To a large extent, global circulation models predict the boring stuff that most people don't even think about-- the diurnal temperature variation, for example (which is highly affected by the greenhouse effect-- much more than the average temperature), and the variation of temperature with altitude and with latitude-- the models are constantly compared to the radiosonde data. The models are actually global circulation models, and the main thing that they work at predicting is the atmospheric circulation-- where does the air move, and how much? This is basically what drives weather. Cloudiness and the cloud altitudes are another thing that GCMs predict. Basically, all of these are predictions that are compared to data to verify the model.
If I were looking for predictions that lay persons could compare to data, I'd go for measuring the upwelling and downwelling infrared flux from balloon experiments-- these days lots of students do high altitude balloons, and that would be a cool measurement to do.
"According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total.
Yow-- that little??? Nuclear power plants provide about 11 percent of the world's electricity production now, so multiply that 230 years by 0.11, and it says we have a twenty-five year supply of uranium fuel if all of the world's electricity were nuclear.
I retract whatever I may have said earlier-- according to this, nuclear (at least, uranium-based fission nuclear reactors) is not a viable long-term solution.
Too often, however, the net result seems to be supporting a position of "we would do well to not take at face value those scientific results which threaten the profit of oil companies, or other billion dollar industries."
...
I am not saying we should ignore those claims, but rather use them as a hint to do more repetitions until we establish those claims as likely true or likely not.
Good God, how many repetitions do we have to do? We've done hundreds. Do you want thousands? Millions?
Literally hundreds of institutions on five continents are and have been repeating the work and running the models; the source codes for all the analysis tools are open-source and available to anybody; tens of terabytes of data is acquired every year (you do know that climate science is supported by data, right?; thousands of pages of documentation are available explaining exactly what and how the work was done; and they all agree on the overall consensus.
Let me suggest the opposite: the understanding of anthropogenic global warming is, at this point, the most well validated scientific theory in the history of science. Scientific theories are validated when they are challenged and meet the challenge, and no theory has ever been challenged as long or as relentlessly as anthropogenic global warming.
If there is any theory anywhere which has been challenged, and challenged, and challenged-- this is it.
The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel.
Pork barrel or not, it was nevertheless the first re-usable orbital launch vehicle.
...And, so far, the only reusable orbital launch vehicle ever flown. (Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one.)
I was referring to the numbers in the article being discussed here, which were not the generic "$/kg to LEO" but were the specific $paid-per-launch-for-delivery-to-ISS divided by payload-delivered-to-ISS.
Not sure why you're being modded down, because you nailed it.
Possibly -1 redundant, because he only repeated in sarcastic tones what the very first post wrote: "The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted."
Huh-- you're right. I misread the columns. Thanks.
So, the dollars per kilogram drops by a factor of 4 as the launches per year increases from 1 to 5, but the actual cost remains at 1.3 billion per launch even at a flight rate of five per year. But because the cargo capacity is so high, the cost per kilogram is about the same as the Falcon 9/Dragon, and somewhat lower than the Antares/Cygnus.
Looking more carefully, the recurring cost does include a budget of $1 billion per year for shuttle upgrades. So, if you did not do upgrades (essentially freezing the shuttle technology at what it is), cost would drop slightly (only by 15%, though, not a very large drop).
To be fair, there was one actual interview in which (then) NASA Administrator Bolden was quoted saying that NASA needed to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering". However, a day later the White House corrected this to say that this was "not the task of NASA."
Quite right. And it took an outsider (Musk) to ask a game changing question ("Can first stage rockets be salvaged and reused to save money?") because when NASA got started doing launches, that wasn't possible at all.
That was true when NASA first started doing launches, which was in 1950 (project Bumper 2). The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
So over the years as technology changed, nobody at NASA ever thought about it because they were too entrenched in the old way of doing launches to ask any new questions.
Or, more to the point, for the thirty years after developing the shuttle, NASA was not given the authority to work on developing a next generation booster.
When they finally did get to replacing the shuttle... the replacement was to fund SpaceX to develop a booster for cargo flights to the ISS.
(Also Rocketplane Kistler. Not all commercial launcher development programs worked.)
Actually, yes, I found the actual details in the numbers to be quite surprising.
Working through the details, most of the cost of using the shuttle to resupply the station turned out to be due to the fact that one flight per year was enough to deliver the cargo to station, but that's not enough to cover the fixed cost. The main reason that the shuttle was too expensive as a resupply vehicle was that its cargo was too high (all of the cargo that sixteen flights of both Dragon and Cygnus carried to ISS, from 2012 to present, equals the cargo capacity of 2.5 shuttle launches).
The cost per flight of the shuttle drops remarkably with number of flights per year. From table 6, on page 30, the cost is $365 million per flight at a rate of one flight per year, and drops to $96 million per year at a rate of five flights per year*.
So, the surprising thing is that at five flights per year, the shuttle cargo launch cost would have been about equal to the Falcon 9/Dragon cost.
I didn't know that.
-------
*note that this is NOT counting the development cost of shuttle-- that is money already spent, so you don't get it back when the shuttle stopped flying. So the second lesson is that it would not be a good bargain to build a new vehicle with the same development costs as the shuttle.
Among those included in this list of Climate Scientists:
A small correction: the people asked to sign were to be "scientists from any scientific discipline", not specifically climate scientists.
Davis, Joanne - Australian
Daweti, Nokuthula - Student
de Clercq, Deon - Earthling
Hamilton, Ava - independent documentary producer/citizen scientist
Jara, Andrea - Colombian
Thapa, Lal - Asst. Professor of Alien Invasion ...
ON that last one: you conveniently left out most of the reference in order to highlight the phrase "alien invasion." Looking at the list, the full information following the name is:
Thapa, Lal
Asst. Professor, Plant Ecology, Microbial Interaction, Climate Change, Alien Invasion
Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University
Nepal.
In the context of plant ecology, the phrase "invasion" means "invasion of a alien (that is, non-native) plant species into an ecology."
I think I'll give a person whose native language is Nepali the benefit of the doubt in not necessarily realizing that "alien invasion" might mean something different to slashdot readers than to plant ecologists.
Strange thing is that I've never seen a letter of 20,000 mathematicians stating that the value of pi isn't 3,
There isn't a relentless and well-funded campaign to assert that mathematicians are liars who are perpetrating a hoax about the value of pi, nor a publicity campaign by the fossil-fuel companies to convince the public that there is no consensus about the value of pi because a trillion-dollar industry might make less profit if people knew that the value of pi was well known.
If it sounds like turtles all the way down it is: just try to trace the claim of "97% scientists agree" to its roots in reality
OK, I traced it. The 97% figure came from the several references: J. Cook, et al., "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, No. 4, 13 April 2016. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
It states: "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”
Another reference is J. Carlton et al., "The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists," Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 10, No. 94, 24 September 2015. Their results show a 96.7% agreement on anthropogenic contribution to rising temperatures among the group who indicated that 'The majority of my research concerns climate change or the impacts of climate change.'" (The agreement was "only" 91.9% when the group was expanded to all scientists and not just climate scientists.)
and you'll see it's based on a long chain of implicit trust based on implicit credibility. (Who did they poll? What was the poll? Did scientist accurately report their convictions? Who reported the news? etc. etc.)
Questions which are all answered.... if you had done the work that you suggested: "trace the claim to its roots."
That doesn't mean our scientific knowledge is not useful -- on the contrary, whether it is useful is the (only) criteria to go by. But it means it is acquired statistically, as if humanity were one giant neural network. If you need a confirmation, here's a quote (supposedly) from Max Planck who (we believe) had enough experience to see the pattern: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
The greenhouse effect isn't a "new scientific truth". It's been known and pretty well understood for well over a hundred years. It is the tool we use to understand planetary temperatures.
The first thing to do, though, is to get the fanatic right wing to stop with the "abstinence only, because birth control of any kind is against the will of god" thing.
We had this tech in the 60s. No Nukes in Space treaty killed that. An engine isn't a weapon.
No, it didn't. The Nuclear test ban treaty banned nuclear explosions in space. It didn't ban nuclear reactors, and in fact several have been flown (primarily in the old Soviet Union's RORSAT program, but one-- SNAP-10A—by the US.)
Material limits set what we can do with conventional rockets. Not just melting points but thermal shock and fatigue.
No. Chemical rockets are limited by the energy content of the chemical fuel. They haven't been limited by materials for well over fifty years.
Those material limits are the same for a nuclear power source - and shoving water through a barely sub-critical reactor to heat it seems like a laughable idea. Water is hellish corrosive at high temperatures so odds are you'd be leaving a trail of reactor guts behind you before the engine had been running long.
Nobody proposes using water as reaction mass in a nuclear thermal rocket-- Specific impulse (Isp) is not high enough; you might as well use chemical propellants.
Hydrogen isn't a lot better. See "hydrogen embrittlement"
Hydrogen is a lot better. It is pretty much what everybody (or at least, everybody who knows the technology) would use for a NTR.
Since nuclear engines were designed, built and tested with hydrogen reaction mass back in the 1960s and early 1970s, your belief that they couldn't work is quaint.
A nuclear powered ion-drive seems a lot more likely to work.
Yes...and no. Ion drives put out a very low thrust per unit power. Thermal rockets are high thrust. There are some applications where you can get there slowly but efficiently, but it's definitely an engineering trade-off.
"A nuclear powered ion-drive seems a lot more likely to work."
Indeed. Hydrogen is sort of stupid, but that is where they started decades back, and it is perhaps best if they continue along those lines and develop it properly.
Yes, nuclear thermal is very simple, and it has been demonstrated.
Then load up with Xenon and get serious. Get the Reactor nice and toasty, both heat and ionize the Xenon with it, and then work with what Plasma Physicists have been doing, in accelerating the product and shooting it out the back end.
Really you want to do one or the other, not both. Either use the thermal energy, in which case you want hydrogen, or convert the thermal energy to electrical power and use an ion engine, but not both at once.
(Accelerators are notoriously thirsty, but that is another thing Reactors are good at providing.)
135Xe is a particularly good candidate, as it has a very high Thermal Neutron Cross Section, and can carry some of those pesky Neutrons away with them.
That makes little sense. If you're using the reaction mass for neutron shielding, basically you want the lowest atomic mass you can get. And a fuel that decays with a half life of 9 hours means you'd have to breed the fuel in situ.
Well, the Rover and Pee Wee projects built and tested nuclear rocket engines, so it's already beyond Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 1. Right now nuclear thermal rockets are TRL 4: Module and/or subsystem validation in laboratory environment;
standalone prototype implementations.
This settlement is 45 minutes outside of Phoenix, a city of population 1.6 million. And growing. Rapidly. All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people already live there.
He merely needs to make a suburb that's somewhat more attractive than the other suburbs currently being built. And he can sell this to, not new people who had never thought of moving to Arizona, but some of the 81,000 people moving to the Phoenix area every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Skip Mario-- I want the Legend of Zelda movie!
If I were looking for predictions that lay persons could compare to data, I'd go for measuring the upwelling and downwelling infrared flux from balloon experiments-- these days lots of students do high altitude balloons, and that would be a cool measurement to do.
"According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total.
Yow-- that little??? Nuclear power plants provide about 11 percent of the world's electricity production now, so multiply that 230 years by 0.11, and it says we have a twenty-five year supply of uranium fuel if all of the world's electricity were nuclear.
I retract whatever I may have said earlier-- according to this, nuclear (at least, uranium-based fission nuclear reactors) is not a viable long-term solution.
...
I am not saying we should ignore those claims, but rather use them as a hint to do more repetitions until we establish those claims as likely true or likely not.
Good God, how many repetitions do we have to do? We've done hundreds. Do you want thousands? Millions?
Literally hundreds of institutions on five continents are and have been repeating the work and running the models; the source codes for all the analysis tools are open-source and available to anybody; tens of terabytes of data is acquired every year (you do know that climate science is supported by data, right?; thousands of pages of documentation are available explaining exactly what and how the work was done; and they all agree on the overall consensus.
Let me suggest the opposite: the understanding of anthropogenic global warming is, at this point, the most well validated scientific theory in the history of science . Scientific theories are validated when they are challenged and meet the challenge, and no theory has ever been challenged as long or as relentlessly as anthropogenic global warming.
If there is any theory anywhere which has been challenged, and challenged, and challenged-- this is it.
The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
Total pork-barrel.
Pork barrel or not, it was nevertheless the first re-usable orbital launch vehicle.
...And, so far, the only reusable orbital launch vehicle ever flown. (Falcon 9 recovers and re-uses the first stage: the easy one.)
I was referring to the numbers in the article being discussed here, which were not the generic "$/kg to LEO" but were the specific $paid-per-launch-for-delivery-to-ISS divided by payload-delivered-to-ISS.
Not sure why you're being modded down, because you nailed it.
Possibly -1 redundant, because he only repeated in sarcastic tones what the very first post wrote: "The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted."
Nailed it.
So, the dollars per kilogram drops by a factor of 4 as the launches per year increases from 1 to 5, but the actual cost remains at 1.3 billion per launch even at a flight rate of five per year. But because the cargo capacity is so high, the cost per kilogram is about the same as the Falcon 9/Dragon, and somewhat lower than the Antares/Cygnus.
Looking more carefully, the recurring cost does include a budget of $1 billion per year for shuttle upgrades. So, if you did not do upgrades (essentially freezing the shuttle technology at what it is), cost would drop slightly (only by 15%, though, not a very large drop).
To be fair, there was one actual interview in which (then) NASA Administrator Bolden was quoted saying that NASA needed to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering". However, a day later the White House corrected this to say that this was "not the task of NASA."
Quite right. And it took an outsider (Musk) to ask a game changing question ("Can first stage rockets be salvaged and reused to save money?") because when NASA got started doing launches, that wasn't possible at all.
That was true when NASA first started doing launches, which was in 1950 (project Bumper 2). The first re-usable rocket to launch to orbit was, of course, the space shuttle. So, NASA started doing reusable rocket launches back when Elon Musk was 11 years old.
So over the years as technology changed, nobody at NASA ever thought about it because they were too entrenched in the old way of doing launches to ask any new questions.
Or, more to the point, for the thirty years after developing the shuttle, NASA was not given the authority to work on developing a next generation booster.
When they finally did get to replacing the shuttle... the replacement was to fund SpaceX to develop a booster for cargo flights to the ISS.
(Also Rocketplane Kistler. Not all commercial launcher development programs worked.)
Actually, yes, I found the actual details in the numbers to be quite surprising.
Working through the details, most of the cost of using the shuttle to resupply the station turned out to be due to the fact that one flight per year was enough to deliver the cargo to station, but that's not enough to cover the fixed cost. The main reason that the shuttle was too expensive as a resupply vehicle was that its cargo was too high (all of the cargo that sixteen flights of both Dragon and Cygnus carried to ISS, from 2012 to present, equals the cargo capacity of 2.5 shuttle launches).
The cost per flight of the shuttle drops remarkably with number of flights per year. From table 6, on page 30, the cost is $365 million per flight at a rate of one flight per year, and drops to $96 million per year at a rate of five flights per year*.
So, the surprising thing is that at five flights per year, the shuttle cargo launch cost would have been about equal to the Falcon 9/Dragon cost.
I didn't know that.
-------
*note that this is NOT counting the development cost of shuttle-- that is money already spent, so you don't get it back when the shuttle stopped flying. So the second lesson is that it would not be a good bargain to build a new vehicle with the same development costs as the shuttle.
Among those included in this list of Climate Scientists:
A small correction: the people asked to sign were to be "scientists from any scientific discipline", not specifically climate scientists.
Davis, Joanne - Australian Daweti, Nokuthula - Student de Clercq, Deon - Earthling Hamilton, Ava - independent documentary producer/citizen scientist Jara, Andrea - Colombian Thapa, Lal - Asst. Professor of Alien Invasion
...
ON that last one: you conveniently left out most of the reference in order to highlight the phrase "alien invasion." Looking at the list, the full information following the name is:
Thapa, Lal Asst. Professor, Plant Ecology, Microbial Interaction, Climate Change, Alien Invasion Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University Nepal.
In the context of plant ecology, the phrase "invasion" means "invasion of a alien (that is, non-native) plant species into an ecology."
I think I'll give a person whose native language is Nepali the benefit of the doubt in not necessarily realizing that "alien invasion" might mean something different to slashdot readers than to plant ecologists.
Strange thing is that I've never seen a letter of 20,000 mathematicians stating that the value of pi isn't 3,
There isn't a relentless and well-funded campaign to assert that mathematicians are liars who are perpetrating a hoax about the value of pi, nor a publicity campaign by the fossil-fuel companies to convince the public that there is no consensus about the value of pi because a trillion-dollar industry might make less profit if people knew that the value of pi was well known.
If it sounds like turtles all the way down it is: just try to trace the claim of "97% scientists agree" to its roots in reality
OK, I traced it. The 97% figure came from the several references: J. Cook, et al., "Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming," Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 11, No. 4, 13 April 2016. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
It states: "The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”
Another reference is J. Carlton et al., "The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists," Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 10, No. 94, 24 September 2015. Their results show a 96.7% agreement on anthropogenic contribution to rising temperatures among the group who indicated that 'The majority of my research concerns climate change or the impacts of climate change.'" (The agreement was "only" 91.9% when the group was expanded to all scientists and not just climate scientists.)
A slightly later paper by Cook et al. included a table summarizing fourteen other surveys of scientists, is here: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
And a nice site summarizing what scientific societies say is here: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
and you'll see it's based on a long chain of implicit trust based on implicit credibility. (Who did they poll? What was the poll? Did scientist accurately report their convictions? Who reported the news? etc. etc.)
Questions which are all answered.... if you had done the work that you suggested: "trace the claim to its roots."
That doesn't mean our scientific knowledge is not useful -- on the contrary, whether it is useful is the (only) criteria to go by. But it means it is acquired statistically, as if humanity were one giant neural network. If you need a confirmation, here's a quote (supposedly) from Max Planck who (we believe) had enough experience to see the pattern: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
The greenhouse effect isn't a "new scientific truth". It's been known and pretty well understood for well over a hundred years. It is the tool we use to understand planetary temperatures.
Except that the climate models have, overall, worked remarkably well.
Here is the first and best-referenced of the global climate models, dated from 1967, and a comparison of the model against the data for the following fifty years: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly-3c0854932a4a.
The model fit the data remarkably well over a time span of fifty years.
Wrong again. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
The first thing to do, though, is to get the fanatic right wing to stop with the "abstinence only, because birth control of any kind is against the will of god" thing.
Uh, just to point out the obvious, a simpler and cheaper solution would be just to make sure that birth control is available to those who want it.
A better solution would be to mandate birth control for those that can't afford it.
If by "mandate" you mean "force birth control on people whether they want it or not"-- no.
If by "mandate" you mean "mandate that birth control be available for everybody who can't afford it," -- yes, that would be a good idea.
Not only that, but it also says the same thing twice.
We had this tech in the 60s. No Nukes in Space treaty killed that. An engine isn't a weapon.
No, it didn't. The Nuclear test ban treaty banned nuclear explosions in space. It didn't ban nuclear reactors, and in fact several have been flown (primarily in the old Soviet Union's RORSAT program, but one-- SNAP-10A—by the US.)
Material limits set what we can do with conventional rockets. Not just melting points but thermal shock and fatigue.
No. Chemical rockets are limited by the energy content of the chemical fuel. They haven't been limited by materials for well over fifty years.
Those material limits are the same for a nuclear power source - and shoving water through a barely sub-critical reactor to heat it seems like a laughable idea. Water is hellish corrosive at high temperatures so odds are you'd be leaving a trail of reactor guts behind you before the engine had been running long.
Nobody proposes using water as reaction mass in a nuclear thermal rocket-- Specific impulse (Isp) is not high enough; you might as well use chemical propellants.
Hydrogen isn't a lot better. See "hydrogen embrittlement"
Hydrogen is a lot better. It is pretty much what everybody (or at least, everybody who knows the technology) would use for a NTR.
Since nuclear engines were designed, built and tested with hydrogen reaction mass back in the 1960s and early 1970s, your belief that they couldn't work is quaint.
A nuclear powered ion-drive seems a lot more likely to work.
Yes...and no. Ion drives put out a very low thrust per unit power. Thermal rockets are high thrust. There are some applications where you can get there slowly but efficiently, but it's definitely an engineering trade-off.
"A nuclear powered ion-drive seems a lot more likely to work." Indeed. Hydrogen is sort of stupid, but that is where they started decades back, and it is perhaps best if they continue along those lines and develop it properly.
Yes, nuclear thermal is very simple, and it has been demonstrated.
Then load up with Xenon and get serious. Get the Reactor nice and toasty, both heat and ionize the Xenon with it, and then work with what Plasma Physicists have been doing, in accelerating the product and shooting it out the back end.
Really you want to do one or the other, not both. Either use the thermal energy, in which case you want hydrogen, or convert the thermal energy to electrical power and use an ion engine, but not both at once.
(Accelerators are notoriously thirsty, but that is another thing Reactors are good at providing.) 135Xe is a particularly good candidate, as it has a very high Thermal Neutron Cross Section, and can carry some of those pesky Neutrons away with them.
That makes little sense. If you're using the reaction mass for neutron shielding, basically you want the lowest atomic mass you can get. And a fuel that decays with a half life of 9 hours means you'd have to breed the fuel in situ.
TRL 1 type stuff.
Well, the Rover and Pee Wee projects built and tested nuclear rocket engines, so it's already beyond Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 1. Right now nuclear thermal rockets are TRL 4: Module and/or subsystem validation in laboratory environment; standalone prototype implementations.
The trick was to get them to TRL 5 and beyond.
If physics is considered a form of life, then we'd also have to consider global warming to be a form of life.
You do realize that this sentence makes no sense whatsoever, right?
This settlement is 45 minutes outside of Phoenix, a city of population 1.6 million. And growing. Rapidly. All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people already live there.
He merely needs to make a suburb that's somewhat more attractive than the other suburbs currently being built. And he can sell this to, not new people who had never thought of moving to Arizona, but some of the 81,000 people moving to the Phoenix area every year.
Who's the dullard? The AC post you responded to had a flashing red sarcasm tag 10 feet tall, How did you miss that?
Because of Poe's law.