When you look at the something like the space shuttle or just about any other launcher, construction costs aren't the largest cost component. Rather, paying the standing army of workers, needed to get the system ready and check/repair it between launches, is the most expensive part.
What about the standing army needed to build your expendibles in the first place? Then the tasks are even more complicated, because you're building something new every time, rather than just toppping off fluids and kicking the tires...
NASA procedures shouldn't be taken as an example of the best (cheapest) possible practice; the incentives are different, so they haven't really tried to work towards a low-cost reusable system.
If anything, the incentive at KSC is for a higher cost system - more jobs make for happy congressmen.
why does it have to be reusable to be economical, seems the other way around.
Simple really: a space vehicle is always going to be expensive to build - you have very stringent quality controls and tolerance requirements, as well as exotic materials and complicated fabrication procedures. A reusable vehicle should allow you to amortize that construction cost over many flights.
Imagine how much it would cost to fly from Boston to LA if they threw away the 737 after every flight....
And a 737 is a lot less complicated than a space launcher.
You might argue that making it disposable would cut costs, but that would only be true if it allowed you to build a much simpler vehicle. Which is not the case - it always has to withstand high loads, be built very light-weight etc etc. Some people are trying this, but it isn't going to work out for them.
This is so disappointing it makes this dyed-in-the-wool space enthusast want to embrace the Flat Earth Society. I hardly know where to begin:
1) we're reusing the solids which have already killed one crew, and which are neither cheap, reliable, efficient nor reuseable. A single shot of this new vehicle will be at least $100 million - 5 times what a Soyuz ride goes for.
2) We're reusing the SSME engines, which are the latest 1970's technology. They have a decent specific impulse, but are very expensive to keep running. But worse yet, we're putting them on an expendible booster, so we'll have to keep building new ones. We spent the money to develope a reusable engine that we will then discard after one shot. That was dumb. Besides, haven't there advances in materials technology since the 70's that we could use to make a better engine?
3) We subsidized Boeing and Lockheed-Martin to the tune of many billions so they'd each build a family of boosters. They did so, and now we're removing the largest market for those boosters.
Good luck ever trying to get an aerospace company to invest in development in the hope that NASA will provide a customer.
4)We're apparently giving up on the idea of reusable spacecraft entirely - this means that space will NEVER be economically worthwhile. It's pissing-contest stunts from here on out, forever, folks. Sooner or later people will get bored and kill funding, and that's the end of a future in space.
5) The biggest problem is simply that there is no investment in the future with this approach - it's "slap together what we already have for the least short-term cost, and get something that will make it to Mars ONCE. Never mind the fact that it will never be sustainable." We're not developing any new rocket technology, any new structural materials, any new payload handling or vehicle fabrication technologies, no new energy sources (nukes in space).
6) In order to achieve even this pathetic approach we're gutting most of the very exciting, successful unmanned sciene that NASA is so very good at. For what? A fscking flag on Mars that will never be seen again by anyone coming back.
A friend of mine was working at a hedge fund and made a similar mistake (bought too much of one stock, putting the portfolio out of balance) - it ended up costing the company about $1 million. When he asked his boss how soon he'd have to clear out his office, the boss responded: "No way. I just spent $1 million getting you trained. I'm not wasting that investment."
The proton-Boron fusion idea sounded good a while back, but then a clever MIT grad student (link to his thesis) wrote a thesis proving that it (along with a bunch of other clever ideas) would never work. Bummer.
For instance, a 300 Kt strategic nuclear weapon needs to be placed within about 800m of its target, otherwise don't even bother with it. [..] Drop a strategic nuclear weapon more than 800m from a submarine pen, a railyard, a C3 bunker, and you're better off not dropping it at all and saving it for later.
Well, only if you believe the most pessimistic assumptions of planners, add 50% margin, then add another bit of margin to account for worst-case weapon performance, neglect the effects of firestorms etc. etc. You say it has to hit within 800m to destroy the target (which is easy these days) - an uninformed reader might think that implies that if you're 800m away you'll be fine. Far, far from the truth...
Check out this link to see for yourself.
A while back I took a course on nuclear warfare at a major institute of technology on the East Coast taught by a former targeting specialist for (I think) the Navy. Very macabre, but interesting.
We had one homework set where we were to place ourselves in the shoes of a Soviet planner tasked with "eliminating the economic potential of Boston", specifically by cutting road and rail links to the city. To do this you had to take out a couple of bridges. Now, it turns out that by standard planning assumptions bridges need something like 1000 psi overpressure to be destroyed - which means you have to be within a few hundred yards with a medium-sized nuke. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think you eneded up havin to lob something like four 150 kiloton warheads at the damned thing to have a 90% assurance of destruction. This somes from the fact that planners assume that anything short of vaporization can be repaired on short notice.
You mention Dresden - the only way they got rail links working in a few days was because the stockpiled rails, and basically laid new track.
None of these calculations take into account the effects of EMP and other attacks utteryly destroying essentially all industry and manufacturing.
Then he had us calculate what this would do to Boston itself. This is where you discover that cities are fragile. The city would be destroyed by fire, mostly. For reference to those who live there, a 5 Mt airburst over the MIT dome would cause firestorms as far away as Natick. Dangerous fallout, if the wind blew inland (unusual) would reach upstate New York; the dose rate in Worcester could be 500 rads/hour (lethal in one to two hours).
Then, a few years ago, The Business looked into the effects of a 1 Mt citykiller dropped on London. It turns out you'd kill 20% of the population, but only destroy 5% of the economic value of London... meaning that immediately following a nuclear strike, the survivors would find themselves 18% wealthier. (They'd need it, too, thanks to the rampant inflation which would soon hit.)
Bullshit. I don't care which psychotic group of thinktank warriors came up with that crap, but it ain't gonna happen. 20% of the poulation is close to 20% of the economic value of the city, at least in terms of wartime value. Never mind the fact that if you nuked London, the survivors would hardly brush off the fallout and go down and start investing in the stock market, or go shopping.
Look at what 9/11 did in the US - 3000 casualties in one city, and something like 200 billion dollars of economic damage. Now imagine killing 2 million people outright, not to mention annihilating everything in a 5-mile radius around Buckingham Palace. The survivors get richer?
Did you notice the references to radiation sickness in the article?
..is radio-frequency interference. They are building a radio telescope that is extremely sensitive in the FM and TV bands, and putting it right smack in the middle of one of the most densely populated and radio-loud areas in the world.
It might sound impressive, but it's a stupid idea.
The main reason they need a supercomputer in the first place is so they can try and remove the effect of the interference - but "taking it all out in software" is exceedingly difficult. Especially if the RFI gets so bad that it saturates the receiver front-ends.
LOFAR (my office mate worked on it) used to be an international collaboration, but it broke a apart because the Dutch insisted it be build in their country, rather than in some place more sensible, like Western Australia.
I have no idea....I'm no physicist, but it seems that if they know the object's mass and the object's size, they can figure the object's density, and infer its composition from that. What more do they really have to know?
Most likely the strength of the material. This determines how much energy is dissipated by tidal forces during the close Earth flyby of 2029. That in turn affects the orbital parameters and hence the possibility of a later impact.
The strength of the material (is it solid rock, or a big gravel pile) is very hard to determine remotely.
Can someone answer the question as to how prevalent hydrocarbons are in our universe? [..]The theory goes that many natural hydrocarbons were trapped in the earth as the planet formed and that oil is not a product of decaying animals.
If by "Hydrocarbons" you mean long (>3 carbons) chains of C and H then the answer is that they are exceedingly rare. However, methane (one carbon) is relatively common in the atmospheres of the outer planets (and the moon Titan). Hydrogen, by itself, is the most abundant element in the universe, and carbon is also quite common (it's a product of stellar fusion). But you rarely if ever find conditions where the two will bind together in long chains.
The theory of an "abiotic" origin of oil is pretty shaky, to the point of being wrong. It came from two observations: 1) loud bangs heard off the east coast of the U.S. which somehow led to the idea that it was caused by methane seeps (it was the Concorde. I kid you not!) 2) The observation that most hydrocarbons associated with life (things like ear wax and various fats) are made up of odd numbers of carbon, while oil has equal abundances of even and odd-numbered chains.
There several lines of evidence against the abiotic theory: 1) we understand how temperature and time can change the odd/even ratio in hydrocarbons, 2) people tried drilling for "deep oil" (look up "Siljan" in Sweden) and found nothing. 3) various other isotopic abundace ratios are consistent with life.
For a really excellent discussion of where oil comes from (including a dicussion of the abiotic hypothesis), read "Hubberts Peak" by Kenneth S. Deffeyes.
As for methane and life on Mars; things are still too uncertain to know. There are ways to explain small amounts of methane without life. It's harder to explain more short-lived species like formaldehyde and (I believe) methanol. Stay tuned on that one...
You forget how sneaky and manipulative the government is. When it started to become apparent that SDI was a boondoggle, they went into CYA mode. Communism was a red herring.
We basically agree - SDI was a hoax. More on the American taxpayer than on the Russkies. In any case, the fact that this guy participated in it doesn't speak well of him.
SDI was a hoax. They all but said this outright when the project was cancelled in 1993.
There is no way that Reagan thought it was a hoax. Nor did Teller. It's possible some of the generals and other cold warriors did, but I'm more inclined to believe that the hoax argument came along afterward when it became obvious that the whole thing was foolish.
You forget just how ideologically driven some of the cold warriors were. They wanted to rid the Earth of Communism, and mere physics wasn't going to stand in their way. When they started to look like idiots they took refuge in the whole "see, it was a clever hoax" argument.
Bush is spending $60Bil, which is how we know his project isn't a hoax
The 60 G$ shows Bush believes in it. But nothing has changed, SDI-Lite is just as stupid as the original, and the fact that they are spending real money on it indicates just how crazy these guys are.
There is one thing that bothers me a great deal about this guy: he apparently was big into SDI in the 80's. That makes me doubt his judgement. Anyone with a decent amount of technical knowledge at the time knew that SDI would never work against a full Soviet onslaught. Either he held his nose and did the work for the money (like a colleague of mine), or he was blinded by ideology, or he just wasn't thinking very clearly. None of those alternative speaks well of him.
And no, I was not kidding. Go crunch the numbers yourself.
Yes, the numbers are not dissimilar. But you are being deliberately disingenious; the biosphere (which includes humans) is more or less in equilibrium - trees take the exhaled CO2 and produce O2. The burning of fossil fuels pushes that balance and leads to a net increse in CO2 levels. We know that the carbon accumulating in the atmosphere is coming from fossil fuels because we can measure the carbon isotope ratios, and the relative abundance of short-lived isotopes is dropping. This means that the carbon being added to the atmosphere has not been exposed to the surface for >1 million years. It's from fossil fuels.
Let me get this straight: The group assumed that certain factors were relevant to global energy input, output and flux, that the measurements of these factors were both accurate and comprehensive, and that, most importantly, because THEIR OWN MODELS said that these other factors did not a significant impact, that only anthropogenic CO2 emissions could be the cause of the modeled behavior?
You didn't. They took several models from other researchers and looked at what those models predicted in the way of deep-ocean temperatures (these models included ones that didn't attribute atmospheric warming to C02 increases). They then compared these predictions to the observed deep-ocean data. The models that showed C02-induced warming did a better job of predicting the temperature profiles; thus leading one to believe that the C02-related models did a better job overall. Conclusive? Maybe not - but nonetheless a good test.
Your argument ignores the information-bearing aspect of price, and the dynamic of the market.
As oil supplies run down, price goes up[1]. If demand is also increasing, price goes up even more quickly. As the price of oil rises, the comparative advantage of oil drops[2].
Ah, I love the smell of naive science being applied in the morning. Perfect markets are to economists what spherical cows are to physicists; something we all like to use all the time, and which are so simplified as to have almost no bearing on reality.
"The market will solve everything" assumes that all the true costs are being accounted for; but
surely you will agree that that is not the case. A prime example is of course the cost of pollution due to oil - smog, oil spills, global warming etc.
It also assumes that the costs are borne by those who reap the benefits, something that is manifestly not the case.
The world's climate has been much hotter, and much colder, than it is now, and that is fact.
That is beside the point. It has been warmer at times in the past (usually when CO2 levels were higher - see this link). That doesn't disprove the claim that adding CO2 will cause warming. It also doesn't disprove the claim that rapid CO2 increases will cause disruptively rapid increases in temperature. Then of course there is also the point that both temperature and CO2 levels are higher now than any time in the past 480,000 years (370 ppm last time I checked).
You mean I look up someone who firmly believes the earth is warming due to CO2 levels, and he rebuts all the claims?? Shocking?
Well, you read a book by a guy who firmly believes global warming is a myth and he claims to show that it's all bunk... so, which are you going to believe? An author of fiction, or a bunch of scientists whos professional code requires that they be objective? Obviously not all scientists achieve that objectivity; the difference is that they are expected to. Crichton can claim the Earth is flat if he wants, and suffer no professional consequences.
consensus amoung scientist quoted on realclimate.org, you mean.
Did you read the article? The consensus refers to a study of peer-reviewed scientific publications. That is the hard currency of scientific debate. The consensus refers to all published authors; it can also refer to the authors of the IPCC report.
you're still buying into the same "world could end" argument you did when you were a kid. Scary nukes! Scary environment! Scary terrorists!
Are you saying that during the Cold War there never was a risk of nuclear exchange? Or that terrorists never were a threat? You must be a moron.
Obviously there are people who cry wolf. But there are others who genuinely do see risks, risks that are very real. The trick is telling the difference. I am trained in planetary science, physics and some climatology and based on my, hopefully objective, understanding of the data I have seen, the papers I have read, and conversations I have had with with other scientists, I am worried about the effects global warming will have. Again, the the world won't end; but it will damaging, expensive and cause many problems for decades to come.
No, it wasn't. It was based on a mixture of outright falsehoods ("Global warming is defined by the global mean surface temperature...[]..it's effect is presumably the same everywhere in the world"), and selective use of facts in such a manner as to be outright misleading (Antarctic cooling does NOT contradict the idea of global warming; in fact it is consistent with the results from models, which show local cooling there). Again, read this rebuttal , written by scientists active in the area.
And that there are many scientists who do not believe in global warming.
It is a consensus among published papers by atmospheric scientists and climatologists that there are increasing levels of CO2 and global warming.
On a more precise note, asking a climatologist whether or not he "believes in global warming" is like asking an economist if he believes in inflation. Global warming is happeneing; the question is a) whether it is unusual, b) whether it is caused by humans, c) whether it will be harmful. The majority of scientists in the field would answer "yes" to all three, but not every single scientist you can find will do so. (There are always cranks - to this day there are scientists who claim the Sun is made primarily out of iron). There are also some uncertainties to some of those answers - just that most scientists think that the predominance of evidence points to humans causing problems.
Just like they said in the 70s which has proven to be false.
Puhleeeaaase not this old canard again. Read a rebuttal here. Same website, but its a collection of rebuttals to the most common claims by contrarians, most of which you've manged to parrot pretty well.
I am in the middle of reading Michael Crichton's book State of Fear.
Before you base your response to a very serious environmental situation on a work of fiction, please read this.
Crichton uses a bunch of proven-false arguments, and wraps a transparent opinion piece in a layer of fiction, yet still tries to make a political point. And in the process he basically slanders a whole bunch of very earnest, hard-working scientists. It's really quite despicable.
Personally I think there has to be a balance where we work to protect the enviroment but do not have to tramatize our kids with scary tales of the world ending in their lifetimes.
I grew up in the 80's; the nukes could fly any minute (that really could've happened). I turned out just fine. So I'm not too worried about traumatizing kids. Besides, the consensus view states that there would be a 2-6 deg increase in global average temperture, not "that the world will end". You can infer from such a rise that the disruption will be very severe, but I think it is simply idiocy to argue that we shouldn't warn people "just because it might scare the kids".
You're missing the point. You can predict with a degree of probability *assuming* the parameters that you have considered are the only parameters involved.
Look at this link. You see a correlation between temperature and CO2 levels that has endured for 470,000 years. On that basis I argue that doubling the atmospheric CO2 levels is likely to lead to a warming, especially given that there is a perfecly physically valid explaination for such a link.
All that being said, I cannot say with absolute certainty that there will be warming; there could be an asteroid thta wipes out humanity and destroys all life on the planet tomorrow. There could be a primordial black hole that passes through the Solar System and sends Earth out into the interstellar void. Who knows? Who cares?
I will acknowledge the usual scientifically reasonable uncertainty, if you acknowledge that the link between CO2 and warming meets sufficient scientific standards to warrant concern and even action.
And the idea behind giving weather & climate a chaotic description is not that they are absolutely indeterministic, merely that we do not know the initial conditions nor all the related parameters to make a judgement of what is affecting them.
Actually, "chaotic" in this context usually means that the future development of the system is exponetially sensitive to initial conditions; it does not mean that you are completely unable to predict its behavior. Example - a double pendulum is a chaotic oscillator. Even given an arbitrarily accurate set of initial conditions and models I can only predict its behavior some small amount of time into the future. However, I can with complete certainty predict that it will not oscillate forever - the laws of energy conservation still apply. There is always the caveat that there might be an asteroid that hits the oscillator and vaporizes it. So I'm not, strictly speaking, absolutely certain... But I think you understand what I do mean by certainty.
The case of the climate lies somewhere in the middle - we do not have anywhere close to perfect, complete knowledge of the system or initial conditions. But we DO have a good understanding of the physics of radiative transport and heat absorption, as well as records of past behavior, and hence we can make some pretty reasonable inferences based on that. Those inferences have been made by many, many independent researchers and point predominantly in one direction: trouble.
OP: The only way that adding CO2 wouldn't warm the surface was if there was some other negative feedback. Not only that - you then STILL have to account for the observed warming. It's getting to be quite the Oliver Stone scenario.
Re: Yeah, except that you're ignoring a dozen other factors such as the fact that we are at the end of an ice-age, we still have unexplained long term effects of solar activity and dozens of other factors. Does the term Maunder minimum ring a bell to you?
You missed my point. CO2 increases are - based on everything we know about CO2, radiative transfer and greenhouses - expected to cause warming. We see CO2 increases and we see warming. If you want to place the blame for that warming on something else (and there are lots of suggested culprits: the Sun, volcanoes, urban heat islands, chaos theory, the Chinese, and a global conspiracy of pinko green commies), then you have to invoke two new phenomena 1) something that counteracts the unavoidable CO2-related warming and 2) a different soure of warming that appears suspiciously coincident with the rise of CO2 levels. Like I said, that's getting to be quite the conspiracy theory. You can invoke a zillion other factors, but none of them free you from those two requirements. How does the Maunder minimum explain away the fact that CO2 increases would increase surface temps? Where is the negative feedback?
Chaotic systems are hard to predict - and there is no shame in admitting that. Rather than do that, most climatologists make claims without bothering to sufficiently back up their data or their analytic methods.
Chaotic systems are hard to predict with a high degree of certainty over a long period of time. That doesn NOT mean that they can't be predicted over some range; you should notice that climate modelers give a range of possible temperature increases. You need to argue why their error bars are wrong - not that they can't predict anything.
And the truth is that you can't do that just by repeating the word "chaotic" over and over again.
There is a rise in global greenhouse gas levels. There is a rise in Earth's temperature. But there is no absolutely conclusive evidence linking the two.
I'm quite open, show me the evidence and I will believe. Look at what Crutzen, Rowland and Molina did - they proved conclusively the link between Ozone depletion & CFCs and they won a Nobel.
You've agreed to the first two points. Now - we know that CO2 absorbs IR radiation (that's indisputable, you can do the experiment yourself if you care to). We know from very simple physics that adding such heat-trapping gases will warm the surface. It's basically the same physics as a greenhouse (hence the name). The only way that adding CO2 wouldn't warm the surface was if there was some other negative feedback. Not only that - you then STILL have to account for the observed warming. It's getting to be quite the Oliver Stone scenario.
You are simply refusing to admit simple physics - it's not any more of a leap than the chemistry that linked CFC's and Ozone. You just don't want to admit the link. It's there.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the standing army needed to build your expendibles in the first place? Then the tasks are even more complicated, because you're building something new every time, rather than just toppping off fluids and kicking the tires... NASA procedures shouldn't be taken as an example of the best (cheapest) possible practice; the incentives are different, so they haven't really tried to work towards a low-cost reusable system. If anything, the incentive at KSC is for a higher cost system - more jobs make for happy congressmen.
Simple really: a space vehicle is always going to be expensive to build - you have very stringent quality controls and tolerance requirements, as well as exotic materials and complicated fabrication procedures. A reusable vehicle should allow you to amortize that construction cost over many flights. Imagine how much it would cost to fly from Boston to LA if they threw away the 737 after every flight.... And a 737 is a lot less complicated than a space launcher.
You might argue that making it disposable would cut costs, but that would only be true if it allowed you to build a much simpler vehicle. Which is not the case - it always has to withstand high loads, be built very light-weight etc etc. Some people are trying this, but it isn't going to work out for them.
1) we're reusing the solids which have already killed one crew, and which are neither cheap, reliable, efficient nor reuseable. A single shot of this new vehicle will be at least $100 million - 5 times what a Soyuz ride goes for.
2) We're reusing the SSME engines, which are the latest 1970's technology. They have a decent specific impulse, but are very expensive to keep running. But worse yet, we're putting them on an expendible booster, so we'll have to keep building new ones. We spent the money to develope a reusable engine that we will then discard after one shot. That was dumb. Besides, haven't there advances in materials technology since the 70's that we could use to make a better engine?
3) We subsidized Boeing and Lockheed-Martin to the tune of many billions so they'd each build a family of boosters. They did so, and now we're removing the largest market for those boosters. Good luck ever trying to get an aerospace company to invest in development in the hope that NASA will provide a customer.
4)We're apparently giving up on the idea of reusable spacecraft entirely - this means that space will NEVER be economically worthwhile. It's pissing-contest stunts from here on out, forever, folks. Sooner or later people will get bored and kill funding, and that's the end of a future in space.
5) The biggest problem is simply that there is no investment in the future with this approach - it's "slap together what we already have for the least short-term cost, and get something that will make it to Mars ONCE. Never mind the fact that it will never be sustainable." We're not developing any new rocket technology, any new structural materials, any new payload handling or vehicle fabrication technologies, no new energy sources (nukes in space).
6) In order to achieve even this pathetic approach we're gutting most of the very exciting, successful unmanned sciene that NASA is so very good at. For what? A fscking flag on Mars that will never be seen again by anyone coming back.
The proton-Boron fusion idea sounded good a while back, but then a clever MIT grad student (link to his thesis) wrote a thesis proving that it (along with a bunch of other clever ideas) would never work. Bummer.
Well, only if you believe the most pessimistic assumptions of planners, add 50% margin, then add another bit of margin to account for worst-case weapon performance, neglect the effects of firestorms etc. etc. You say it has to hit within 800m to destroy the target (which is easy these days) - an uninformed reader might think that implies that if you're 800m away you'll be fine. Far, far from the truth... Check out this link to see for yourself.
A while back I took a course on nuclear warfare at a major institute of technology on the East Coast taught by a former targeting specialist for (I think) the Navy. Very macabre, but interesting. We had one homework set where we were to place ourselves in the shoes of a Soviet planner tasked with "eliminating the economic potential of Boston", specifically by cutting road and rail links to the city. To do this you had to take out a couple of bridges. Now, it turns out that by standard planning assumptions bridges need something like 1000 psi overpressure to be destroyed - which means you have to be within a few hundred yards with a medium-sized nuke. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think you eneded up havin to lob something like four 150 kiloton warheads at the damned thing to have a 90% assurance of destruction. This somes from the fact that planners assume that anything short of vaporization can be repaired on short notice. You mention Dresden - the only way they got rail links working in a few days was because the stockpiled rails, and basically laid new track. None of these calculations take into account the effects of EMP and other attacks utteryly destroying essentially all industry and manufacturing.
Then he had us calculate what this would do to Boston itself. This is where you discover that cities are fragile. The city would be destroyed by fire, mostly. For reference to those who live there, a 5 Mt airburst over the MIT dome would cause firestorms as far away as Natick. Dangerous fallout, if the wind blew inland (unusual) would reach upstate New York; the dose rate in Worcester could be 500 rads/hour (lethal in one to two hours).
Then, a few years ago, The Business looked into the effects of a 1 Mt citykiller dropped on London. It turns out you'd kill 20% of the population, but only destroy 5% of the economic value of London... meaning that immediately following a nuclear strike, the survivors would find themselves 18% wealthier. (They'd need it, too, thanks to the rampant inflation which would soon hit.)
Bullshit. I don't care which psychotic group of thinktank warriors came up with that crap, but it ain't gonna happen. 20% of the poulation is close to 20% of the economic value of the city, at least in terms of wartime value. Never mind the fact that if you nuked London, the survivors would hardly brush off the fallout and go down and start investing in the stock market, or go shopping. Look at what 9/11 did in the US - 3000 casualties in one city, and something like 200 billion dollars of economic damage. Now imagine killing 2 million people outright, not to mention annihilating everything in a 5-mile radius around Buckingham Palace. The survivors get richer?
Did you notice the references to radiation sickness in the article?
I prefer: "When all you have is a mallet, everything looks like a baby seal."
Oh. So locking up kidnappers is immoral? Criminals in general? Trerrorists?
People who make broad moralistic statements of black and white are wrong.
It might sound impressive, but it's a stupid idea. The main reason they need a supercomputer in the first place is so they can try and remove the effect of the interference - but "taking it all out in software" is exceedingly difficult. Especially if the RFI gets so bad that it saturates the receiver front-ends.
LOFAR (my office mate worked on it) used to be an international collaboration, but it broke a apart because the Dutch insisted it be build in their country, rather than in some place more sensible, like Western Australia.
Most likely the strength of the material. This determines how much energy is dissipated by tidal forces during the close Earth flyby of 2029. That in turn affects the orbital parameters and hence the possibility of a later impact. The strength of the material (is it solid rock, or a big gravel pile) is very hard to determine remotely.
If by "Hydrocarbons" you mean long (>3 carbons) chains of C and H then the answer is that they are exceedingly rare. However, methane (one carbon) is relatively common in the atmospheres of the outer planets (and the moon Titan). Hydrogen, by itself, is the most abundant element in the universe, and carbon is also quite common (it's a product of stellar fusion). But you rarely if ever find conditions where the two will bind together in long chains.
The theory of an "abiotic" origin of oil is pretty shaky, to the point of being wrong. It came from two observations: 1) loud bangs heard off the east coast of the U.S. which somehow led to the idea that it was caused by methane seeps (it was the Concorde. I kid you not!) 2) The observation that most hydrocarbons associated with life (things like ear wax and various fats) are made up of odd numbers of carbon, while oil has equal abundances of even and odd-numbered chains.
There several lines of evidence against the abiotic theory: 1) we understand how temperature and time can change the odd/even ratio in hydrocarbons, 2) people tried drilling for "deep oil" (look up "Siljan" in Sweden) and found nothing. 3) various other isotopic abundace ratios are consistent with life.
For a really excellent discussion of where oil comes from (including a dicussion of the abiotic hypothesis), read "Hubberts Peak" by Kenneth S. Deffeyes.
As for methane and life on Mars; things are still too uncertain to know. There are ways to explain small amounts of methane without life. It's harder to explain more short-lived species like formaldehyde and (I believe) methanol. Stay tuned on that one...
We basically agree - SDI was a hoax. More on the American taxpayer than on the Russkies. In any case, the fact that this guy participated in it doesn't speak well of him.
There is no way that Reagan thought it was a hoax. Nor did Teller. It's possible some of the generals and other cold warriors did, but I'm more inclined to believe that the hoax argument came along afterward when it became obvious that the whole thing was foolish.
You forget just how ideologically driven some of the cold warriors were. They wanted to rid the Earth of Communism, and mere physics wasn't going to stand in their way. When they started to look like idiots they took refuge in the whole "see, it was a clever hoax" argument.
Bush is spending $60Bil, which is how we know his project isn't a hoax
The 60 G$ shows Bush believes in it. But nothing has changed, SDI-Lite is just as stupid as the original, and the fact that they are spending real money on it indicates just how crazy these guys are.
Yes, the numbers are not dissimilar. But you are being deliberately disingenious; the biosphere (which includes humans) is more or less in equilibrium - trees take the exhaled CO2 and produce O2. The burning of fossil fuels pushes that balance and leads to a net increse in CO2 levels. We know that the carbon accumulating in the atmosphere is coming from fossil fuels because we can measure the carbon isotope ratios, and the relative abundance of short-lived isotopes is dropping. This means that the carbon being added to the atmosphere has not been exposed to the surface for >1 million years. It's from fossil fuels.
You didn't. They took several models from other researchers and looked at what those models predicted in the way of deep-ocean temperatures (these models included ones that didn't attribute atmospheric warming to C02 increases). They then compared these predictions to the observed deep-ocean data. The models that showed C02-induced warming did a better job of predicting the temperature profiles; thus leading one to believe that the C02-related models did a better job overall. Conclusive? Maybe not - but nonetheless a good test.
Ah, I love the smell of naive science being applied in the morning. Perfect markets are to economists what spherical cows are to physicists; something we all like to use all the time, and which are so simplified as to have almost no bearing on reality.
"The market will solve everything" assumes that all the true costs are being accounted for; but surely you will agree that that is not the case. A prime example is of course the cost of pollution due to oil - smog, oil spills, global warming etc. It also assumes that the costs are borne by those who reap the benefits, something that is manifestly not the case.
That is beside the point. It has been warmer at times in the past (usually when CO2 levels were higher - see this link). That doesn't disprove the claim that adding CO2 will cause warming. It also doesn't disprove the claim that rapid CO2 increases will cause disruptively rapid increases in temperature. Then of course there is also the point that both temperature and CO2 levels are higher now than any time in the past 480,000 years (370 ppm last time I checked).
Well, you read a book by a guy who firmly believes global warming is a myth and he claims to show that it's all bunk... so, which are you going to believe? An author of fiction, or a bunch of scientists whos professional code requires that they be objective? Obviously not all scientists achieve that objectivity; the difference is that they are expected to. Crichton can claim the Earth is flat if he wants, and suffer no professional consequences.
Did you read the article? The consensus refers to a study of peer-reviewed scientific publications. That is the hard currency of scientific debate. The consensus refers to all published authors; it can also refer to the authors of the IPCC report.
Are you saying that during the Cold War there never was a risk of nuclear exchange? Or that terrorists never were a threat? You must be a moron.
Obviously there are people who cry wolf. But there are others who genuinely do see risks, risks that are very real. The trick is telling the difference. I am trained in planetary science, physics and some climatology and based on my, hopefully objective, understanding of the data I have seen, the papers I have read, and conversations I have had with with other scientists, I am worried about the effects global warming will have. Again, the the world won't end; but it will damaging, expensive and cause many problems for decades to come.
No, it wasn't. It was based on a mixture of outright falsehoods ("Global warming is defined by the global mean surface temperature...[]..it's effect is presumably the same everywhere in the world"), and selective use of facts in such a manner as to be outright misleading (Antarctic cooling does NOT contradict the idea of global warming; in fact it is consistent with the results from models, which show local cooling there). Again, read this rebuttal , written by scientists active in the area.
And that there are many scientists who do not believe in global warming.
It is a consensus among published papers by atmospheric scientists and climatologists that there are increasing levels of CO2 and global warming.
On a more precise note, asking a climatologist whether or not he "believes in global warming" is like asking an economist if he believes in inflation. Global warming is happeneing; the question is a) whether it is unusual, b) whether it is caused by humans, c) whether it will be harmful. The majority of scientists in the field would answer "yes" to all three, but not every single scientist you can find will do so. (There are always cranks - to this day there are scientists who claim the Sun is made primarily out of iron). There are also some uncertainties to some of those answers - just that most scientists think that the predominance of evidence points to humans causing problems.
Just like they said in the 70s which has proven to be false.
Puhleeeaaase not this old canard again. Read a rebuttal here. Same website, but its a collection of rebuttals to the most common claims by contrarians, most of which you've manged to parrot pretty well.
Before you base your response to a very serious environmental situation on a work of fiction, please read this. Crichton uses a bunch of proven-false arguments, and wraps a transparent opinion piece in a layer of fiction, yet still tries to make a political point. And in the process he basically slanders a whole bunch of very earnest, hard-working scientists. It's really quite despicable.
Personally I think there has to be a balance where we work to protect the enviroment but do not have to tramatize our kids with scary tales of the world ending in their lifetimes.
I grew up in the 80's; the nukes could fly any minute (that really could've happened). I turned out just fine. So I'm not too worried about traumatizing kids. Besides, the consensus view states that there would be a 2-6 deg increase in global average temperture, not "that the world will end". You can infer from such a rise that the disruption will be very severe, but I think it is simply idiocy to argue that we shouldn't warn people "just because it might scare the kids".
Look at this link. You see a correlation between temperature and CO2 levels that has endured for 470,000 years. On that basis I argue that doubling the atmospheric CO2 levels is likely to lead to a warming, especially given that there is a perfecly physically valid explaination for such a link.
All that being said, I cannot say with absolute certainty that there will be warming; there could be an asteroid thta wipes out humanity and destroys all life on the planet tomorrow. There could be a primordial black hole that passes through the Solar System and sends Earth out into the interstellar void. Who knows? Who cares? I will acknowledge the usual scientifically reasonable uncertainty, if you acknowledge that the link between CO2 and warming meets sufficient scientific standards to warrant concern and even action.
And the idea behind giving weather & climate a chaotic description is not that they are absolutely indeterministic, merely that we do not know the initial conditions nor all the related parameters to make a judgement of what is affecting them.
Actually, "chaotic" in this context usually means that the future development of the system is exponetially sensitive to initial conditions; it does not mean that you are completely unable to predict its behavior. Example - a double pendulum is a chaotic oscillator. Even given an arbitrarily accurate set of initial conditions and models I can only predict its behavior some small amount of time into the future. However, I can with complete certainty predict that it will not oscillate forever - the laws of energy conservation still apply. There is always the caveat that there might be an asteroid that hits the oscillator and vaporizes it. So I'm not, strictly speaking, absolutely certain... But I think you understand what I do mean by certainty.
The case of the climate lies somewhere in the middle - we do not have anywhere close to perfect, complete knowledge of the system or initial conditions. But we DO have a good understanding of the physics of radiative transport and heat absorption, as well as records of past behavior, and hence we can make some pretty reasonable inferences based on that. Those inferences have been made by many, many independent researchers and point predominantly in one direction: trouble.
OP: The only way that adding CO2 wouldn't warm the surface was if there was some other negative feedback. Not only that - you then STILL have to account for the observed warming. It's getting to be quite the Oliver Stone scenario.
Re: Yeah, except that you're ignoring a dozen other factors such as the fact that we are at the end of an ice-age, we still have unexplained long term effects of solar activity and dozens of other factors. Does the term Maunder minimum ring a bell to you?
You missed my point. CO2 increases are - based on everything we know about CO2, radiative transfer and greenhouses - expected to cause warming. We see CO2 increases and we see warming. If you want to place the blame for that warming on something else (and there are lots of suggested culprits: the Sun, volcanoes, urban heat islands, chaos theory, the Chinese, and a global conspiracy of pinko green commies), then you have to invoke two new phenomena 1) something that counteracts the unavoidable CO2-related warming and 2) a different soure of warming that appears suspiciously coincident with the rise of CO2 levels. Like I said, that's getting to be quite the conspiracy theory. You can invoke a zillion other factors, but none of them free you from those two requirements. How does the Maunder minimum explain away the fact that CO2 increases would increase surface temps? Where is the negative feedback?
Most climatologists and weather folks worth
Chaotic systems are hard to predict with a high degree of certainty over a long period of time. That doesn NOT mean that they can't be predicted over some range; you should notice that climate modelers give a range of possible temperature increases. You need to argue why their error bars are wrong - not that they can't predict anything. And the truth is that you can't do that just by repeating the word "chaotic" over and over again.
There is a rise in global greenhouse gas levels. There is a rise in Earth's temperature. But there is no absolutely conclusive evidence linking the two. I'm quite open, show me the evidence and I will believe. Look at what Crutzen, Rowland and Molina did - they proved conclusively the link between Ozone depletion & CFCs and they won a Nobel.
You've agreed to the first two points. Now - we know that CO2 absorbs IR radiation (that's indisputable, you can do the experiment yourself if you care to). We know from very simple physics that adding such heat-trapping gases will warm the surface. It's basically the same physics as a greenhouse (hence the name). The only way that adding CO2 wouldn't warm the surface was if there was some other negative feedback. Not only that - you then STILL have to account for the observed warming. It's getting to be quite the Oliver Stone scenario.
You are simply refusing to admit simple physics - it's not any more of a leap than the chemistry that linked CFC's and Ozone. You just don't want to admit the link. It's there.