And while we are on the subject, the warming of Mars is irrelevant and our temperature measurements are MUCH longer than "a few thousand years".
If you are really a historian, then I rather suspect that you would take a dim view of someone outside the field making broad and ignorant statements about your area of expertise, seeing those statements repeated ad nauseam by a well-funded industrial cartel and finally having your reasonable responses denigrated with ad hominem attacks on your professional character.
And even if that does not bother YOU, I suspect it would bother "the astronomers up the hall".
it seems daft to discount the sun when it comes to terrestrial temperature changes
No one is discounting it - the effects are well understood. They are just not large enough (by an order of magnitude) to account for the changes we are seeing.
You link looks broken, but this description (where it is called the "Guide Wave Interpretation") points out that it is incompatible with Bell's inequality.
For a pretty thorough discussion of various interpretations, have a look at the containing article.
The problem is that doing something significant about global warming involves very strict controls which will cripple the economies of developing nations.
CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) are not particularly toxic
That depends on how you define "toxic". Sure, folks in the US who have a temperate climate reasonably far above sea level with a food surplus may be more concerned about some heavy metal toxins in their high-protein diet, but if you are a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh whose very life is sensitive to the monsoon schedule and how far above sea level you are, you might have a different set of priorities.
If you do impose heavy restrictions on companies in the "developed world," they'll simply move whatever tiny amount of manufacturing is still left to China or any other country which is business friendly and does not limit CO2 production of companies.
China's national academy of sciences just issued a report showing that their recent rash of dust storms is being driven by the receding of the glaciers on the Tibetan plateau. If the glaciers dry up completely, there goes the water supply for Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indochina and China itself. While I have no illusions about their leaders' humanity, I suspect that survival of SOME of their population will figure into their calculations in the near future.
Ironic, the very thing that is the only reasonable alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear energy and how many less nuclear scientists are there now in the US than there were 30 years ago after the Left killed the nuclear power industry?
If you "follow the money", you will discover that it is actually the coal industry that has been funding the anti-nuke frenzy. And you have fallen into the trap of using the simplistic labels that such entities hide behind.
(FYI and am so far "left" it would curl you hair and I support nuclear power, even breeder reactors.)
Re:Some monetary reasons to return to the moon
on
Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
Snort!
(/me goes looking for a towel to clean up my desk with...)
Er. You do know that only 20% of oil is used for fuel, and that the bulk of it goes to the plastics, fertilizer, industrial chemical and paint industries, right?
I don't believe that is true. According to this DOE graph, transporation sector usage is about 65%. Squinting at the graph suggests that 20% is more like the industrial sector usage.
Sorry to be a bummer about this, but while the idea works well on an individual scale, it just doesn't scale to the society level.
I think the issue is more complex than this.
First of all, I think there are things that individuals CAN do to contribute to the collective energy needs - California's solarification program is a good example of this. You are correct that most folks are not equipped to do this themselves (even thinking about it is frightening in some cases), BUT if it was commodity hardware installed by the power company in conjunction with licensed roofers (say), you could get a fair amount of distributed infrastructure without much risk.
The second issue is one that I was pondering the other day and seems particularly American: The one size fits all solution. American's like BIG solutions to problems. This is not to say that economies of scale should be ignored, but I expect that hooking together several medium sized solutions (nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar, solar thermal and biodiesel) with some sort of transport system (I am intrigued by methanol these days, but whatever) is not a bad plan.
So while I agree, that making everyone a producer will not always work, I think there can be particular solutions at multiple scales from societal down to the individual that will work and we must be careful not to over-generalise.
Ah, I see it now. Putting it next to the display settings is one of the dumbest pieces of UI design I have seen since... I guess since the last time I made a top level post.
Did you buy your 4 digit id off eBay?
No, I just haven't made a top level post in a while. Some of us have a life outside of/.
Please! After his "wounded bull on the Senate floor" speech, I was surprised anyone took him seriously any more. His constituents should replace him with ANYONE from ANY party who can at least act like an adult in public.
Unfortunately, if we transported those items in Toyota Priuses, which can hold a driver plus about 700 pounds of cargo and get 60 mpg (but not fully loaded, I'd bet), it would take 85 of them to carry the same amount as a single 18-wheeler. Those 85 Toyota's would burn about 7 times as much fuel in the process and take up as much as 70 times as much space on the roads. Plus it would cost 85 times as much to pay the drivers.
While most of your post is pretty spot on and informative, this last statement is a bit myopic. If you are going to argue about the economies of scale afforded by trucking, it bears mentioning that there are even greater economies possible with a 200 year old technology called "railways".
Unfortunately for the US, there was a nasty deal cut with the Teamsters under the Carter administration which severely hamstrung the competitiveness of rail with long-haul trucking. 30 years later, the trucking companies are having a lot of trouble replacing personnel and the railroads are experiencing a boom that is saturating their capacity, so maybe this will all sort itself out soon. Your figures on the cost of hiring drivers makes me wonder if the flatness of wages over the last 30 years has enabled the railroads to get back in the game, despite hostile regulation.
We only contribute 0.28% of greenhouse gases according to official numbers. 5% if you remove water vapor, which most global warming kooks do to jack up the numbers.
Citation, please? Oh, here you go. And even if you were right, shoving a balanced rock off a cliff onto someone's head and saying "it's mostly not my fault" doesn't usually cut it.
Temps haven't risen since 1998.
More accurately, the most recent record year was 1998 - although 2005 was very close. That single outlier says nothing about the trend, which is about ~0.17C/decade.
And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.
Venus slow rotation rate, massive atmosphere, tiny inclination (-3 deg), and lack of a hydrologic cycle should make the climate very stable. The mission has a lot of merits on its own. Why make tenuous comparisons?
Oddly enough, some climatologists don't agree with you. Among other things, they are very interested in why the Venusian atmosphere rotates every 100 hours or so, even though Venus itself rotates every 243 days.
However, since water vapor is, you know, an integral part of the atmosphere and several cycles on earth, we really can't do much about that. Better to worry about all the other gasses we up dump into the atmosphere that we can control.
More to the point, water vapour has a much shorter residence time (on the order of 10 days). By contrast, the residence time of CO2 is hundreds of years. Which is why water vapour is called a feedback in GCMs, instead of a forcing.
In plain English: the H2O level in the atmosphere will track the effects of other greenhouse gases within two weeks, so trying to manipulate it directly is pointless.
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some references from climatologists on the Medieval Warm Period, the Mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum and the Little Ice Age, all of which directly contradict your statement.
And while we are on the subject, the warming of Mars is irrelevant and our temperature measurements are MUCH longer than "a few thousand years".
If you are really a historian, then I rather suspect that you would take a dim view of someone outside the field making broad and ignorant statements about your area of expertise, seeing those statements repeated ad nauseam by a well-funded industrial cartel and finally having your reasonable responses denigrated with ad hominem attacks on your professional character.
And even if that does not bother YOU, I suspect it would bother "the astronomers up the hall".
Once again, someone reads a rag like Time and assumes it speaks for "scientists". In fact, no journal article was ever published making such claims.
For a discussion of this topic involving people who study the earth's climate (as opposed to the sun's climate) please see here.
You link looks broken, but this description (where it is called the "Guide Wave Interpretation") points out that it is incompatible with Bell's inequality.
For a pretty thorough discussion of various interpretations, have a look at the containing article.
Close: I have a catapult. Give me all your money or I will throw a big rock at your head. ;-)
China's national academy of sciences just issued a report showing that their recent rash of dust storms is being driven by the receding of the glaciers on the Tibetan plateau. If the glaciers dry up completely, there goes the water supply for Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indochina and China itself. While I have no illusions about their leaders' humanity, I suspect that survival of SOME of their population will figure into their calculations in the near future.
If you "follow the money", you will discover that it is actually the coal industry that has been funding the anti-nuke frenzy. And you have fallen into the trap of using the simplistic labels that such entities hide behind.
(FYI and am so far "left" it would curl you hair and I support nuclear power, even breeder reactors.)
Snort!
(/me goes looking for a towel to clean up my desk with...)
I don't believe that is true. According to this DOE graph, transporation sector usage is about 65%. Squinting at the graph suggests that 20% is more like the industrial sector usage.
First of all, I think there are things that individuals CAN do to contribute to the collective energy needs - California's solarification program is a good example of this. You are correct that most folks are not equipped to do this themselves (even thinking about it is frightening in some cases), BUT if it was commodity hardware installed by the power company in conjunction with licensed roofers (say), you could get a fair amount of distributed infrastructure without much risk.
The second issue is one that I was pondering the other day and seems particularly American: The one size fits all solution. American's like BIG solutions to problems. This is not to say that economies of scale should be ignored, but I expect that hooking together several medium sized solutions (nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar, solar thermal and biodiesel) with some sort of transport system (I am intrigued by methanol these days, but whatever) is not a bad plan.
So while I agree, that making everyone a producer will not always work, I think there can be particular solutions at multiple scales from societal down to the individual that will work and we must be careful not to over-generalise.
No, I just haven't made a top level post in a while. Some of us have a life outside of
AGW appears to be drying out Tibet. The number of people in those watersheds is frightening.
(Sorry to post as a reply, but I can't find the frigging "top level reply" link on the article page for some reason...)
Unfortunately for the US, there was a nasty deal cut with the Teamsters under the Carter administration which severely hamstrung the competitiveness of rail with long-haul trucking. 30 years later, the trucking companies are having a lot of trouble replacing personnel and the railroads are experiencing a boom that is saturating their capacity, so maybe this will all sort itself out soon. Your figures on the cost of hiring drivers makes me wonder if the flatness of wages over the last 30 years has enabled the railroads to get back in the game, despite hostile regulation.
More accurately, the most recent record year was 1998 - although 2005 was very close. That single outlier says nothing about the trend, which is about ~0.17C/decade.
In plain English: the H2O level in the atmosphere will track the effects of other greenhouse gases within two weeks, so trying to manipulate it directly is pointless.
No it isn't.
If we can cause the problem, we can fix it. The only question is, will we?