, and the citizens of other developed nations that have socialized medicine (ie just about all of them) get inferior care -- care plagued by wasteful red tape. But I heard an interview with a doctor who had practiced in both the USA and Canada. His experience was that he had to waste much more time over red-tape while practicing in the USA. In Canada he only had to look in one place to see if a procedure was insured. But in the USA each of his patients had a different private health care insurer. And they each had constantly changing, different rules about which procedures they covered. The way he characterized it was, "In the USA serious medical decisions about what care a patient should get aren't made by doctors or other trained medical personnel. They are made by the HMO's poorly-paid clerks, who have no medical training whatsoever."
Best of luck in your healthy eating plan...