I will agree with you that I certainly have more reading to do. However, I must say that the New Scientist is not he end all be all and neither is it a final authority.
I've never included New Scientist in my list of reputable peer-reviewed journals (in the article.) I've provided a couple of links to it, but only because I've verified that the story matches the evidence provided in genuinely peer-reviewed journals.
It is troubling to me that you reject papers from other peer-reviewed journals (as seems apparent in one of the responses to posts to your article). It raises questions in my mind why include some and exclude others.
I presume you're referring to the incident where Jane Q. Public tried to reference an article from Energy and Environment (a social science journal) when that research had been presented in hard science journals 15 years previously and quickly dismissed as a fluke of data smoothing parameters? That's the reason I dismissed the paper: it was wrong. This happens often enough in that journal that I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you want to waste your time.
Until scientists models start predicting the future accurately, GW is going to be a hard sell.
When it comes to the general public, this subject is quite similar to evolution or the reality of the moon landings. It will always be a hard sell to most nonscientists despite the many model validations like the Mt. Pinatubo prediction. I'm not under the impression that anyone I'm talking to has the slightest intention of looking into the science deeply enough to understand it.
Bottom line, there are too many creditable people who argue against your point of view.
Again, I've repeatedly stressed that science isn't democratic.
Be careful about weeding out data just because it doesn't support your hypothesis. Temperature is certainly on topic.
I'm not weeding out data; just saying that temperature and CO2 aren't the same. The recent rapid CO2 rise has nothing to do with the gradual warming that preceded the industrial revolution, as you implied earlier. That's all I meant.
That's one way to see it. It's also possible that the separate records have a shift in their timescales. I'm sure there are other ways to see it too.
Yes, as I've mentioned in the sixth paragraph of that article, the time lag is difficult to determine with any great accuracy.
You seem quite certain that there is only one way to explain things. You've already assumed your hypothesis is true. It's not good science, and I think you should be more skeptical.... Science isn't about "facts". It's about hypothesis that haven't been contradicted yet. When a hypothesis survives some scrutiny and starts to yield accurate predictions, then maybe we could start to get a little faith that we've got an accurate understanding, but even then, you don't "know" the truth. A new experiment could tear it all back to zero. That's why I hate it when someone says how there is no more doubt - if you aren't doubting, it's not science.
I certainly haven't assumed anything. In fact, you're basically accusing me of committing the cardinal sin in science. All I'm saying is that there's a lot of evidence for abrupt climate change, in the same way that I'd say there's a lot of evidence for general relativity or the big bang theory.
I'll try to avoid taking offense, and just note that I've been training my entire life to be skeptical about everything I study. I wonder why people find it necessary to insult scientists like this? These kinds of statements are kind of like telling a plumber "Oh, come on... you don't really know the difference between a bathtub and a sink." Presumably, people wouldn't insult him by suggesting that he's fundamentally incompetent at his life's work. Maybe that's because plumbers carry big wrenches, while scientists carry calculators?
It doesn't have to be wild fluctuations. A smooth 100 year increase followed by a smooth 100 year decrease would be completely hidden.
If it's not a wild fluctuation, then the Vostok and EPICA ice core analyses are basically right: the current CO2 concentration of 380ppm is ~26% above the 650,000 year maximum of 300ppm. If they are wild fluctuations, the increase you describe would have a 100 year mean far above the average, and would show up in our CO2 reconstructions. As I said, in order to be invisible to the reconstructions, the wild increase would have to be very rapid and immediately followed by an equally rapid and wildly low anomaly to produce a long-term mean that remains below 300ppm.
Again, that's too strong of a statement. Use your imagination, and I think you could come up with other hypotheses that you can't contradict either.
You say that as though my life's work isn't developing and falsifying hypotheses. I've been trying to find an alternative explanation for Meehl's results, and can't think of one. Maybe you could read the paper and show me where their mistake was?
However, I'm guessing there are a lot of things required to understand the climate that fall outside of anyone's present knowledge.
Certainly. But the last 20 years have been a renaissance in climatology, and as I've said the error bars can now confidently rule out the possibility "climate change isn't happening" and fairly confidently rule out the possibility "climate change isn't human-caused." Perfect knowledge isn't necessary to make predictions, otherwise Voya
Yes, it's common for people to claim there's a giant conspiracy among scientists. I've faced this repeatedly in the article from people like Jane Q. Public. No, data aren't being manipulated to serve some political agenda. Scientists aren't evil monsters. We're people just like you, and our primary interest is in understanding the universe, not pushing an agenda. For instance, my interest in this subject began when I was trying to solve an unrelated problem and the mass loss in Greenland's glaciers jumped out at me.
That website is confused on many levels, most of which I've already covered in the article. They confuse weather with climate regarding ENSO events, mistake Newsweek and other mainstream media for "science" and assume nefarious motives for what is simply an ongoing process of assimilating data from various sources properly.
The global temperature change tracks quite nicely with solar output levels, which happen to be cyclic.
Actually, solar variations are too small to account for recent warming.
The politicians and scientists are making the tragic assuming that the earths temperature is supposed to be constant, and ignoring that it probably cycles up and down over a hundred year cycle.
I can't speak for politicians, but scientists aren't making any such assumption.
Are we affecting it? Possibly, but we are certainly not the dominant or controlling factor.
Actually, as I've shown, we're very likely causing the majority of the recent warming.
Interesting study, without a doubt. But it uses oxygen isotope records as a proxy for the global mass of ice sheets, and I was discussing CO2 records. Plus, it agrees with the Vostok ice core temperature reconstruction.
It looks to me like the earth has been going through warm spikes for a lot longer than we've been around. Our current spike started well before mankind was doing much of anything. One could even conjecture that we're around because it got warmer...
We're talking about spikes in CO2, not temperature. One way to see that the current climate change is artificial is that the spike in CO2 is happening before the temperature spike rather than centuries afterwards like in the natural record.
I've already said that the climate varies on long timescales but that Meehl 2004 shows the current warming can't be accounted for by natural forcings. Greenhouse gas emissions are the only way we can explain the temperatures over the last ~40 years. And as I've said, it's quite easy to measure our emitted CO2 because governments tax oil and coal. Those estimates are easily high enough to account for the sudden increase in CO2. We're definitely causing the CO2 spike, and it's very likely causing the temperatures to increase at a rate that's likely to be dangerous.
Again, as I've repeatedly stressed, events such as Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events are the best examples of abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. These are well known in the climatology community, but they're different from what's happening today for reasons I just mentioned. These ancient events are worrying, though, because they show the climate has a propensity to shift quickly from one state to another, given even small forcings.
As far as "rates of change" go, I'm not certain you can say much at all about the long term history without better resolution in the data. For instance, the rate could vary quite wildly in the blink of 100 years, but that would be blurred in the long term record. These ice and sediment cores implement a nice low pass filter based on how they accumulated and are measured.
Yes, ice core data are smoothed by diffusion and compaction, but studies like Delmotte 2004 and Jouzel 2007 have examined the data at a resolution of ~100 years and largely support the conclusions in the original Vostok and EPICA papers.
Of course, you could respond that decadal variations could exist, but to the best of my knowledge no known natural mechanism exists that could allow CO2 to fluctuate so wildly so quickly. Actually, the Siberian trapsmay qualify as a plausible natural source, but what sink could possibly have absorbed the CO2 quickly enough to drive the level down far enough below the average for the low-pass signal to record no evidence of this event?
Single-celled life may be ~3 billion years old, but multi-cellular life is ~600 million years old.
How high had CO2 skyrocketed before 650,000 years ago?
We're still searching, but the current level is higher than at any point in at least the past 2 million years. Furthermore, as I mention in the article, the Sun was dimmer in the distant past, and the biosphere was totally different so the sources/sinks of CO2 weren't the same as today. Also, the positions of the continents have a profound effect on the climate, and they move on those timescales. Comparisons across distant geological time are tricky at best.
This is what I love about you semi-honest "scientists". Why are you limiting your dates to 650,000 years ago? That's not really a long time in the history of this planet.
Because as I mention in the article, that's the age corresponding to EPICA, the deepest antarctic ice core extracted so far.
Well, I try not to repeat myself. But people keep repeating arguments that I specifically address in the sixth paragraph of the article, and discuss in more detail in sections 7(f) and 7(g). I suspect the repetition is more annoying for me than it is for you, because I had to research these issues at length, type nearly 50 pages of explanations that attempt to take a very complicated subject in modern physics down to the level at which the general public might understand it, and then provide links to the peer-reviewed articles that are the basis of this science. All you had to do was click on the link, see the first picture, and stop reading before the sixth paragraph where I discuss the claim you made.
But I'm sad to see that you didn't address any of the science I've discussed, instead asserting that I'm trying to pass myself off as an authority. The very title of my website should be proof that I'm not, but in that article I also repeatedly tried to get people to focus on the actual scientific evidence rather than trying to identify "authorities" or "consensus." Science isn't about authority, it's about developing models to predict new phenomena, and rigorously testing them in peer-reviewed journal articles.
See, my actual goal is to try to find another scientist who disagrees with the science behind abrupt climate change. I'm desperately searching for someone who disagrees with me, but does so in a polite manner while focusing on the science and discussing evidence. Are you that person?
Great post; you even singled out the one rational point in his entire post (aside from the fact that the US has a lower population density, which makes mass transit less economical for us.)
It's also quite surprising to find out that jmerlin's original post is +5 insightful and his followups are "informative," while our responses are +1 troll or redundant. Maybe these words don't mean what I thought they did...
Thanks. As you say, the climate changes naturally. The graph immediately below the one you're talking about shows temperature reconstructions over the last 1000 years that support what you're saying. These natural climate changes establish a range of natural variability, and current measurements show that the climate is now changing much faster than can be attributed to natural causes.
Wow, the reasonable post that I referred to in my own is now at -1? And it's the target of an incredibly rude flame by someone who apparently didn't read the title of the post you responded to. Sad.
Correction: "the worst case scenario has it lagging ~800 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations" should read "the worst case scenario has it lagging ~1000 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations" due to error bars on the ice-age/gas-age estimations, mainly due to accumulation rate uncertainties and gas diffusion before the snow is firmly compacted.
... that version of the Vostok ice core graph you included is horrendously misleading. If you don't overlay the two graphs on top of each other you can easily be fooled into thinking the data suggests that increased atmospheric CO2 lead to higher temperatures. When you do overlay the charts, it becomes clear that the increase in temperature slightly preceded the increase in CO2 in each cycle, including this one.
I've specifically addressed that point in 7 (f) of the index: "CO2 increases after temperature, so it doesn't warm the planet."
But since the tone of your response implies that you probably won't bother, I'll repeat myself once again: this phase lag isn't known with great precision, the worst case scenario has it lagging ~800 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations, and more fundamentally, the difference between the small Milankovitch forcings and the actual observed temperature swings shows that CO2 amplifies the natural forcing. CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, make no mistake about that.
And I'm sorry if you're offended by ads. I tried really hard to force them to be non-animated, and only put them off to the side (I HATE interstitial ads with a burning passion.) And to be honest I make ~8 cents a day from them-- my dream is to have them make 30 cents a day so that the website pays its own hosting costs. And, yes, even though I've archived most of my responses for people to read, I still find it necessary to repeat myself because people keep bringing up the same strange talking points regardless of the scientific evidence. Again, sorry if this is horribly offensive to you.
... But we care SO MUCH about a prediction that at our current use something which will kill off life on this planet in hundreds of thousands of years?... before anything "bad" happens as a result of any man-made climate problems (even if they are true -- though largely unproven), they, their children, and children's great great grandchildren will be all dead and gone....
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. Climate change is already have negative effects, and they'll get worse over the next century. Hundreds of thousands of years is wishful thinking according to the best scientific evidence available today.
... "Cap and Trade" is not a constructive tax -- it is destructive. We have technologies other than coal and oil to produce energy...
I've directly addressed cap and trade, which seems like a very constructive, capitalistic approach that will jumpstart a new industrial revolution. My hope is that the United States invests heavily in nuclear fission technology, preferably using waste reprocessing and newer designs like pebble bed reactors.
... It's just the next buzz-word in politics: "omgs, it might destroy human life on the earth in a few hundred years in a worst case scenario!!"...
As I've stressed, the existence of abrupt climate change is a scientific topic. It's a good idea to ignore politicians and their ridiculous claims, and focus on the science.
and natural CO2 production is 20x mans... but it damn well won't stop the "consensus" train. The only good thing about N2O is that its not something you can tax the population over, at least directly. Can't wait to see who the N2O bogeymen are going to be.
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. There seem to be an endless number of internet ninjas promoting claims like this, despite the fact that CO2 hasn't risen above 300ppm in the last 650,000 years. But then we come along and the concentration skyrockets to 380ppm in a matter of decades, which is 35x faster than any increase in the last 650,000 years.
As other posters have remarked, natural CO2 production and absorption aren't relevant to the current CO2 problem because they balance each other. Our emissions and volcanoes are the only sources of CO2 that aren't balanced, and humans emit 100x more CO2 than volcanoes.
I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints, such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?). The same thing can be found by regarding the solar wind as an electrical current instead of viewing it in mechanical terms. The solar wind is the flow of charged particles from the Sun. "The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
As I mention here, the solar wind is electrically neutral. The Sun isn't "electric." It's a giant ball of fusing hydrogen and helium, and the solar wind is primarily thermally-driven (with exceptions due to solar flares, etc.)
You're not flamebait, just confused or seriously lacking in graduate physics education. The Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand physics (or science) very well.
In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman examines the idea in detail on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.
If it's a bad idea, it will die on its own merits; but if it's a good idea, killing it prematurely by putting it down simply because it goes against conventional wisdom is doing nobody any good.
He may have been overly harsh, but the Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand physics (or science) very well.
In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman has a lengthy critique of the same notion on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.
Really? The first thing I tried when I moved to England was the direction the sink water drained, and surely enough it drained the opposite direction.
Really. The Coriolis force is overwhelmed by tiny asymmetries in the sink and plumbing. Different sinks will drain differently even in the same city because they're made by different companies.
Therefore, we are facing 'up' and the globe is the wrong way around.
Go ahead and believe that if it makes you feel better as you cling to a tree lest you fall into the sky below your upside-down country.:)
I realize you're joking, but it's important to note that the Coriolis force doesn't affect small objects in any significant sense. Sinks and toilets don't drain the other way in the southern hemisphere, nor would coins circulate differently.
BUT inflation aka printing money is a way for the Printer to tax the users of that currency. It's all part of the plan.
Frankly, I don't understand macroeconomics well enough to comment intelligently on the likelihood of the conspiracy theory you're proposing. But the economy seems bloody complicated to me, and I can't rule out the possibility that the Federal Reserve is just trying to avoid a deflationary spiral. Deflation seems more dangerous than inflation as far as I can tell.
Inflation doesn't really seem dangerous unless it's so fast wages can't keep up with it, or if rate fluctuations undermine investor confidence. Inflation's bad for someone who keeps money in a mattress, but all rational investors simply subtract the average inflation rate from the expected return of any potential investment.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never included New Scientist in my list of reputable peer-reviewed journals (in the article.) I've provided a couple of links to it, but only because I've verified that the story matches the evidence provided in genuinely peer-reviewed journals.
I presume you're referring to the incident where Jane Q. Public tried to reference an article from Energy and Environment (a social science journal) when that research had been presented in hard science journals 15 years previously and quickly dismissed as a fluke of data smoothing parameters? That's the reason I dismissed the paper: it was wrong. This happens often enough in that journal that I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you want to waste your time.
When it comes to the general public, this subject is quite similar to evolution or the reality of the moon landings. It will always be a hard sell to most nonscientists despite the many model validations like the Mt. Pinatubo prediction. I'm not under the impression that anyone I'm talking to has the slightest intention of looking into the science deeply enough to understand it.
Again, I've repeatedly stressed that science isn't democratic.
I'm not weeding out data; just saying that temperature and CO2 aren't the same. The recent rapid CO2 rise has nothing to do with the gradual warming that preceded the industrial revolution, as you implied earlier. That's all I meant.
Yes, as I've mentioned in the sixth paragraph of that article, the time lag is difficult to determine with any great accuracy.
I certainly haven't assumed anything. In fact, you're basically accusing me of committing the cardinal sin in science. All I'm saying is that there's a lot of evidence for abrupt climate change, in the same way that I'd say there's a lot of evidence for general relativity or the big bang theory.
I'll try to avoid taking offense, and just note that I've been training my entire life to be skeptical about everything I study. I wonder why people find it necessary to insult scientists like this? These kinds of statements are kind of like telling a plumber "Oh, come on... you don't really know the difference between a bathtub and a sink." Presumably, people wouldn't insult him by suggesting that he's fundamentally incompetent at his life's work. Maybe that's because plumbers carry big wrenches, while scientists carry calculators?
If it's not a wild fluctuation, then the Vostok and EPICA ice core analyses are basically right: the current CO2 concentration of 380ppm is ~26% above the 650,000 year maximum of 300ppm. If they are wild fluctuations, the increase you describe would have a 100 year mean far above the average, and would show up in our CO2 reconstructions. As I said, in order to be invisible to the reconstructions, the wild increase would have to be very rapid and immediately followed by an equally rapid and wildly low anomaly to produce a long-term mean that remains below 300ppm.
You say that as though my life's work isn't developing and falsifying hypotheses. I've been trying to find an alternative explanation for Meehl's results, and can't think of one. Maybe you could read the paper and show me where their mistake was?
Certainly. But the last 20 years have been a renaissance in climatology, and as I've said the error bars can now confidently rule out the possibility "climate change isn't happening" and fairly confidently rule out the possibility "climate change isn't human-caused." Perfect knowledge isn't necessary to make predictions, otherwise Voya
Yes, it's common for people to claim there's a giant conspiracy among scientists. I've faced this repeatedly in the article from people like Jane Q. Public. No, data aren't being manipulated to serve some political agenda. Scientists aren't evil monsters. We're people just like you, and our primary interest is in understanding the universe, not pushing an agenda. For instance, my interest in this subject began when I was trying to solve an unrelated problem and the mass loss in Greenland's glaciers jumped out at me.
That website is confused on many levels, most of which I've already covered in the article. They confuse weather with climate regarding ENSO events, mistake Newsweek and other mainstream media for "science" and assume nefarious motives for what is simply an ongoing process of assimilating data from various sources properly.
Actually, solar variations are too small to account for recent warming.
I can't speak for politicians, but scientists aren't making any such assumption.
Actually, as I've shown, we're very likely causing the majority of the recent warming.
Sorry, forgot this bit:
Interesting study, without a doubt. But it uses oxygen isotope records as a proxy for the global mass of ice sheets, and I was discussing CO2 records. Plus, it agrees with the Vostok ice core temperature reconstruction.
Yes, ice core data are smoothed by diffusion and compaction, but studies like Delmotte 2004 and Jouzel 2007 have examined the data at a resolution of ~100 years and largely support the conclusions in the original Vostok and EPICA papers.
Of course, you could respond that decadal variations could exist, but to the best of my knowledge no known natural mechanism exists that could allow CO2 to fluctuate so wildly so quickly. Actually, the Siberian traps may qualify as a plausible natural source, but what sink could possibly have absorbed the CO2 quickly enough to drive the level down far enough below the average for the low-pass signal to record no evidence of this event?
Correction: "asserting" should read "implying." My bad.
Single-celled life may be ~3 billion years old, but multi-cellular life is ~600 million years old.
We're still searching, but the current level is higher than at any point in at least the past 2 million years. Furthermore, as I mention in the article, the Sun was dimmer in the distant past, and the biosphere was totally different so the sources/sinks of CO2 weren't the same as today. Also, the positions of the continents have a profound effect on the climate, and they move on those timescales. Comparisons across distant geological time are tricky at best.
Because as I mention in the article, that's the age corresponding to EPICA, the deepest antarctic ice core extracted so far.
There's a similar post further down this page which is currently modded "troll." Fascinating.
Well, I try not to repeat myself. But people keep repeating arguments that I specifically address in the sixth paragraph of the article, and discuss in more detail in sections 7(f) and 7(g). I suspect the repetition is more annoying for me than it is for you, because I had to research these issues at length, type nearly 50 pages of explanations that attempt to take a very complicated subject in modern physics down to the level at which the general public might understand it, and then provide links to the peer-reviewed articles that are the basis of this science. All you had to do was click on the link, see the first picture, and stop reading before the sixth paragraph where I discuss the claim you made.
But I'm sad to see that you didn't address any of the science I've discussed, instead asserting that I'm trying to pass myself off as an authority. The very title of my website should be proof that I'm not, but in that article I also repeatedly tried to get people to focus on the actual scientific evidence rather than trying to identify "authorities" or "consensus." Science isn't about authority, it's about developing models to predict new phenomena, and rigorously testing them in peer-reviewed journal articles.
See, my actual goal is to try to find another scientist who disagrees with the science behind abrupt climate change. I'm desperately searching for someone who disagrees with me, but does so in a polite manner while focusing on the science and discussing evidence. Are you that person?
Great post; you even singled out the one rational point in his entire post (aside from the fact that the US has a lower population density, which makes mass transit less economical for us.)
It's also quite surprising to find out that jmerlin's original post is +5 insightful and his followups are "informative," while our responses are +1 troll or redundant. Maybe these words don't mean what I thought they did...
Thanks. As you say, the climate changes naturally. The graph immediately below the one you're talking about shows temperature reconstructions over the last 1000 years that support what you're saying. These natural climate changes establish a range of natural variability, and current measurements show that the climate is now changing much faster than can be attributed to natural causes.
Wow, the reasonable post that I referred to in my own is now at -1? And it's the target of an incredibly rude flame by someone who apparently didn't read the title of the post you responded to. Sad.
Correction: "the worst case scenario has it lagging ~800 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations" should read "the worst case scenario has it lagging ~1000 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations" due to error bars on the ice-age/gas-age estimations, mainly due to accumulation rate uncertainties and gas diffusion before the snow is firmly compacted.
I've specifically addressed that point in 7 (f) of the index: "CO2 increases after temperature, so it doesn't warm the planet."
But since the tone of your response implies that you probably won't bother, I'll repeat myself once again: this phase lag isn't known with great precision, the worst case scenario has it lagging ~800 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations, and more fundamentally, the difference between the small Milankovitch forcings and the actual observed temperature swings shows that CO2 amplifies the natural forcing. CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, make no mistake about that.
And I'm sorry if you're offended by ads. I tried really hard to force them to be non-animated, and only put them off to the side (I HATE interstitial ads with a burning passion.) And to be honest I make ~8 cents a day from them-- my dream is to have them make 30 cents a day so that the website pays its own hosting costs. And, yes, even though I've archived most of my responses for people to read, I still find it necessary to repeat myself because people keep bringing up the same strange talking points regardless of the scientific evidence. Again, sorry if this is horribly offensive to you.
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. Climate change is already have negative effects, and they'll get worse over the next century. Hundreds of thousands of years is wishful thinking according to the best scientific evidence available today.
I've directly addressed cap and trade, which seems like a very constructive, capitalistic approach that will jumpstart a new industrial revolution. My hope is that the United States invests heavily in nuclear fission technology, preferably using waste reprocessing and newer designs like pebble bed reactors.
As I've stressed, the existence of abrupt climate change is a scientific topic. It's a good idea to ignore politicians and their ridiculous claims, and focus on the science.
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. There seem to be an endless number of internet ninjas promoting claims like this, despite the fact that CO2 hasn't risen above 300ppm in the last 650,000 years. But then we come along and the concentration skyrockets to 380ppm in a matter of decades, which is 35x faster than any increase in the last 650,000 years.
As other posters have remarked, natural CO2 production and absorption aren't relevant to the current CO2 problem because they balance each other. Our emissions and volcanoes are the only sources of CO2 that aren't balanced, and humans emit 100x more CO2 than volcanoes.
Yes. The great firewall blocks Chinese access more than English access.
After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun idea, and a follow-up.
After rebooting the router, I can give you W.T. Bridgman's review of "The Electric Sky" and Tim Thompson's review of the electric sun idea, and a follow-up.
As I mention here, the solar wind is electrically neutral. The Sun isn't "electric." It's a giant ball of fusing hydrogen and helium, and the solar wind is primarily thermally-driven (with exceptions due to solar flares, etc.)
You're not flamebait, just confused or seriously lacking in graduate physics education. The Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand physics (or science) very well.
In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman examines the idea in detail on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.
He may have been overly harsh, but the Electric Universe idea has been disproven for many years. It's fair to say that it isn't science, but rather a conspiracy theory promoted by people who don't understand physics (or science) very well.
In addition to my critique, Tim Thompson has rebutted the electric sun idea in depth, and W.T. Bridgman has a lengthy critique of the same notion on his site "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy." Unfortunately, my internet connection is screwed up so I can't provide direct links to these articles at the moment.
Really. The Coriolis force is overwhelmed by tiny asymmetries in the sink and plumbing. Different sinks will drain differently even in the same city because they're made by different companies.
Go ahead and believe that if it makes you feel better as you cling to a tree lest you fall into the sky below your upside-down country. :)
I realize you're joking, but it's important to note that the Coriolis force doesn't affect small objects in any significant sense. Sinks and toilets don't drain the other way in the southern hemisphere, nor would coins circulate differently.
Frankly, I don't understand macroeconomics well enough to comment intelligently on the likelihood of the conspiracy theory you're proposing. But the economy seems bloody complicated to me, and I can't rule out the possibility that the Federal Reserve is just trying to avoid a deflationary spiral. Deflation seems more dangerous than inflation as far as I can tell.
Inflation doesn't really seem dangerous unless it's so fast wages can't keep up with it, or if rate fluctuations undermine investor confidence. Inflation's bad for someone who keeps money in a mattress, but all rational investors simply subtract the average inflation rate from the expected return of any potential investment.