Basically, our atmosphere has so much water vapor, that every frequency of IR that can be absorbed by it is already fully absorbed.
Sigh.
No, no, no! The bands are not saturated - only the gasses at the top of the atmosphere count and they are not even close to being saturated because they are so thin.
As far as I can tell this would require some sort of new scientific discoveries to even be possible. Nothing we currently know about the universe supports the concept of a coherent mental entity capable of making decisions that affect the physical world; in fact everything seems to imply the opposite, that the physical world would determine the structure and behavior of our mind, and that consciousness and the perception of free will is some sort of emergent effect from all the (entirely deterministic) processes going on inside our brains
True enough, but have a look at this. (This is not be best reference for OR but it is the bet on line version I can find on short notice).
For a really nice overview of the views (more than 3!) have a look at this.
Personally, I suspect that the future is indeterminate because it is the simplest explanation I have for the existence of the present moment. Note that this is NOT the same as saying that time has a direction or even a flow, but more that there is a point that moves along the gradient. Put another way, if I am just a set of points in 4 space, why should one point be favoured over any other?
what we don't know (and it's one of those things that might be impossible to prove, as so many things are in science) is whether these increases are caused by us
Yes we do. The isotope ratios of the carbon match that of the burned fossil fuels. More here.
While I havent kicked someone across the room, ive definitely kicked someone into the air at least a few feet, and I wasnt thrown backwards. The way I see it, as long as you're rooted to the ground by one foot, the opposing force is tranferred along that leg and into the ground.
Even on a heavy bag, you can see this - no disposable friends required;-)
I've also noticed that when doing wheel/spinning hook/whatever you call it kicks on a heavy bag, where there is no reasonable angle to transmit the reaction into the floor, I tend to "bounce off" at full power. By contrast, doing the same kick on a target (or someone's head) doesn't have this problem because of the lower mass of the target.
Okay, so Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. What about water vapor?:)
A good question, and the answer is that the lifetime of water vapour in the atmosphere is measured in weeks. So what happens is that water quickly reaches an equillibrium concentration dictated by the other forcings with longer time scales (CO2 is measured in centuries, methane is shorter but still measured in decades.)
12. Total information awareness... First, there was the hyperbolic, Orwellian name, Total Information Awareness (TIA); then there was the project leader, convicted Iran-Contra felon Rear Admiral John Poindexter. And finally there was the bloated goal: To aggregate, store, and analyze public and private data on an unimaginably massive scale, applying a predictive model that would correlate past activities to predict future acts.
There are these archaic technologies called "film" and "paper" that can be made to last quite a bit longer than all of the geek toys being listed here. Stuff from the 19th century is still quite legible. I have my great grandfather's wedding picture on my dining room wall behind some UV-opaque glass and it looks great. That's about 100 years old...
Other technologies that last include vellum (lambskin) for legal documents, still going strong 700 years later (the British Parliament abandoned a digital technology developed in the 1980s for archiving Acts because it was unreadable 10 years later, but the vellum was just fine). Cuneiform tablets are still legible 5000 years later, so maybe some sort of bas-relief image in clay would work?
Many years ago when Wired was still interesting, they had a chart of information storage technologies in one issue. The thing that struck me looking at it was that the older the tech, the more robust it was. Maybe there is some sort of self-selection going on there but I think that it is more likely to be related to information density and writability.
it also raises questions about why God would create a "dead-end" species such as the neanderthals
While I agree with your rant about fundamentalists, I'd mention that other Christians have no problem with this idea. In C.S.Lewis' novel Perelandra, the main character is informed that species do come to an end, and that to wish otherwise is pretty dysfunctional.
This brings up an interesting point. Folks who actually try to design serious experiments for various ESP phenomena say that it is not possible to design an experiment to distinguish between telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance. So while I agree with the general nature of your rebuttal, there are interesting epistemological issues with ESP and experimental design. Even Radin (who I linked to above) falls into this trap at one point and does not rule out the experimenter influencing the apparatus being tested.
There was a hilarious story a few years back about how in the late 80s the British Parliament decided to start putting laws on digital media instead of vellum (lambskin) as had been done for almost 1000 years. 10 or so years later the project was canned because it was becoming impossible to read the 10 year old media. By contrast, 1000 year old vellum was still perfectly legible.
In a related story, one of the early issues of Wired had a nice chart showing the age vs longevity of various kinds of media. Clay cuneiform tablets are still legible after about 6000 years, but modern CDs only had a projected lifetime of about 10 years.
While I am pretty freaked out myself by the impending collapse of various ice shelves, etc., I believe that dry ice is made by condensing CO2 out of the atmosphere and has no significant carbon footprint (aside from the electricity used to run the compressor maybe.)
(And since it is the summer here in the US of A, I'd also point out that charcoal is made from trees and is also carbon-neutral;-) )
Here are some accurate counts of these values with references to the literature.
To sum up: 30% of the carbon in the atmosphere is of human origin, volcanos produce about 5% of what humans produce, we know which is which because of the isotope ratios and the amounts in the atmosphere and ocean add up to within 10% or so of what we are estimated to have released.
(While I applaud the initiative you guys are showing, next time you might want to see if someone has actually done the calculations in a peer reviewed journal just to check your results.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, no! The bands are not saturated - only the gasses at the top of the atmosphere count and they are not even close to being saturated because they are so thin.
Personally, I suspect that the future is indeterminate because it is the simplest explanation I have for the existence of the present moment. Note that this is NOT the same as saying that time has a direction or even a flow, but more that there is a point that moves along the gradient. Put another way, if I am just a set of points in 4 space, why should one point be favoured over any other?
For the young 'uns among you, see here ;-)
I think they are quoting Hacker from CyberChase.
I've also noticed that when doing wheel/spinning hook/whatever you call it kicks on a heavy bag, where there is no reasonable angle to transmit the reaction into the floor, I tend to "bounce off" at full power. By contrast, doing the same kick on a target (or someone's head) doesn't have this problem because of the lower mass of the target.
Snort!
A nice discussion can be found here.
The usual aphorism is:
"Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get."
(/me ducks!)
There are these archaic technologies called "film" and "paper" that can be made to last quite a bit longer than all of the geek toys being listed here. Stuff from the 19th century is still quite legible. I have my great grandfather's wedding picture on my dining room wall behind some UV-opaque glass and it looks great. That's about 100 years old...
Other technologies that last include vellum (lambskin) for legal documents, still going strong 700 years later (the British Parliament abandoned a digital technology developed in the 1980s for archiving Acts because it was unreadable 10 years later, but the vellum was just fine). Cuneiform tablets are still legible 5000 years later, so maybe some sort of bas-relief image in clay would work?
Many years ago when Wired was still interesting, they had a chart of information storage technologies in one issue. The thing that struck me looking at it was that the older the tech, the more robust it was. Maybe there is some sort of self-selection going on there but I think that it is more likely to be related to information density and writability.
There was a hilarious story a few years back about how in the late 80s the British Parliament decided to start putting laws on digital media instead of vellum (lambskin) as had been done for almost 1000 years. 10 or so years later the project was canned because it was becoming impossible to read the 10 year old media. By contrast, 1000 year old vellum was still perfectly legible.
In a related story, one of the early issues of Wired had a nice chart showing the age vs longevity of various kinds of media. Clay cuneiform tablets are still legible after about 6000 years, but modern CDs only had a projected lifetime of about 10 years.
While I am pretty freaked out myself by the impending collapse of various ice shelves, etc., I believe that dry ice is made by condensing CO2 out of the atmosphere and has no significant carbon footprint (aside from the electricity used to run the compressor maybe.)
;-) )
(And since it is the summer here in the US of A, I'd also point out that charcoal is made from trees and is also carbon-neutral
Here are some accurate counts of these values with references to the literature.
To sum up: 30% of the carbon in the atmosphere is of human origin, volcanos produce about 5% of what humans produce, we know which is which because of the isotope ratios and the amounts in the atmosphere and ocean add up to within 10% or so of what we are estimated to have released.
(While I applaud the initiative you guys are showing, next time you might want to see if someone has actually done the calculations in a peer reviewed journal just to check your results.)