You might consider a neutron spallation source. Just dig your proton linac out of the attic, and fire it up pointed at a high-Z target material. I like tungsten for the target, but you could also go with plutonium if you've got some handy. Bingo, spallation neutrons galore! It's not a beam source, but if you put the spallation target near the thorium, you should be able to get the neutrons to where you need them. Just remember, safety first --- be sure to wear safety glasses and have a couple kilotons of iron-loaded cement shielding between you and the target.
An image processing computer farm and Google Earth.
Several large impact craters have been identified nearly by accident just by people looking at satellite data. With some work on image processing algorithms, there are likely oodles of ~10 meter sized crater remnants to be found scattered around the middles of nowhere, which nobody has noticed over the past few centuries since formation.
This just goes to show that the "free market" is a uselessly naive concept. If one could rely on "good faith" from the participants, then we wouldn't need any type of markets at all; everyone would just get along by freely sharing with others, and perhaps unicorns would bring us free lunches on rainbows. However, any viable system needs to address the fact that many of the participants will be greedy, amoral bastards. The "free market" system rewards and elevates those most successful at gaming the system for their own ends, allowing them to accumulate ever more wealth, hence influence over the system. You can't rely on "good regulation" to promote "good faith" actions in a system that empowers those who successfully act in bad faith to subvert regulation with a strong destructive feedback loop of more money -> more influence over the markets -> greater ability to distort markets and regulation -> more money. That feedback loop has to be broken somewhere (by, for example, relying more on democracy rather than "market forces" representing the will of a wealthy minority for deciding fundamental economic issues).
The history of markets shows that a strong "natural tendency" of free markets is the rise of a wealthier controlling class who find it within their interests and capabilities to distort the market to serve their own ends. The "free, unregulated" market is inherently unstable, and guaranteed to devolve into an oligopoly in the service of a small elite.
Sarah Palin's non-denominational church is the "Wasilla Assembly of God". From the Wikipedia page on the church, here is a quote from Sarah Palin about our involvement in Iraq:
[pray] "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure we're praying for: that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."
A Google search should give you plenty more information about "Wasilla Assembly of God" from sources much less policed and cleansed of critical commentary than Wikipedia.
As for GWB, perhaps you didn't hear about how Rumsfeld's war briefings going past his desk were usually prefaced by violent old-testament scriptures glorifying war and conquest? What went on mostly behind closed doors in the Bush administration was not main-stream Methodist, no matter what public face the administration puts on to the media.
And if you believe that Abu Ghraib was just a few rogue soldiers, then you have fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the propaganda book (blaming a few low-level scapegoats whenever evidence of widespread systematic atrocities start to leak out).
Indeed, you should start paying more attention. There's a good reason why you may not have heard much about GWB and Friends' crazy religious ideas; the main-stream corporate media and the White House were very cooperative in shielding the Bush administration from critical inquiry and evaluation of their internal rhetoric and motivations. It's not surprising that you didn't hear, for example, about how many of Donald Rumsfeld's war briefings that crossed GWB's desk were prefaced by cover pages quoting violent old-testament scriptures in support of war and conquest, and that such language was commonplace within the inner circles of the administration. However, just because you and much of the American public have been kept in the dark about the shady internal workings of our government doesn't mean they didn't happen, and aren't well documented in places that don't get cited by Fox News.
I agree, most major Christian denominations don't think that (I'm a Christian myself, ELCA Lutheran). However, the "fringe" denominations that are extremely powerful in politics (right-wing politics in particular), the varieties of Christianity that Sarah Palin and George Bush and the "C-Street house" subscribe to, are very much interested in "hastening" the return of Christ by fomenting religious wars in the middle east. If you need examples of when these religious movements have perpetrated horrible crimes against humanity, look at what the US has been doing in Iraq (torture camps) or the atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians by the right-wing backed Israeli government, all with the blessing and support of the politically powerful religious right that considers America's terrorist policies in the middle east to be God's will.
If you live in America, you are living in a country run by people who have repeatedly stated that it is the duty of all christians to work towards being in a position to start Armageddon (or Armageddon, basically the apocalyptic battle at the end of the world). In addition to these statements, they have also expressed their own desire to trigger said battle.
The "Christian" right (and the authoritarian corporatist interests backing it) is every bit as terrifying as those scary Muslims, and has a long history of using violent nationalist rhetoric to mobilize the US population into backing massive (and massively profitable to the War Industry) military expansion against perceived threats in the outside world. As an American, the greatest contribution I can bring to world peace and safety is not by ratcheting up the fear against Muslims, but by working to deconstruct the violent and dangerous terrorist power amassed by my own government and its allies.
Absolutely. An upper-middle-class American has the resources to get his food shipped to him from anywhere in the world. Think of how much produce we get from Mexico today. If Mexico becomes a barren desert and Canada becomes the new fertile breadbasket, we'll just get food shipped from Canada instead. A subsistence farmer in Ghana doesn't have that luxury --- when the local crop fails due to changing climate, they starve to death. It happens every day (and will only be exasperated by global warming). A tiny nonproductive wealthy elite controls the global flow of goods produced by the labor of the vast global poor majority, so we already have mass famines in countries that are **exporting** their own food to wealthier nations with a surplus (because that's where profits for the rich are, regardless of the millions of lives lost).
Did you notice the name on the podium in the videos associated with your link, "The Heartland Institute"? Which is a "libertarian/conservative free market-oriented public policy think tank" --- in other words, an entirely politically/ideologically oriented shill group funded by megacorporations and the super-wealthy elite who benefit from them?
In many of your posts, you are adamant that you are a facts-first, science-above-ideology kind of guy. All of this is in vain if the sources you trust and learn from are 100% ideologically driven, with foregone conclusions about climate change that they assemble "facts" to support. This is the very opposite of science. Don't naively accept the dazzling "scientific" articles of such charlatans.
There were many decades when Big Tobacco companies had large segments of the public believing that there were absolutely no credible links between smoking and cancer. During this time, the tobacco industry's own internal research directly contradicted this --- as later came out in court documents. Take note that the Heartland Institute is currently also involved in spreading FUD to downplay health concerns about second-hand smoke. If you are a humanist, it should worry you that you may be being played by organizations that will stop at nothing --- even at the cost of millions of human lives and untold suffering --- to support their corporate overlords' interests.
As a computer scientist who knows about simulations, you should know better than to fall for the "climate is too random to model" canard.
It would be pretty much impossible for me to write a computer program that would predict the results of you rolling a die. There's no way I could get all the initial conditions right, much less predict the complicated interactions going on in your brain controlling your muscles. On the other hand, I can predict with extreme accuracy the average results of you rolling a die many times. It's much the same with climate models. Accurately predicting the weather more than a few days in advance is pretty much impossible, since weather systems tend to be dominated by fluid mechanical properties that are highly chaotic --- extremely sensitive to initial conditions and tiny perturbations that you won't get right in a model. However, the average properties of weather patterns over many years become reasonably predictable. No one can tell you what days it will rain in your city in the year 2011, but they can probably predict the total annual rainfall pretty much spot-on. Global temperature modeling is similar; we can't predict the fine scale day-to-day or even year-to-year random fluctuations, but that doesn't make it impossible to predict longer term (multi-decade scale) trends, including the effects of human impacts on the environment that are slightly "weighting the die" of natural random fluctuations.
As for the accuracy of your "debunking" sites, I don't have time to closely review and respond to all the materials you have presented. However, let me use the first point made in the first article that you linked (Weinstein, "Disproving the Anthropogenic Global Warming Problem") as an example of the type of half-assed deceptive reasoning that you should be more wary of.
Weinstein presents a plot of "Global Average Temperature 1850-2008." He claims that (unnamed) scientists are biasing interpretation by only averaging the temperature rise over the past few decades to show the impact of greenhouse gas warming. Instead, "If the time period from 1850 through 2008 is used as a base, the net increase is just under 0.70C and the average rise is also 0.040C per decade!". Well, DUH! Since human output of greenhouse gases has been increasing with an exponentially growing population using more per-capita resources, one would entirely expect the effects of AGW to be highly concentrated in just the most recent years, so averaging over a much longer period of time, over most of which we were pumping out a negligible amount of greenhouse gases compared to today, one will obviously see a much lower average warming impact. The plot shown is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that current and future levels of greenhouse emissions (which, don't forget, also accumulate over many years) add an underlying trend of > 0.2C/decade to the existing baseline fluctuations in temperature. While this graph would not alone be considered proof of that point (the rise so far is not that many sigma above historical fluctuations), Weinstein is employing extremely flawed logic in trying to use this plot to "disprove" the AGW predictions.
If you ever wonder why there is a lack of anti-AGW voices in peer-reviewed scientific literature, perhaps this is a prime example: this type of thinly veiled ad-hominem attack on 'those misleading scientists' based on flawed logic would get laughed out of the room by any rational set of people. I encourage you to re-read the rest of Weinstein's article with a more critical eye yourself for flawed and deceptive logic. If you can find nothing else wrong with the article, then perhaps you have over-rated your own ability at critical thinking with regards to slick but faulty propaganda writing.
First off, I apologize if my previous post was too easily misread as implying that you have a monetary stake in spreading anti-AGW FUD. Please re-read that section of the post more carefully --- what I meant to say is that some of your sources of information may be channeling (paid-for) disinformation (at least indirectly, by uncritically repeating "talking points" generated by corporate-funded PR agencies for the express purpose of deceiving the general public). I was merely encouraging you to apply your same high standards for proof to supposed "debunkings" as you do to AGW claims (and make sure that your picture of AGW isn't composed of straw-man claims set up to be easily debunk-able), and not to forget the fact that there may be extremely smart and well-funded people whose entire job is to convincingly lie to people like you.
I completely agree that my proposed experiment is "lacking in finesse." Not knowing your level of expertise, budget, or available time commitment, I assumed that, when you asked for an experiment you could do at home, you wanted something extremely simple, cheap, and easy. If you want more finesse, you should be capable on your own of devising a more rigorous program of experimentation.
As to the concept that warmer global temperatures are perhaps even beneficial to humanity in the long run, I do not disagree. The problem is the time scale over which society has time to adjust. With gradual changes over thousands of years, civilizations can make large-scale movements fairly "painlessly" to follow bands of optimal climate. However, if these same changes happen in only a few dozen decades, it's a lot harder to relocate a 6-billion person population to Canada and Siberia in only one century without severe social upheaval and loss of life. People dying from famines (due to crop failures in previously-productive areas) or disease in mass refugee camps will take little consolation in knowing that Canadians are enjoying their new tropical paradise. As a humanist, you should try to be aware of the actual human impact of uncharacteristically rapid climate change.
It is true that, among scientists, most funding ends up going to research groups that generate findings consistent with AGW. This might largely be because lots of actual evidence actually points to AGW. Consider also that the PR budget and political leverage of large polluters far exceeds the total amount of funding for actual research in climate science --- the distribution of funding for research will skew the "debate" over AGW far less than the distribution of funding for buying politicians and control over the media.
Yes, I am a physicist (in-training; currently in grad school), but my field is in low-energy particle physics, so I make no claims to be an expert authority on climatology.
The "Troll" mod on the parent is undeserved. What drinkypoo said is perfectly correct --- the driving force behind the development and deployment of technology is making a few rich people richer; whatever benefits have accrued to the rest of the population are merely side effects. More than making rich people richer, technology has been heavily skewed towards accumulating power and control in the hands of a few. Besides the obvious power-accumulating role of military technology, there is the more subtle (but more insidious) "progress" in industrial "labor saving" saving technology --- which is not designed to make workers' lives any easier, but rather to save employers from having to hire as many workers (and leaving the remaining ones as unskilled, interchangeable button-pushers wholly reliant on the decisions and direction of their employers rather than being independent masters of their own craft). I recommend the book "Progress Without People: in Defense of Luddism" by labor historian David Noble, an excellent set of essays on the way "progress" is used to de-skill and disempower workers even when it is more expensive and less productive than alternative methods that would lead to a more even distribution of authority in society.
To see that white/black visible colors actually do make a big difference in reflecting/absorbing the energy from sunlight, take two boxes and paint one black, one white. Place a thermometer in each, and leave outside in full sunlight on a bright day. You should be able to see for yourself that the black box absorbs more heat from the sunlight (and gets really hot inside), while the white remains cooler. You could also try touching the surface of a black road compared to a lighter sidewalk nearby on a sunny day, and see which is hotter. These experiments should tell you about one half of the issue, absorbance/reflectance of the visible-light solar spectrum.
Unfortunately, to observe the infrared half of the equation is difficult to do in the typical "home" setting, since most people don't have a deep-IR spectrometer in their house. Science actually does sometimes require moderately sophisticated lab equipment (allowing us to, e.g., technologically advance beyond "things I can build in the back yard in an afternoon"). There is a decent chance that there is some university reasonably close to where you live with suitable equipment, and most scientists I know are happy to give visitors a tour of their lab and equipment and demonstrate/answer questions as best they can.
On a different note, I guess that you think of yourself as being a "skeptical" person with regards to the claims of science. Skepticism is a good thing, but it needs to be applied uniformly to be useful. I would highly recommend that you consider being at least one tenth as skeptical towards whatever your current sources of information and speculation on global warming denial are as you are towards the basics of climate science. Your statements so far seem to indicate that you have an extremely limited understanding of the most basic principles of light, heat, and energy, yet you are quick to proclaim what "disproves global warming." You ought to skeptically consider that the sources you currently trust for information on these matters may have significant hidden ideological (often even monetary) drives to blatantly lie and spread ignorance about the issues (just like you have likely been told the "crazy environmentalists" do). You'll do yourself a favor by starting to think critically 100% of the time, not just in response to those you've already been propagandized to distrust. Don't be fooled and end up ignorant under the guise of being (selectively) "skeptical."
See the Wikipedia article on blackbody radiation for the basics of thermal radiation as a function of temperature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbody_radiation). The sun is approximately a 5250 kelvin blackbody source modified by particular absorptions in the atmosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight). A pure 5250K blackbody source peaks at ~550nm. At typical "room temperature" surface temperatures of ~300K, the peak of the blackbody radiation spectrum is 9660nm. If you need a more thorough reference on thermal radiation, consult any introductory college-level quantum mechanics or thermodynamics textbook.
For how these spectra are absorbed/transmitted by different atmospheric components, see the Wikipedia article on the Greenhouse Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect), especially the plot showing the absorption/transmission spectrum of the atmosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png). Note how "greenhouse gases" like CO2 have "bumps" in their absorption spectrum that recapture long-wavelength thermal IR components, while they are pretty much transparent to the bulk of incoming sunlight. The references on the page for this figure provide more information on where these absorption spectra come from.
The light coming in from the sun is mostly near the "visible" band of frequencies that our eyes are good at seeing, ~300-800nm wavelength. The atmosphere is fairly transparent to these wavelengths (hence all the light getting through to us from the sun). The "greenhouse effect" occurs when this visible light is absorbed by (dark-colored) matter and then re-emitted as heat in the thermal IR, at wavelengths around 10,000nm, which are more strongly reflected by "greenhouse gasses" like CO2 in the atmosphere than visible light. A white surface reflects back the visible light --- that can escape back out through the atmosphere --- instead of absorbing it and re-emitting thermal IR that gets trapped. There is no contradiction of the standard global warming model here.
Have you ever considered that you might be horrendously ignorant in lumping all liberals together as people who's ideal is "micromanagement"? I suggest you try reading some political writings by "far-left" liberals like Chomsky, who tend towards left-anarchism (the book "Understanding Power" is a good place to start). The major driving concept of much of the "far left" is the abolishment of all unjustified authority that subjugates some humans under the oppression of others. It's kind of like libertarianism, except not willfully blind and ignorant to the fact that the accumulation of vast riches and capital by a tiny minority leads back to just as horrible coercive authority and enslavement as any "big government" nightmare.
The micromanaging, coercive liberals you probably have in mind are just the "centrist" liberals who are bought and paid for by the same type of big-money interests that own the Republicans, too (hence, the ones usually elected) --- the liberals that still believe in the Capitalist and "market solutions" claptrap that perpetuates the interests of a wealthy, powerful elite. So many of the problems in Africa and around the world have come from allowing Western megacorporations to exploit and pillage under the guise of the "free market," actively destroying attempts at local, community-based organization and production. Third-world countries are coerced into dependence on foreign technology --- pesticides, fertilizers, crop strains, pharmaceuticals --- sometimes through disgustingly hypocritical methods like selectively dumping "food aid" or "medical aid" in targeted areas just long enough to drive local producers out of business. The UN and mainstream liberalism aren't to blame for the world's problems; they are just pawns of the global corporatist hegemony.
So you don't think there are any "real" problems out there that need to be solved? Poverty, homelessness, starvation, war, and genocide are all things of the past or "perceived" figments of my bleeding-heart-liberal imagination? I suspect you may be a very blissful person...
Digital sensor retrofits are available... at a price that may not have 5 trailing zeros, but quite likely 4. That's still a lot of 75 cent polaroid sheets to the break even point. So long as the machine is working fine for the original poster's purposes, there are probably better places to spend that kind of money in the lab.
Actually, you can get TTL light meters for large format cameras, with a light sensor that can be placed anywhere on the ground-glass viewing screen of the camera. These have been around at least since the early '80's, when the Sinarsix metering system was the hot new technology being adopted by photographers like Ansel Adams. While proofing with Polaroids was highly useful earlier, it's no longer a necessity for large format work.
I did a summer internship with NASA a few years after this incident, and of course the interns all got a nice tour of the moonrock facility.
As modemboy points out, the "nitrogen filled lab" and such is pure bunk. The moonrocks are kept in nitrogen-purged safes (and in a separate room with nitrogen-filled gloveboxes used for preparing samples to send out to researchers), but the room containing the safes isn't itself filled with nitrogen. There is an "air-lock," but it's the usual type of clean-room airlock, used to keep out dust between the changing room where you suit up in disposable clean-room clothes and the lab itself.
I have no problems taking Greek Mythology as metaphor --- that's pretty much what a fairytale is, the encapsulation of a society's moral/social norms and knowledge in catchy story form. By calling it a fairytale, I don't mean to wholly dismiss it, but rather to simply categorize it for what it is.
Furthermore, I have no problem with seeing large segments of the bible, especially in the Old Testament, in the same way, as a mythology/set-of-fairytales passed down by the Isrealites, describing their understanding of God and the world.
The New Testament Gospels, however, fall under a somewhat different rubric. They are retellings of actual events about actual people, passed down from the original eyewitness of the first apostles. Not that the gospel accounts are wholly free from all errors (in the many decades intervening between when the actual events and when the Gospels were actually written down, there's plenty of room for muddling a few items in transmission), but that they do speak of a real Jesus who was the real Christ, actually dying for the sins of the world (including mine!) and rising again.
However, I disbelieve in Zeus for likely pretty much the same reason that you disbelieve in Zeus --- seeing Greek Mythology as a set of fairytales that do not hold up to rational scrutiny. However, the existence of fairytales involving gods disproves the existence of God no more than the existence of fairytales involving wolves disproves the existence of wolves. Christianity (at least in the form I subscribe to) has so far stood up to my scrutiny (to a far deeper level than one-liners in a Slashdot discussion).
Parent is modded funny, but this is actually a serious and frequently made argument both outside and inside of Christianity. Many Christian denominations --- most notably, Roman Catholicism --- hold that doing a sufficient amount of good works is a necessary prerequisite for salvation, and worry that if salvation is assured by grace and faith alone, then good works will languish.
The response to this, ever since the Reformation and the split of Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism over this very issue, is that we can trust God that good works will not languish. Rather, that one who accepts the Good News promise of salvation will be all the more driven, out of response to God's love and through the working of the spirit, to strive to be the servant of all, loving others as God first loved them. Thus good works still happen, though as the result and response rather than the cause of God's love for us.
That's exactly what a faith in such a loving God allows one to do. I am freed from striving to assure my own self-righteousness, "worrying about making God happy," since I know Jesus has already taken care of that. Instead, I can now joyfully serve my fellow man ahead of myself.
Slashdot Mirror
You might consider a neutron spallation source. Just dig your proton linac out of the attic, and fire it up pointed at a high-Z target material. I like tungsten for the target, but you could also go with plutonium if you've got some handy. Bingo, spallation neutrons galore! It's not a beam source, but if you put the spallation target near the thorium, you should be able to get the neutrons to where you need them. Just remember, safety first --- be sure to wear safety glasses and have a couple kilotons of iron-loaded cement shielding between you and the target.
An image processing computer farm and Google Earth.
Several large impact craters have been identified nearly by accident just by people looking at satellite data. With some work on image processing algorithms, there are likely oodles of ~10 meter sized crater remnants to be found scattered around the middles of nowhere, which nobody has noticed over the past few centuries since formation.
This just goes to show that the "free market" is a uselessly naive concept. If one could rely on "good faith" from the participants, then we wouldn't need any type of markets at all; everyone would just get along by freely sharing with others, and perhaps unicorns would bring us free lunches on rainbows. However, any viable system needs to address the fact that many of the participants will be greedy, amoral bastards. The "free market" system rewards and elevates those most successful at gaming the system for their own ends, allowing them to accumulate ever more wealth, hence influence over the system. You can't rely on "good regulation" to promote "good faith" actions in a system that empowers those who successfully act in bad faith to subvert regulation with a strong destructive feedback loop of more money -> more influence over the markets -> greater ability to distort markets and regulation -> more money. That feedback loop has to be broken somewhere (by, for example, relying more on democracy rather than "market forces" representing the will of a wealthy minority for deciding fundamental economic issues).
The history of markets shows that a strong "natural tendency" of free markets is the rise of a wealthier controlling class who find it within their interests and capabilities to distort the market to serve their own ends. The "free, unregulated" market is inherently unstable, and guaranteed to devolve into an oligopoly in the service of a small elite.
Sarah Palin's non-denominational church is the "Wasilla Assembly of God". From the Wikipedia page on the church, here is a quote from Sarah Palin about our involvement in Iraq:
[pray] "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure we're praying for: that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."
A Google search should give you plenty more information about "Wasilla Assembly of God" from sources much less policed and cleansed of critical commentary than Wikipedia.
As for GWB, perhaps you didn't hear about how Rumsfeld's war briefings going past his desk were usually prefaced by violent old-testament scriptures glorifying war and conquest? What went on mostly behind closed doors in the Bush administration was not main-stream Methodist, no matter what public face the administration puts on to the media.
And if you believe that Abu Ghraib was just a few rogue soldiers, then you have fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the propaganda book (blaming a few low-level scapegoats whenever evidence of widespread systematic atrocities start to leak out).
Indeed, you should start paying more attention. There's a good reason why you may not have heard much about GWB and Friends' crazy religious ideas; the main-stream corporate media and the White House were very cooperative in shielding the Bush administration from critical inquiry and evaluation of their internal rhetoric and motivations. It's not surprising that you didn't hear, for example, about how many of Donald Rumsfeld's war briefings that crossed GWB's desk were prefaced by cover pages quoting violent old-testament scriptures in support of war and conquest, and that such language was commonplace within the inner circles of the administration. However, just because you and much of the American public have been kept in the dark about the shady internal workings of our government doesn't mean they didn't happen, and aren't well documented in places that don't get cited by Fox News.
I agree, most major Christian denominations don't think that (I'm a Christian myself, ELCA Lutheran). However, the "fringe" denominations that are extremely powerful in politics (right-wing politics in particular), the varieties of Christianity that Sarah Palin and George Bush and the "C-Street house" subscribe to, are very much interested in "hastening" the return of Christ by fomenting religious wars in the middle east. If you need examples of when these religious movements have perpetrated horrible crimes against humanity, look at what the US has been doing in Iraq (torture camps) or the atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians by the right-wing backed Israeli government, all with the blessing and support of the politically powerful religious right that considers America's terrorist policies in the middle east to be God's will.
One thing to remember:
If you live in America, you are living in a country run by people who have repeatedly stated that it is the duty of all christians to work towards being in a position to start Armageddon (or Armageddon, basically the apocalyptic battle at the end of the world). In addition to these statements, they have also expressed their own desire to trigger said battle.
The "Christian" right (and the authoritarian corporatist interests backing it) is every bit as terrifying as those scary Muslims, and has a long history of using violent nationalist rhetoric to mobilize the US population into backing massive (and massively profitable to the War Industry) military expansion against perceived threats in the outside world. As an American, the greatest contribution I can bring to world peace and safety is not by ratcheting up the fear against Muslims, but by working to deconstruct the violent and dangerous terrorist power amassed by my own government and its allies.
Absolutely. An upper-middle-class American has the resources to get his food shipped to him from anywhere in the world. Think of how much produce we get from Mexico today. If Mexico becomes a barren desert and Canada becomes the new fertile breadbasket, we'll just get food shipped from Canada instead. A subsistence farmer in Ghana doesn't have that luxury --- when the local crop fails due to changing climate, they starve to death. It happens every day (and will only be exasperated by global warming). A tiny nonproductive wealthy elite controls the global flow of goods produced by the labor of the vast global poor majority, so we already have mass famines in countries that are **exporting** their own food to wealthier nations with a surplus (because that's where profits for the rich are, regardless of the millions of lives lost).
Did you notice the name on the podium in the videos associated with your link, "The Heartland Institute"? Which is a "libertarian/conservative free market-oriented public policy think tank" --- in other words, an entirely politically/ideologically oriented shill group funded by megacorporations and the super-wealthy elite who benefit from them?
In many of your posts, you are adamant that you are a facts-first, science-above-ideology kind of guy. All of this is in vain if the sources you trust and learn from are 100% ideologically driven, with foregone conclusions about climate change that they assemble "facts" to support. This is the very opposite of science. Don't naively accept the dazzling "scientific" articles of such charlatans.
There were many decades when Big Tobacco companies had large segments of the public believing that there were absolutely no credible links between smoking and cancer. During this time, the tobacco industry's own internal research directly contradicted this --- as later came out in court documents. Take note that the Heartland Institute is currently also involved in spreading FUD to downplay health concerns about second-hand smoke. If you are a humanist, it should worry you that you may be being played by organizations that will stop at nothing --- even at the cost of millions of human lives and untold suffering --- to support their corporate overlords' interests.
As a computer scientist who knows about simulations, you should know better than to fall for the "climate is too random to model" canard.
It would be pretty much impossible for me to write a computer program that would predict the results of you rolling a die. There's no way I could get all the initial conditions right, much less predict the complicated interactions going on in your brain controlling your muscles. On the other hand, I can predict with extreme accuracy the average results of you rolling a die many times. It's much the same with climate models. Accurately predicting the weather more than a few days in advance is pretty much impossible, since weather systems tend to be dominated by fluid mechanical properties that are highly chaotic --- extremely sensitive to initial conditions and tiny perturbations that you won't get right in a model. However, the average properties of weather patterns over many years become reasonably predictable. No one can tell you what days it will rain in your city in the year 2011, but they can probably predict the total annual rainfall pretty much spot-on. Global temperature modeling is similar; we can't predict the fine scale day-to-day or even year-to-year random fluctuations, but that doesn't make it impossible to predict longer term (multi-decade scale) trends, including the effects of human impacts on the environment that are slightly "weighting the die" of natural random fluctuations.
As for the accuracy of your "debunking" sites, I don't have time to closely review and respond to all the materials you have presented. However, let me use the first point made in the first article that you linked (Weinstein, "Disproving the Anthropogenic Global Warming Problem") as an example of the type of half-assed deceptive reasoning that you should be more wary of.
Weinstein presents a plot of "Global Average Temperature 1850-2008." He claims that (unnamed) scientists are biasing interpretation by only averaging the temperature rise over the past few decades to show the impact of greenhouse gas warming. Instead, "If the time period from 1850 through 2008 is used as a base, the net increase is just under 0.70C and the average rise is also 0.040C per decade!". Well, DUH! Since human output of greenhouse gases has been increasing with an exponentially growing population using more per-capita resources, one would entirely expect the effects of AGW to be highly concentrated in just the most recent years, so averaging over a much longer period of time, over most of which we were pumping out a negligible amount of greenhouse gases compared to today, one will obviously see a much lower average warming impact. The plot shown is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that current and future levels of greenhouse emissions (which, don't forget, also accumulate over many years) add an underlying trend of > 0.2C/decade to the existing baseline fluctuations in temperature. While this graph would not alone be considered proof of that point (the rise so far is not that many sigma above historical fluctuations), Weinstein is employing extremely flawed logic in trying to use this plot to "disprove" the AGW predictions.
If you ever wonder why there is a lack of anti-AGW voices in peer-reviewed scientific literature, perhaps this is a prime example: this type of thinly veiled ad-hominem attack on 'those misleading scientists' based on flawed logic would get laughed out of the room by any rational set of people. I encourage you to re-read the rest of Weinstein's article with a more critical eye yourself for flawed and deceptive logic. If you can find nothing else wrong with the article, then perhaps you have over-rated your own ability at critical thinking with regards to slick but faulty propaganda writing.
First off, I apologize if my previous post was too easily misread as implying that you have a monetary stake in spreading anti-AGW FUD. Please re-read that section of the post more carefully --- what I meant to say is that some of your sources of information may be channeling (paid-for) disinformation (at least indirectly, by uncritically repeating "talking points" generated by corporate-funded PR agencies for the express purpose of deceiving the general public). I was merely encouraging you to apply your same high standards for proof to supposed "debunkings" as you do to AGW claims (and make sure that your picture of AGW isn't composed of straw-man claims set up to be easily debunk-able), and not to forget the fact that there may be extremely smart and well-funded people whose entire job is to convincingly lie to people like you.
I completely agree that my proposed experiment is "lacking in finesse." Not knowing your level of expertise, budget, or available time commitment, I assumed that, when you asked for an experiment you could do at home, you wanted something extremely simple, cheap, and easy. If you want more finesse, you should be capable on your own of devising a more rigorous program of experimentation.
As to the concept that warmer global temperatures are perhaps even beneficial to humanity in the long run, I do not disagree. The problem is the time scale over which society has time to adjust. With gradual changes over thousands of years, civilizations can make large-scale movements fairly "painlessly" to follow bands of optimal climate. However, if these same changes happen in only a few dozen decades, it's a lot harder to relocate a 6-billion person population to Canada and Siberia in only one century without severe social upheaval and loss of life. People dying from famines (due to crop failures in previously-productive areas) or disease in mass refugee camps will take little consolation in knowing that Canadians are enjoying their new tropical paradise. As a humanist, you should try to be aware of the actual human impact of uncharacteristically rapid climate change.
It is true that, among scientists, most funding ends up going to research groups that generate findings consistent with AGW. This might largely be because lots of actual evidence actually points to AGW. Consider also that the PR budget and political leverage of large polluters far exceeds the total amount of funding for actual research in climate science --- the distribution of funding for research will skew the "debate" over AGW far less than the distribution of funding for buying politicians and control over the media.
Yes, I am a physicist (in-training; currently in grad school), but my field is in low-energy particle physics, so I make no claims to be an expert authority on climatology.
The "Troll" mod on the parent is undeserved. What drinkypoo said is perfectly correct --- the driving force behind the development and deployment of technology is making a few rich people richer; whatever benefits have accrued to the rest of the population are merely side effects. More than making rich people richer, technology has been heavily skewed towards accumulating power and control in the hands of a few. Besides the obvious power-accumulating role of military technology, there is the more subtle (but more insidious) "progress" in industrial "labor saving" saving technology --- which is not designed to make workers' lives any easier, but rather to save employers from having to hire as many workers (and leaving the remaining ones as unskilled, interchangeable button-pushers wholly reliant on the decisions and direction of their employers rather than being independent masters of their own craft). I recommend the book "Progress Without People: in Defense of Luddism" by labor historian David Noble, an excellent set of essays on the way "progress" is used to de-skill and disempower workers even when it is more expensive and less productive than alternative methods that would lead to a more even distribution of authority in society.
To see that white/black visible colors actually do make a big difference in reflecting/absorbing the energy from sunlight, take two boxes and paint one black, one white. Place a thermometer in each, and leave outside in full sunlight on a bright day. You should be able to see for yourself that the black box absorbs more heat from the sunlight (and gets really hot inside), while the white remains cooler. You could also try touching the surface of a black road compared to a lighter sidewalk nearby on a sunny day, and see which is hotter. These experiments should tell you about one half of the issue, absorbance/reflectance of the visible-light solar spectrum.
Unfortunately, to observe the infrared half of the equation is difficult to do in the typical "home" setting, since most people don't have a deep-IR spectrometer in their house. Science actually does sometimes require moderately sophisticated lab equipment (allowing us to, e.g., technologically advance beyond "things I can build in the back yard in an afternoon"). There is a decent chance that there is some university reasonably close to where you live with suitable equipment, and most scientists I know are happy to give visitors a tour of their lab and equipment and demonstrate/answer questions as best they can.
On a different note, I guess that you think of yourself as being a "skeptical" person with regards to the claims of science. Skepticism is a good thing, but it needs to be applied uniformly to be useful. I would highly recommend that you consider being at least one tenth as skeptical towards whatever your current sources of information and speculation on global warming denial are as you are towards the basics of climate science. Your statements so far seem to indicate that you have an extremely limited understanding of the most basic principles of light, heat, and energy, yet you are quick to proclaim what "disproves global warming." You ought to skeptically consider that the sources you currently trust for information on these matters may have significant hidden ideological (often even monetary) drives to blatantly lie and spread ignorance about the issues (just like you have likely been told the "crazy environmentalists" do). You'll do yourself a favor by starting to think critically 100% of the time, not just in response to those you've already been propagandized to distrust. Don't be fooled and end up ignorant under the guise of being (selectively) "skeptical."
See the Wikipedia article on blackbody radiation for the basics of thermal radiation as a function of temperature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbody_radiation).
The sun is approximately a 5250 kelvin blackbody source modified by particular absorptions in the atmosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight). A pure 5250K blackbody source peaks at ~550nm. At typical "room temperature" surface temperatures of ~300K, the peak of the blackbody radiation spectrum is 9660nm. If you need a more thorough reference on thermal radiation, consult any introductory college-level quantum mechanics or thermodynamics textbook.
For how these spectra are absorbed/transmitted by different atmospheric components, see the Wikipedia article on the Greenhouse Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect), especially the plot showing the absorption/transmission spectrum of the atmosphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png). Note how "greenhouse gases" like CO2 have "bumps" in their absorption spectrum that recapture long-wavelength thermal IR components, while they are pretty much transparent to the bulk of incoming sunlight. The references on the page for this figure provide more information on where these absorption spectra come from.
The light coming in from the sun is mostly near the "visible" band of frequencies that our eyes are good at seeing, ~300-800nm wavelength. The atmosphere is fairly transparent to these wavelengths (hence all the light getting through to us from the sun). The "greenhouse effect" occurs when this visible light is absorbed by (dark-colored) matter and then re-emitted as heat in the thermal IR, at wavelengths around 10,000nm, which are more strongly reflected by "greenhouse gasses" like CO2 in the atmosphere than visible light. A white surface reflects back the visible light --- that can escape back out through the atmosphere --- instead of absorbing it and re-emitting thermal IR that gets trapped. There is no contradiction of the standard global warming model here.
Have you ever considered that you might be horrendously ignorant in lumping all liberals together as people who's ideal is "micromanagement"? I suggest you try reading some political writings by "far-left" liberals like Chomsky, who tend towards left-anarchism (the book "Understanding Power" is a good place to start). The major driving concept of much of the "far left" is the abolishment of all unjustified authority that subjugates some humans under the oppression of others. It's kind of like libertarianism, except not willfully blind and ignorant to the fact that the accumulation of vast riches and capital by a tiny minority leads back to just as horrible coercive authority and enslavement as any "big government" nightmare.
The micromanaging, coercive liberals you probably have in mind are just the "centrist" liberals who are bought and paid for by the same type of big-money interests that own the Republicans, too (hence, the ones usually elected) --- the liberals that still believe in the Capitalist and "market solutions" claptrap that perpetuates the interests of a wealthy, powerful elite. So many of the problems in Africa and around the world have come from allowing Western megacorporations to exploit and pillage under the guise of the "free market," actively destroying attempts at local, community-based organization and production. Third-world countries are coerced into dependence on foreign technology --- pesticides, fertilizers, crop strains, pharmaceuticals --- sometimes through disgustingly hypocritical methods like selectively dumping "food aid" or "medical aid" in targeted areas just long enough to drive local producers out of business. The UN and mainstream liberalism aren't to blame for the world's problems; they are just pawns of the global corporatist hegemony.
So you don't think there are any "real" problems out there that need to be solved? Poverty, homelessness, starvation, war, and genocide are all things of the past or "perceived" figments of my bleeding-heart-liberal imagination? I suspect you may be a very blissful person...
Digital sensor retrofits are available... at a price that may not have 5 trailing zeros, but quite likely 4. That's still a lot of 75 cent polaroid sheets to the break even point. So long as the machine is working fine for the original poster's purposes, there are probably better places to spend that kind of money in the lab.
Actually, you can get TTL light meters for large format cameras, with a light sensor that can be placed anywhere on the ground-glass viewing screen of the camera. These have been around at least since the early '80's, when the Sinarsix metering system was the hot new technology being adopted by photographers like Ansel Adams. While proofing with Polaroids was highly useful earlier, it's no longer a necessity for large format work.
I did a summer internship with NASA a few years after this incident, and of course the interns all got a nice tour of the moonrock facility.
As modemboy points out, the "nitrogen filled lab" and such is pure bunk. The moonrocks are kept in nitrogen-purged safes (and in a separate room with nitrogen-filled gloveboxes used for preparing samples to send out to researchers), but the room containing the safes isn't itself filled with nitrogen. There is an "air-lock," but it's the usual type of clean-room airlock, used to keep out dust between the changing room where you suit up in disposable clean-room clothes and the lab itself.
I have no problems taking Greek Mythology as metaphor --- that's pretty much what a fairytale is, the encapsulation of a society's moral/social norms and knowledge in catchy story form. By calling it a fairytale, I don't mean to wholly dismiss it, but rather to simply categorize it for what it is.
Furthermore, I have no problem with seeing large segments of the bible, especially in the Old Testament, in the same way, as a mythology/set-of-fairytales passed down by the Isrealites, describing their understanding of God and the world.
The New Testament Gospels, however, fall under a somewhat different rubric. They are retellings of actual events about actual people, passed down from the original eyewitness of the first apostles. Not that the gospel accounts are wholly free from all errors (in the many decades intervening between when the actual events and when the Gospels were actually written down, there's plenty of room for muddling a few items in transmission), but that they do speak of a real Jesus who was the real Christ, actually dying for the sins of the world (including mine!) and rising again.
That would be a bummer, indeed.
However, I disbelieve in Zeus for likely pretty much the same reason that you disbelieve in Zeus --- seeing Greek Mythology as a set of fairytales that do not hold up to rational scrutiny. However, the existence of fairytales involving gods disproves the existence of God no more than the existence of fairytales involving wolves disproves the existence of wolves. Christianity (at least in the form I subscribe to) has so far stood up to my scrutiny (to a far deeper level than one-liners in a Slashdot discussion).
Parent is modded funny, but this is actually a serious and frequently made argument both outside and inside of Christianity. Many Christian denominations --- most notably, Roman Catholicism --- hold that doing a sufficient amount of good works is a necessary prerequisite for salvation, and worry that if salvation is assured by grace and faith alone, then good works will languish.
The response to this, ever since the Reformation and the split of Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism over this very issue, is that we can trust God that good works will not languish. Rather, that one who accepts the Good News promise of salvation will be all the more driven, out of response to God's love and through the working of the spirit, to strive to be the servant of all, loving others as God first loved them. Thus good works still happen, though as the result and response rather than the cause of God's love for us.
That's exactly what a faith in such a loving God allows one to do. I am freed from striving to assure my own self-righteousness, "worrying about making God happy," since I know Jesus has already taken care of that. Instead, I can now joyfully serve my fellow man ahead of myself.