If you are interested in knowing more about earthquake hazards, but you're not a seismologist, check out
Earthshaking Science by Susan Hough. She works for the U.S. Geological Survey. She first discusses the basics of determining earthquake hazard, then discusses the currently estimated hazard in various regions in the United States. She's not optimisitic about specific earthquake prediction, but she thinks that we can improve our estimates of longer-term hazards. These estimates are critical for guiding hazard-mitigation efforts (building codes, for example).
To add to what another poster said on this, I recently saw a PBS show (Scientific American Frontiers, I think) that talked about bushmeat. The major consumers are loggers and city-dwellers. The hunters are not the local residents, but people who come in over recently opened logging roads. The city-dwellers who consume bushmeat are those who can afford it. Farm-raised meat is actually less expensive, but bushmeat is fashionable.
Actually, I didn't know that "mountaintop mining" was the industry-approved phrase. I just picked it up from somewhere. Also, the "log/speck" line is actually originally from the Bible. But I've always liked it, independent of its religious origins. Thanks for an interesting discussion.
Re:James P Hogan does it better.
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, I've read a lot of it, elsewhere. Where I have some prior knowledge, I recognized some of the usual claims. More interestingly, I followed up one I didn't know about before.
Here, Hogan repeats an allegation that was new to me: that the 1986 Challenger disaster occured during the first launch using a new, asbestos-free joint putty. He says that the use of this putty was mandated due to environmental concerns about the previous, asbestos-containing putty. Sounds pretty bad...
Except it's not true:
The putty wasn't new; the Challenger blew up on the 25th shuttle flight. The new putty came into use on the 8th flight.
Both old and new puttys contained asbestos. While the manufacturer of the "old" putty did discontinue it due to concerns about asbestos, the "new" putty also contained asbestos.
Joint problems were first noticed on the 2nd flight (i.e., when the old putty was in use).
The big "putty" problem seems to be that beginning with shuttle flight 10, pre-flight tests of the joints were conducted at higher pressures than before, leading to the formation of bubbles and "blowholes" in the putty. The hot gases followed these paths of weakness to the O-ring. In 1984, a NASA engineer derided the use of putty at all as "lucky putty", suggesting that the putty introduced an extra point of failure and was probably unnecessary. His suggestions for study on this issue were not followed up. I got my information here.
This page quotes extensively from the Challenger report, Richard Feynman, and from authors making the "environmentalists did it" claims.
For someone complaining about fearmongering, it's curious that James Hogan is telling us how dangerous evironmentalists are with their "junk science", yet he is using incorrect information that it took me 5 minutes with Google to refute. It's funny how people always claim that their side is objective and everyone else is "politicizing" science. This is most definitely not limited to any one viewpoint on the political spectrum.
I think you've set up a false dichotomy here. "It's hard wired" and "it's a choice" are not the only two options. How about, "genetics play a role, as does experience". Or "many different developmental paths can lead to an assemblage of personality traits labeled 'introverted'." Regarding most aspects of human personality, my reply to the question "Is it nature or nurture?" is "yes".
Re:James P Hogan does it better.
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I did check out the website. He seems to be among a group of people these days who want to disbelieve any scientific result that is generally accepted. Practically all immune researchers believe HIV causes AIDS? They must be wrong! The establishment didn't accept Velikovsky? He must have been right! This attitude appears to come from an UNcritical distrust of authority. Just being dismissed by the authorities doesn't make an idea worthy of serious consideration. They may well have laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Re:Shocking development, government lies.
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Yeah, lying about your sex life sure is more important than lying to get the country into a war. I'm sure glad that W.
won't be lying to us about his sex life!
I just got around to reading this reply, so forgive me for the delay (not that I expect you to be hanging on my every word).
I would like to clear up the misunderstanding over my last reply. I thought I had written something that would make it clear what I was saying, but I obviously didn't. This self-righteous faux intellectual sometimes tries to be too clever for his own good.
I never posted in order to attack you, or to minimize the impact of the coal mining techniques in West Virginia. I thought that you honestly believed that the problems in central Asia were not important, and I was trying to point out that they were also of consequence as compared to the problems you wrote of. From reading your comments and doing my own follow-up, I have seen how serious the problems in Appalachia are.
I probably got carried away with myself when talking about tradeoffs, etc. These are issues that I think about quite a bit, mainly because I don't fully understand where the appropriate balance points are. You saw my thoughts of the moment. If I was contradicting myself or generally not making sense, it was out of genuine confusion, not disingenuity. I take part in discussions like this to clarify my own thoughts as well as trying to help others do the same.
I did not intend to deride you in my most recent post. I brought up the use of rhetoric because you brought it up with your Barnum comment. I realized that the statements I initially disagreed with were not propositions in an argument, but devices used to draw attention to the issue of mountaintop mining. And I told you what I thought. I get annoyed when anyone uses devices like that, especially when they are otherwise saying things that I agree with. I think it's in the end ineffective; that was my entire motiviation. I am sorry if that came across as arrogance and condescension. I also see that I probably used the word "disingeuous" more for its rhetorical value than for its actual meaning. Next time, I should look for the log in my own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's eye.
Anyway, I do think that, even on Slashdot, hyberbole and other such devices cause more trouble than they are worth. When I discuss issues, I would like to be involved in a genuine exchange of ideas. When you told me that you had deliberately exaggerated, I gave you my honest opinion on that.
Well, I'm sure you'll find this post tiresome, long-winded, and off-topic, if you bother to read it. But when my motives are misunderstood, I feel the need to try to remedy that, clumsy though my words may be.
I think the "ultimate question", which is probably unanswerable, is "why does anything bother to exist?" It could be a one-time Big Bang, an infinite number of universes generated from "quantum foam", an endless cycle of bangs and busts, or a cosmic turtle. But, I don't know if the answer of "why is it here" can be answered from within the Universe. Maybe the best answer is "why not?".
The whole trick here will be to fit all the observations together into a consistent model. People have been trying for a long time now to reconcile general relativity (i.e., the concept that gravity is equivalent to warped space-time) with quantum mechanics. Nobody has yet done it, and dark energy and dark matter seem to be bringing up more problems. My semi-educated guess is that significant new physics will be required to reconcile everything. It might be revolutionary on the same scale as Einstein, Bohr, etc. were. It may turn out that relativity is a special case of the "new physics", just as Newtonian gravity is a special case of general relativity. Maybe, for example, the speed of light is not quite as constant as we think it is. I don't know if that's true, but I feel that's the sort of paradigm shift that might be required.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear... I don't think what's going on in WV is good. However, I don't think what's going on in the Aral Sea is good, either, and it should not be minimized. That was my original point. Disingenuous rhetoric used to gain attention only gives ammunition to your opponents and leads to people hurling invective rather than listening to each other. We may have little control over former Soviet republics, but if we don't talk about it, who will? This is one earth we live on, and we can't give up on any of it. While I can do more to help people in the United States (and you apparently just assumed that's where I'm writing from), the people who live around the Aral Sea are no more or less deserving of a livelihood or a place to live than those in West Virginia. Environmental problems do not respect borders, and neither should our concern.
The reason I said they are different is that, while they are both water resources, the impact (environmentally and economically) of the resource damage will be different. In the case of the Aral Sea, economic losses would include the destruction of commercial fisheries, for instance. In the case of West Virginia streams, the economic loss might be increased cost of water treatment to remove silt (for example). Environmentally, the disappearance of the Aral Sea will lead to regional climate change. This won't happen in WV. So, I still think they are different impacts.
Also, be careful about comparing the time scales. If species go extinct becase the Aral Sea dries up, that's pretty permanent. And while if the irrigation is stopped, the sea will come back, its assortment of species will most likely be different (even if some species survive in other locations, they may be locally extinct). In the case of the West Virginia mines, the erosive force of water will eventually carry away the mining debris. Now, that will take thousands of years, but it will eventually happen. Admittedly, this is not much consolation to the local residents.
My point that there is no way for us to live on the planet in an environmentally benign manner. Complaining that the loss of a large lake is somehow not as bad as filling in valleys with mining waste is not really productive in the grand scheme of things, IMHO. All that tells me is that you are closer to the valleys (physically or emotionally), therefore you would rather that we pay attention to them than to what's going on elsewhere. I imagine that the fisherman of the Aral Sea think that its loss is also "absolutely unacceptable" and not a "small impact".
Re:It's a sea because it is salty
on
Aral Sea Disappearing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Err, the Caspian Sea is (or is not) a lake just as much as the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Salton Sea in California are (or are not) lakes. I think most geologists would classify any body of water that is not an arm of the ocean as a lake. So, the Caspian Sea is, IMHO, both a sea and a lake. I wouldn't consider the terms mutually exclusive.
Also, when you say "largest", you must specify the quantity you are measuring. Are you measuring surface area or volume? For freshwater lakes, Lake Baikal in Russia comes in first for volume ( 23,600 km^3). This is nothing, though, compared to glacial Lake Agassiz in North America: 163,000 km^3 by one estimate! And that was only 8400 years ago.
Those impacts are so different, I don't know how one would compare them. The common theme, though, is that one can't really run a 6-billion person civilization without impacting the natural systems of the planet. Don't like coal? Solar cell manufacturing currently requires the use of heavy metals. Maybe we should build wind turbines all over the place? Well, some people
don't like that. Not that I'm saying the effects of coal mining you cite are good, or that we shouldn't try to do better than we do now. Everyone, however, must realize that a technologicially advanced civilization requires energy and materials to run. If you want computers, refrigerators, and hospitals, you have to accept that there will be negative impacts. Since we cannot avoid affecting the environment, we must look at minimizing those impacts.
In fact, gravimetric data
has been collected from Mars orbiters, although the precision is nothing like what the Texas researchers are doing.
I doubt that gravimetric data will be of much use in high-end physics research, unless it's somehow used to support experiments for the detection of gravitational waves, for instance. The data is very useful for putting better constraints on various models of geodynamics, though.
One might consider Steven Hawking's illness an adversity. I believe he himself says that he only really got motivated in his work when he was diagnosed with ALS and told he only had a few years to live (I think that was around 1970). That's probably in his biography, which I don't have handy at the moment to pin down the exact reference.
Ahem... scientists may be initially relectuant to endorse speculative ideas, but once the data is in, they tend to jump right on board. Off the top of my head, in the last 100 years or so such radical theories as relativity (special and general), quantum mechanics, the structure and function of DNA in chromosomes, and plate tectonics have become the fundamental bases of their respective fields. Sure, the acceptance of scientific ideas can be slow; scientists are human. But show them convincing results, and most will come around.
Since you brought up the age of the earth, at the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin said that the earth could not be as old as the geologists said it was, since it would have cooled completely and lost all of its gravitational heat of formation within that time frame. However, a little discovery called radioactivity reconciled the physics with the geology. The heat from radioactive decay has kept the earth hotter all these years. As a bonus, measuring proportions of radioactive isotopes in rocks allows us to much more precisely date the rocks than could be done in Kelvin's time. And guess what... an age of 4.5 billion years is consistent will all the evidence. An age of 10000 years is not.
Scientists generally have reasons for believing the things they do about the world, and those reasons are usually based on the accumulated evidence collected by the scientific community. Are scientists human? Yes. Do they make mistakes? Of course! But, science provides a system for identifying and correcting those mistakes.
Did Steven Milloy let one of his trolls out of the basement? I guess all the florists will be going out of business, seeing how that "Greenhouse Theory" has been refuted.
Ever heard of the Comstock laws in the US? These laws prohibited publication and distribution of information about reproduction and birth control Here is a brief excerpt. Mor information is available here):
On March 3, 1873, Congress passed the new law, later known as the Comstock Act. The statute defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit, making it a federal offense to disseminate birth control through the mail or across state lines.
So, there was at one time a very good reason for providers of birth control to wish to remain anonymous. And I am sure there are people in very high levels of government in the US who would like to make it that way again. That is probably impossible given current public attitudes, but you know, I heard that people who sell condoms are often terrorists....
In fact nowadays I do almost all of my compiling on icc (intel's compiler)
I haven't seen any source code for icc distributed by Intel. If you start including tools like icc, you're now talking about standard, closed source, business-as-usual software, which is definitely not GNU, Linux, BSD, or any other sort of community-developed software. That's fine, if that's what you want. But is it what you want?
I've seen such an estimate before, but can't recall now what the number actually is, and a quick search of the FSF website doesn't have it. But, they do have a list of all GNU projects here. Some favorites include:
GCC
Ghostscript
glibc
GNU Emacs
AbiWord
BASH
most of the Unix-like command line tools (make, tar, ls, etc.)
CVS
GIMP
GNOME
So, most of the "basic" OS, as well as several important applications, are part of GNU. Whether you want to call such an OS GNU/Linux is up to you, but RMS is right when he says that without GNU, there would certainly not be such an operating system based on the Linux kernel available today.
This is a subset of a proposal I first heard several years ago: make all data collected about citizens by the government (exempting perhaps ongoing criminal investigations) public. The theory is, if people know that the information from their annual tax return, for example, will be available on demand, they won't let the government collect the information. Of course, this idea completely misses the voluminous information collected by private entities. Big Brother is more likely to be a corporation than a traditional government, IMHO.
No, but without SOHO, the space forecasters will be left "in the dark". They won't have sufficient data with which to generate forecasts. It would be somewhat equivalent to having all the earth-orbiting weather satellites go down at once. Knowledge of current conditions would be severely limited.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are interested in knowing more about earthquake hazards, but you're not a seismologist, check out Earthshaking Science by Susan Hough. She works for the U.S. Geological Survey. She first discusses the basics of determining earthquake hazard, then discusses the currently estimated hazard in various regions in the United States. She's not optimisitic about specific earthquake prediction, but she thinks that we can improve our estimates of longer-term hazards. These estimates are critical for guiding hazard-mitigation efforts (building codes, for example).
To add to what another poster said on this, I recently saw a PBS show (Scientific American Frontiers, I think) that talked about bushmeat. The major consumers are loggers and city-dwellers. The hunters are not the local residents, but people who come in over recently opened logging roads. The city-dwellers who consume bushmeat are those who can afford it. Farm-raised meat is actually less expensive, but bushmeat is fashionable.
Actually, I didn't know that "mountaintop mining" was the industry-approved phrase. I just picked it up from somewhere. Also, the "log/speck" line is actually originally from the Bible. But I've always liked it, independent of its religious origins. Thanks for an interesting discussion.
The big "putty" problem seems to be that beginning with shuttle flight 10, pre-flight tests of the joints were conducted at higher pressures than before, leading to the formation of bubbles and "blowholes" in the putty. The hot gases followed these paths of weakness to the O-ring. In 1984, a NASA engineer derided the use of putty at all as "lucky putty", suggesting that the putty introduced an extra point of failure and was probably unnecessary. His suggestions for study on this issue were not followed up. I got my information here. This page quotes extensively from the Challenger report, Richard Feynman, and from authors making the "environmentalists did it" claims.
For someone complaining about fearmongering, it's curious that James Hogan is telling us how dangerous evironmentalists are with their "junk science", yet he is using incorrect information that it took me 5 minutes with Google to refute. It's funny how people always claim that their side is objective and everyone else is "politicizing" science. This is most definitely not limited to any one viewpoint on the political spectrum.
I think you've set up a false dichotomy here. "It's hard wired" and "it's a choice" are not the only two options. How about, "genetics play a role, as does experience". Or "many different developmental paths can lead to an assemblage of personality traits labeled 'introverted'." Regarding most aspects of human personality, my reply to the question "Is it nature or nurture?" is "yes".
I did check out the website. He seems to be among a group of people these days who want to disbelieve any scientific result that is generally accepted. Practically all immune researchers believe HIV causes AIDS? They must be wrong! The establishment didn't accept Velikovsky? He must have been right! This attitude appears to come from an UNcritical distrust of authority. Just being dismissed by the authorities doesn't make an idea worthy of serious consideration. They may well have laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Yeah, lying about your sex life sure is more important than lying to get the country into a war. I'm sure glad that W. won't be lying to us about his sex life!
I just got around to reading this reply, so forgive me for the delay (not that I expect you to be hanging on my every word).
I would like to clear up the misunderstanding over my last reply. I thought I had written something that would make it clear what I was saying, but I obviously didn't. This self-righteous faux intellectual sometimes tries to be too clever for his own good.
I never posted in order to attack you, or to minimize the impact of the coal mining techniques in West Virginia. I thought that you honestly believed that the problems in central Asia were not important, and I was trying to point out that they were also of consequence as compared to the problems you wrote of. From reading your comments and doing my own follow-up, I have seen how serious the problems in Appalachia are.
I probably got carried away with myself when talking about tradeoffs, etc. These are issues that I think about quite a bit, mainly because I don't fully understand where the appropriate balance points are. You saw my thoughts of the moment. If I was contradicting myself or generally not making sense, it was out of genuine confusion, not disingenuity. I take part in discussions like this to clarify my own thoughts as well as trying to help others do the same.
I did not intend to deride you in my most recent post. I brought up the use of rhetoric because you brought it up with your Barnum comment. I realized that the statements I initially disagreed with were not propositions in an argument, but devices used to draw attention to the issue of mountaintop mining. And I told you what I thought. I get annoyed when anyone uses devices like that, especially when they are otherwise saying things that I agree with. I think it's in the end ineffective; that was my entire motiviation. I am sorry if that came across as arrogance and condescension. I also see that I probably used the word "disingeuous" more for its rhetorical value than for its actual meaning. Next time, I should look for the log in my own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else's eye.
Anyway, I do think that, even on Slashdot, hyberbole and other such devices cause more trouble than they are worth. When I discuss issues, I would like to be involved in a genuine exchange of ideas. When you told me that you had deliberately exaggerated, I gave you my honest opinion on that.
Well, I'm sure you'll find this post tiresome, long-winded, and off-topic, if you bother to read it. But when my motives are misunderstood, I feel the need to try to remedy that, clumsy though my words may be.
I think the "ultimate question", which is probably unanswerable, is "why does anything bother to exist?" It could be a one-time Big Bang, an infinite number of universes generated from "quantum foam", an endless cycle of bangs and busts, or a cosmic turtle. But, I don't know if the answer of "why is it here" can be answered from within the Universe. Maybe the best answer is "why not?".
The whole trick here will be to fit all the observations together into a consistent model. People have been trying for a long time now to reconcile general relativity (i.e., the concept that gravity is equivalent to warped space-time) with quantum mechanics. Nobody has yet done it, and dark energy and dark matter seem to be bringing up more problems. My semi-educated guess is that significant new physics will be required to reconcile everything. It might be revolutionary on the same scale as Einstein, Bohr, etc. were. It may turn out that relativity is a special case of the "new physics", just as Newtonian gravity is a special case of general relativity. Maybe, for example, the speed of light is not quite as constant as we think it is. I don't know if that's true, but I feel that's the sort of paradigm shift that might be required.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear... I don't think what's going on in WV is good. However, I don't think what's going on in the Aral Sea is good, either, and it should not be minimized. That was my original point. Disingenuous rhetoric used to gain attention only gives ammunition to your opponents and leads to people hurling invective rather than listening to each other. We may have little control over former Soviet republics, but if we don't talk about it, who will? This is one earth we live on, and we can't give up on any of it. While I can do more to help people in the United States (and you apparently just assumed that's where I'm writing from), the people who live around the Aral Sea are no more or less deserving of a livelihood or a place to live than those in West Virginia. Environmental problems do not respect borders, and neither should our concern.
The reason I said they are different is that, while they are both water resources, the impact (environmentally and economically) of the resource damage will be different. In the case of the Aral Sea, economic losses would include the destruction of commercial fisheries, for instance. In the case of West Virginia streams, the economic loss might be increased cost of water treatment to remove silt (for example). Environmentally, the disappearance of the Aral Sea will lead to regional climate change. This won't happen in WV. So, I still think they are different impacts.
Also, be careful about comparing the time scales. If species go extinct becase the Aral Sea dries up, that's pretty permanent. And while if the irrigation is stopped, the sea will come back, its assortment of species will most likely be different (even if some species survive in other locations, they may be locally extinct). In the case of the West Virginia mines, the erosive force of water will eventually carry away the mining debris. Now, that will take thousands of years, but it will eventually happen. Admittedly, this is not much consolation to the local residents.
My point that there is no way for us to live on the planet in an environmentally benign manner. Complaining that the loss of a large lake is somehow not as bad as filling in valleys with mining waste is not really productive in the grand scheme of things, IMHO. All that tells me is that you are closer to the valleys (physically or emotionally), therefore you would rather that we pay attention to them than to what's going on elsewhere. I imagine that the fisherman of the Aral Sea think that its loss is also "absolutely unacceptable" and not a "small impact".
Err, the Caspian Sea is (or is not) a lake just as much as the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Salton Sea in California are (or are not) lakes. I think most geologists would classify any body of water that is not an arm of the ocean as a lake. So, the Caspian Sea is, IMHO, both a sea and a lake. I wouldn't consider the terms mutually exclusive.
Also, when you say "largest", you must specify the quantity you are measuring. Are you measuring surface area or volume? For freshwater lakes, Lake Baikal in Russia comes in first for volume ( 23,600 km^3). This is nothing, though, compared to glacial Lake Agassiz in North America: 163,000 km^3 by one estimate! And that was only 8400 years ago.
Those impacts are so different, I don't know how one would compare them. The common theme, though, is that one can't really run a 6-billion person civilization without impacting the natural systems of the planet. Don't like coal? Solar cell manufacturing currently requires the use of heavy metals. Maybe we should build wind turbines all over the place? Well, some people don't like that. Not that I'm saying the effects of coal mining you cite are good, or that we shouldn't try to do better than we do now. Everyone, however, must realize that a technologicially advanced civilization requires energy and materials to run. If you want computers, refrigerators, and hospitals, you have to accept that there will be negative impacts. Since we cannot avoid affecting the environment, we must look at minimizing those impacts.
In fact, gravimetric data has been collected from Mars orbiters, although the precision is nothing like what the Texas researchers are doing.
I doubt that gravimetric data will be of much use in high-end physics research, unless it's somehow used to support experiments for the detection of gravitational waves, for instance. The data is very useful for putting better constraints on various models of geodynamics, though.
One might consider Steven Hawking's illness an adversity. I believe he himself says that he only really got motivated in his work when he was diagnosed with ALS and told he only had a few years to live (I think that was around 1970). That's probably in his biography, which I don't have handy at the moment to pin down the exact reference.
Since you brought up the age of the earth, at the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin said that the earth could not be as old as the geologists said it was, since it would have cooled completely and lost all of its gravitational heat of formation within that time frame. However, a little discovery called radioactivity reconciled the physics with the geology. The heat from radioactive decay has kept the earth hotter all these years. As a bonus, measuring proportions of radioactive isotopes in rocks allows us to much more precisely date the rocks than could be done in Kelvin's time. And guess what... an age of 4.5 billion years is consistent will all the evidence. An age of 10000 years is not.
Scientists generally have reasons for believing the things they do about the world, and those reasons are usually based on the accumulated evidence collected by the scientific community. Are scientists human? Yes. Do they make mistakes? Of course! But, science provides a system for identifying and correcting those mistakes.
Did Steven Milloy let one of his trolls out of the basement? I guess all the florists will be going out of business, seeing how that "Greenhouse Theory" has been refuted.
here):
So, there was at one time a very good reason for providers of birth control to wish to remain anonymous. And I am sure there are people in very high levels of government in the US who would like to make it that way again. That is probably impossible given current public attitudes, but you know, I heard that people who sell condoms are often terrorists....
I haven't seen any source code for icc distributed by Intel. If you start including tools like icc, you're now talking about standard, closed source, business-as-usual software, which is definitely not GNU, Linux, BSD, or any other sort of community-developed software. That's fine, if that's what you want. But is it what you want?
So, most of the "basic" OS, as well as several important applications, are part of GNU. Whether you want to call such an OS GNU/Linux is up to you, but RMS is right when he says that without GNU, there would certainly not be such an operating system based on the Linux kernel available today.
This is a subset of a proposal I first heard several years ago: make all data collected about citizens by the government (exempting perhaps ongoing criminal investigations) public. The theory is, if people know that the information from their annual tax return, for example, will be available on demand, they won't let the government collect the information. Of course, this idea completely misses the voluminous information collected by private entities. Big Brother is more likely to be a corporation than a traditional government, IMHO.
Not one with SOHO's capabilities. It was a pretty major advance, IIRC.
No, but without SOHO, the space forecasters will be left "in the dark". They won't have sufficient data with which to generate forecasts. It would be somewhat equivalent to having all the earth-orbiting weather satellites go down at once. Knowledge of current conditions would be severely limited.