I suppose I should clarify that comment, since I'm sure it'll be read wrong-- I said "Silicon cells roll off for wavelengths below about 1000 nm"... what I'd intended to say here is that the performance drops to zero for wavelengths "longer" than about 1000 nm. ("below" meaning lower in energy, but longer in wavelength.)
Actually, no. If you look at the color of the solar panel, you'll find its wavelength gap that it doesn't pick up light from
Actually, no. if you would look at the reflectance of a solar panel with a spectrophotometer, you'll discover that, although (for example) silicon panels do look blue, even in the blue the reflectance is very low-- about 8% or so until you get below about 250 nm, where there's just not that many photons in sunlight. It just "looks" blue, because the reflectivity in the blue, low as it is, is more than the reflectivity elsewhere in the visible spectrum.
, as that's what is being essentially reflected back to you.
You can't see the "wavelength gap where it doesn't pick up light"-- that's in the infrared, below the ability of your eyes to see. If you could see in that wavelength, though, the semiconductor would be transparent.
Most solar panels work best under green and red light, and deeper violets, IR has typically had too low of an energy potential to have any worthwhile use.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Silicon cells roll off for wavelengths below about 1000 nm, which is very definitely in the infrared. (FWIW, silicon has a bandgap of about 1.1 eV-- you do the math.). High efficiency triple junction cells go considerably further into the infrared. The cell is most efficient for light very close to the bandgap-- that is, silicon cells have peak conversion efficiency around 950 nm or so.
Typical blues get pretty much ignored, which makes no sense because blue has the higher energy potential.
Blue does have higher energy per photon, but the spectrum has far fewer photons there. It doesn't get "ignored"-- in fact, most cells are quite good at converting the blue photons (they start rolling off in the near UV). However, it's not optimum to make a solar cell have peak response in the blue; there just aren't enough photons there. For a single junction cell, optimum bandgap is about 1.5 eV. For a multijunction cell, though, you do want the top cell to have good blue response.
Now all we need is to mimic Chlorophyll F and start capturing everything from beginning IR (720nm) on down. I'd love to see a solar cell that can respond to all of the wavelengths currently covered by terrestrial and marine plant life.
You're in luck.
Existing solar cells do capture everything from 720 nm on down-- in fact, silicon responds out to about 1000 nm. Existing solar cells do respond to all the wavelengths currently covered by terrestrial and marine plant life.
I agree it's creepy, but Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer bothers me a bit. Really, I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.
I am a great fan of no-moving-parts technologies. Nevertheless, from a lot of experience in the space world, I can tell you that it is not true that a technology with no moving parts is always the engineering choice over a technology with moving parts. There are many systems currently flying in space that do have moving parts, even though they could be redesigned, worse, using systems without moving parts. The correct solution is to use the technology that is best for the mission.
The problem is that if you spin the sail to provide stiffness, the sail is a gyroscope, and with a gyroscope it is difficult to change the angular momentum vector-- that is, to repoint the sail. It's not the low value of the control torque (although the control torques for IKAROS are in fact very low) it's the angular momentum.
Apparently, however, I'm not going to convince you. Nevertheless, it turns out to be valuable to test more than one technology in space, and that simply picking the first thing to fly is not always the best thing.
IKAROS is capable of adjusting its attitude whilst spinning, through the use of LCD panels on the sail which subtly alter its albedo and thus the effect of light pressure, so you are wrong on at least that note.
I said IKAROS was not very maneuverable. "Subtly altering its albedo and thus the effect of light pressure" is a very good description of a vehicle that's not very maneuverable. There may be useful applications in which a not-very maneuverable sail is a good technology. Different applications need different technologies.
Basically, IKAROS and Nanosail-D are quite different in the details of the technologies for sails. Apparently you think that once any sail has ever been deployed that every other approach should be abandoned, but that's not actually a good way to develop things.
--In fact, I hate to disappoint you on this, but if sails are ever going to become practical, there are going to have to even more test flights.
Hmm, a gian, thin space sail that's probably several square miles. Boy, I sure hope one single little chunk of orbital debris or meteor doesn't impact that gigantic area in the 2 weeks or it won't work so well. Sails tend to not like meteors impacting them. Too bad the odds of that happening are about 99.99999%. I don't know what they're thinking.
Actually, solar sails are almost completely unaffected by small impacts by micrometeoroids or debris. The micrometeoroids go right through. They do leave a hole, which reduces the area of the sail by a trivial amount, but sail areas are so large, and micrometeoroids so small, that it would take decades to centuries before the effective area loss reduces performance significantly.
If a micrometeoroid impacts the struts or support structure, of course, that may be more of a problem, depending on how redundant the structure is (and how big the impact-- but micrometeoroids are small, and debris is not much of a problem in interplanetary space, where sails are most likely to be used). Of course to make a sail lightweight, the support structures had better account for only an extremely small fraction of the sail area.
Nanosail D was originally to launch on one of the ill-fated Falcon 1 test flights, at which time it would have indeed been proving the technology. But now that JAXA have not only proved the technology, but applied it to interplanetary travel, it seems a bit moot.
Not at all. If you don't want to actually use technology in space, but just want to get points for saying "I flew the first one," then one flight is fine. If you're actually going to use technology, though, a first demo flight is just the beginning of the development and testing stage, not the end. Pretty much everything about Nanosail D is mechanically and structurally different from the IKAROS sail; in terms of physics, they are similar, but in terms of technology, they are very different. IKAROS is held out by spin, for example; this makes for a solar sail that is not very maneuverable. Nanosail is strut stabilized, this is a sail that can be redirected much more easily (for example, to use for orbit-raising).
They are also not merely different technologies, they are very different mission types-- Nanosail-D is (as its name implies) a demo of a very small sail. Some applications are there for small sails; some are there for medium sails, and there are also a lot of applications for huge sails-- kilometers and larger, which still have to be demonstrated. Saying "we launched one sail once, now the technology is fully developed at all sizes and for all missions" is just ignoring the real world of technology, where every step needs developing and testing.
Finally, the IKAROS sail doesn't demonstrate very low specific mass, which is the key to practical propulsion. Nanosail-D is about three times better.
Saying "a solar sail flew once, so the technology is developed and it's moot to launch another one" is about as accurate a comment as saying "A horseless carriage was tested in 1801 so the technology is demonstrated and it's moot to demonstrate a different one."
It really only has to be dealt with by the interactive 'free' sites like FB. If I die, evenutally my domain will die, my flickr pro account etc. will all die - All because my corpse will fail to pay my bills.
not if you set it to autopay from an interest-bearing bank account.
It's not just a problem with social networks, of course; the question of what to do with a site when the owner dies is a question that has to be dealt with by all websites.
Clinton reduced expenses alright. He closed down many military bases.
Well, to be fair, of the military bases closed by the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commissions, the 1988 and 1991 closures were done while Reagan or Bush were in office, and it's not really fair to credit Clinton with the 1993 BRAC, since it was already well in process when he took office in January 1993. So, really the only base closings you can credit Clinton with were the 1995 BRAC.
One of the few times that a process that is inherently partisan (every congressman wants to keep the base in their district alive, regardless of whether it's useful) managed to be implemented, mostly, by a non-partisan commission.
As far as this national debt blabbing its hype - because it was a non-starter before 2009.
Yes, this was an amazing thing. The Republican rhetoric was very much talking about fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget... right up until a Republican president had a Republican majority in congress. At that point, with amazing suddenness, the Republicans stopped talking about fiscal responsability, and the Republican president didn't see any expenditures that didn't look just fine to him. Talking about the debt was-- as you say-- a "non-starter." In fact, I even heard the Republicans say that balancing the budget "wasn't important." (The technical term for this was "big government conservatism." Google it-- it's apparently not an oxymoron.)
Then, when the Republicans stop controlling Congress, all of a sudden, wham, they start talking about the desperate need for fiscal responsibilty.
Conclusion? The party in power likes to spend money. Don't pay attention to how they talk; pay attention to what they do.
No, Clinton and the Republican Congress didn't have a surplus, even once, in spite of what either side would have you believe. The closest they got was $18 billion in the red in Clinton's last year in office - impressive in itself to get the deficit that small even once, but not a surplus.
To be fair, when you get to numbers that are low, it depends on the details of how you account. The current way the budget of the US is accounted includes social security. If you include social security as income (and payments as expenses), and if you count "the government buying debt from itself" as well as "the government paying interest to itself" as a wash, the Clinton administration did run a slight "surplus."
In any case, it was damn impressive that he got the budget under control to the point where it was even close.
Without subsidies your electricity bill would be larger.
And that would be a good thing. It makes sense that the people who use electricity should pay for electricity. This is known as a "market economy," and it encourages things like efficiency, and matching the supply to the demand.
There's some sense to subsidizing an emerging technology: encouraging the fledgling technologies in hope some of them will grow could result in a large payout further down the line. There's no sense in subsidizing the giants.
...In the case of the major oil companies it's very dubious that they should still get handouts, but some of the tax breaks have been useful to small operators...
And only a trivial percentage of the tax breaks actually go to small operators, because the big operators have much more money to lobby with; and also much more money to pay lawyers to find the loopholes to enable them to qualify for the subsidies intended to support small operators. (Much like farm subsidies, actually-- the bills that are passed because they will be "supporting America's family farms" actually end up supporting the huge factory operations.)
Global warming is a deceptively mellow term for what will potentially happen. At a certain turning point the entire atmosphere will change to make life on this planet entirely impossible. No hiding, no adaptation, no recourse: no one spared, not child, animal or plant. If we don't have interstellar travel and civilization methods by then, our best "hope" is a similar species evolving somewhere else.
Well, eventually. For a sufficiently large value of "eventually".
That's the Venus scenario. Since the sun is gradually getting brighter (about 10% every billion years), eventually the oceans will boil, and at that point, it's pretty much over unless life exhibits a lot more adaptation than we've currently seen.
I've seen calculations suggesting that this might happen as early as 500,000,000 years from now. But most peope think it will take longer.
Of course, if by "child, animal, or plant" you don't count anaerobic life, we can make the planet uninhabitable faster just by converting the oxygen in the atmosphere entirely (or almost entirely) into CO2. (Yes, plants do need oxygen-- they may "breathe" CO2, but they also breathe oxygen). Looking at the slope of the atmospheric CO2 increase, http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ , and fitting this to an exponential, I get roughly a thousand years for that to occur. Give or take. (Which is short compared to half a billion years.)
Don't mess with our tidal bulge, it stabilises the orbit of the moon;)
Actually, the difference in tides in the Atlantic and Pacific contributes to the lag in the tides, which is what causes tidal damping, and is ultimately the cause of the moon receeding from the Earth.
If we implement this scheme, it will delay the departure of the moon!
In five or ten billion years, that may be important:)
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.) If they decide to charge during the day (for example, if people charge them at work), it could strain the grid. Particularly if they charge during hot summer afternoons. Unless a significant part of the grid goes to solar, which produces the highest power during the daytime at summer, of course.
You're aware that the papers that Jones was referring to when he said he would "keep them out somehow" from the IPCC report were, in fact, not kept out, and did appear in the report?
So attempts to quell rival viewpoints are ok as long as they don't succeed?
Well, if your proposition was "peer review doesn't work because, look, here is a scientist who was trying to "quell" a paper that he thought was stupid!"-- well, in fact, the paper was not suppressed, so apparently that argument is faulty.
(and, by "quell," you mean "not reference that paper when writing in a review.")
But, I don't see any evidence that there even was such a purported attempt. I see a stolen e-mail from a scientist who was caught blowing off steam in a private e-mail.
So, can I please have access to all your e-mail accounts so I can see whether out of two thousand or so e-mails I can dig up you having said anything that, taken out of context, might have been read as intemperate?
except that they didn't originate that data, they collected the data from other sources. Presumably the other sources kept (or didn't keep), their data. If they had known that, twenty-five years later people would be going in and claiming that their old work was fraudulent, I expect more effort would have been made to preserve the details, but, basically, the critics are saying "it's too much trouble for us to go to the original sources."
It's nice to have the idea that all scientists keep every scrap of paper with any piece of any data forever, and that all the data is in such an easily readable form that anybody can glance at it and know exactly what each number on every scrap of paper refers to, but, actually, in the real world, sometimes stuff gets lost, and it's not fraud, it's just stuff getting lost. (For that matter, a lot of the data from my PhD thesis are on old 5 1/2 inch floppy disks in a format I haven't been able to read in twenty years; if somebody asked for it, no, it's not "lost," but I'm not sure if the disks are still readable now, and it would take me a month to figure out what the heck those long columns of numbers meant.)
No, he just doesn't want a bunch of people funded by exxon-mobil selectively quoting tiny portions of his data to support bullshit positions,
Funnily enough, none of the people who asked for the data were funded by Exxon-Mobil. Its boring how facts get submerged by a straightforward lie.
Uh, except actually they were. It's not even particualry a secret-- take a look at who funds the "Heartland Institute" (Hint: Exxon Mobil). Google the "American Petroleum Institute".
For a while they were even offering a payment of ten thousand dollars to every scientist who published a paper casting doubt on global warming. (They stopped this when it got publicized in the Guardian.)
Of course there's the problem of those private emails revealing naked attempts to massage what qualifies for peer review and who qualifies as a peer to do the reviewing.
You're aware that the papers that Jones was referring to when he said he would "keep them out somehow" from the IPCC report were, in fact, not kept out, and did appear in the report?
This was, basically, a frustrated scientist blowing off steam in a private conversation. Out of a thousand stolen e-mail messages, one of them was frustrated and hot-tempered. Turns out, scientists actually are human.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose I should clarify that comment, since I'm sure it'll be read wrong-- I said "Silicon cells roll off for wavelengths below about 1000 nm"... what I'd intended to say here is that the performance drops to zero for wavelengths "longer" than about 1000 nm. ("below" meaning lower in energy, but longer in wavelength.)
Actually, no. If you look at the color of the solar panel, you'll find its wavelength gap that it doesn't pick up light from
Actually, no. if you would look at the reflectance of a solar panel with a spectrophotometer, you'll discover that, although (for example) silicon panels do look blue, even in the blue the reflectance is very low-- about 8% or so until you get below about 250 nm, where there's just not that many photons in sunlight. It just "looks" blue, because the reflectivity in the blue, low as it is, is more than the reflectivity elsewhere in the visible spectrum.
, as that's what is being essentially reflected back to you.
You can't see the "wavelength gap where it doesn't pick up light"-- that's in the infrared, below the ability of your eyes to see. If you could see in that wavelength, though, the semiconductor would be transparent.
Most solar panels work best under green and red light, and deeper violets, IR has typically had too low of an energy potential to have any worthwhile use.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Silicon cells roll off for wavelengths below about 1000 nm, which is very definitely in the infrared. (FWIW, silicon has a bandgap of about 1.1 eV-- you do the math.). High efficiency triple junction cells go considerably further into the infrared. The cell is most efficient for light very close to the bandgap-- that is, silicon cells have peak conversion efficiency around 950 nm or so.
Typical blues get pretty much ignored, which makes no sense because blue has the higher energy potential.
Blue does have higher energy per photon, but the spectrum has far fewer photons there. It doesn't get "ignored"-- in fact, most cells are quite good at converting the blue photons (they start rolling off in the near UV). However, it's not optimum to make a solar cell have peak response in the blue; there just aren't enough photons there. For a single junction cell, optimum bandgap is about 1.5 eV. For a multijunction cell, though, you do want the top cell to have good blue response.
Now all we need is to mimic Chlorophyll F and start capturing everything from beginning IR (720nm) on down. I'd love to see a solar cell that can respond to all of the wavelengths currently covered by terrestrial and marine plant life.
You're in luck.
Existing solar cells do capture everything from 720 nm on down-- in fact, silicon responds out to about 1000 nm. Existing solar cells do respond to all the wavelengths currently covered by terrestrial and marine plant life.
I agree it's creepy, but Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer bothers me a bit. Really, I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.
I am a great fan of no-moving-parts technologies. Nevertheless, from a lot of experience in the space world, I can tell you that it is not true that a technology with no moving parts is always the engineering choice over a technology with moving parts. There are many systems currently flying in space that do have moving parts, even though they could be redesigned, worse, using systems without moving parts. The correct solution is to use the technology that is best for the mission.
The problem is that if you spin the sail to provide stiffness, the sail is a gyroscope, and with a gyroscope it is difficult to change the angular momentum vector-- that is, to repoint the sail. It's not the low value of the control torque (although the control torques for IKAROS are in fact very low) it's the angular momentum.
Apparently, however, I'm not going to convince you. Nevertheless, it turns out to be valuable to test more than one technology in space, and that simply picking the first thing to fly is not always the best thing.
IKAROS is capable of adjusting its attitude whilst spinning, through the use of LCD panels on the sail which subtly alter its albedo and thus the effect of light pressure, so you are wrong on at least that note.
I said IKAROS was not very maneuverable. "Subtly altering its albedo and thus the effect of light pressure" is a very good description of a vehicle that's not very maneuverable. There may be useful applications in which a not-very maneuverable sail is a good technology. Different applications need different technologies.
Basically, IKAROS and Nanosail-D are quite different in the details of the technologies for sails. Apparently you think that once any sail has ever been deployed that every other approach should be abandoned, but that's not actually a good way to develop things.
--In fact, I hate to disappoint you on this, but if sails are ever going to become practical, there are going to have to even more test flights.
Unless it is a helluva-lot thinner than a tissue paper, what's so Nano in this sail?
"Nano" is a Greek work meaning "tiny" or "dwarf".
A nanosail would mean a tiny sail, or a "dwarf" sail.
Unless you put the word "meter" or "gram" or some other quantitative suffix on the word, in which case it means 1E-9.
Hmm, a gian, thin space sail that's probably several square miles. Boy, I sure hope one single little chunk of orbital debris or meteor doesn't impact that gigantic area in the 2 weeks or it won't work so well. Sails tend to not like meteors impacting them. Too bad the odds of that happening are about 99.99999%. I don't know what they're thinking.
Actually, solar sails are almost completely unaffected by small impacts by micrometeoroids or debris. The micrometeoroids go right through. They do leave a hole, which reduces the area of the sail by a trivial amount, but sail areas are so large, and micrometeoroids so small, that it would take decades to centuries before the effective area loss reduces performance significantly.
If a micrometeoroid impacts the struts or support structure, of course, that may be more of a problem, depending on how redundant the structure is (and how big the impact-- but micrometeoroids are small, and debris is not much of a problem in interplanetary space, where sails are most likely to be used). Of course to make a sail lightweight, the support structures had better account for only an extremely small fraction of the sail area.
Nanosail D was originally to launch on one of the ill-fated Falcon 1 test flights, at which time it would have indeed been proving the technology. But now that JAXA have not only proved the technology, but applied it to interplanetary travel, it seems a bit moot.
Not at all. If you don't want to actually use technology in space, but just want to get points for saying "I flew the first one," then one flight is fine. If you're actually going to use technology, though, a first demo flight is just the beginning of the development and testing stage, not the end. Pretty much everything about Nanosail D is mechanically and structurally different from the IKAROS sail; in terms of physics, they are similar, but in terms of technology, they are very different. IKAROS is held out by spin, for example; this makes for a solar sail that is not very maneuverable. Nanosail is strut stabilized, this is a sail that can be redirected much more easily (for example, to use for orbit-raising).
They are also not merely different technologies, they are very different mission types-- Nanosail-D is (as its name implies) a demo of a very small sail. Some applications are there for small sails; some are there for medium sails, and there are also a lot of applications for huge sails-- kilometers and larger, which still have to be demonstrated. Saying "we launched one sail once, now the technology is fully developed at all sizes and for all missions" is just ignoring the real world of technology, where every step needs developing and testing.
Finally, the IKAROS sail doesn't demonstrate very low specific mass, which is the key to practical propulsion. Nanosail-D is about three times better.
Saying "a solar sail flew once, so the technology is developed and it's moot to launch another one" is about as accurate a comment as saying "A horseless carriage was tested in 1801 so the technology is demonstrated and it's moot to demonstrate a different one."
Um. No. Nanosail-D is several years old and has been waiting for its launch.
In fact, this is the second try at launching it. The first try was lost in the failure of the Falcon-1 vehicle, August 2 2008.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/nanosaild.html
Wrong Wikipedia link, he should have shown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Solar_pressure_demonstrated_for_attitude_control
Solar sailing was used for spacecraft attitude control on the Mariner ten mission to Venus and Mercury
It really only has to be dealt with by the interactive 'free' sites like FB. If I die, evenutally my domain will die, my flickr pro account etc. will all die - All because my corpse will fail to pay my bills.
not if you set it to autopay from an interest-bearing bank account.
Wow. Got a link?
It's not just a problem with social networks, of course; the question of what to do with a site when the owner dies is a question that has to be dealt with by all websites.
Clinton reduced expenses alright. He closed down many military bases.
Well, to be fair, of the military bases closed by the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commissions, the 1988 and 1991 closures were done while Reagan or Bush were in office, and it's not really fair to credit Clinton with the 1993 BRAC, since it was already well in process when he took office in January 1993. So, really the only base closings you can credit Clinton with were the 1995 BRAC.
One of the few times that a process that is inherently partisan (every congressman wants to keep the base in their district alive, regardless of whether it's useful) managed to be implemented, mostly, by a non-partisan commission.
As far as this national debt blabbing its hype - because it was a non-starter before 2009.
Yes, this was an amazing thing. The Republican rhetoric was very much talking about fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget... right up until a Republican president had a Republican majority in congress. At that point, with amazing suddenness, the Republicans stopped talking about fiscal responsability, and the Republican president didn't see any expenditures that didn't look just fine to him. Talking about the debt was-- as you say-- a "non-starter." In fact, I even heard the Republicans say that balancing the budget "wasn't important." (The technical term for this was "big government conservatism." Google it-- it's apparently not an oxymoron.)
Then, when the Republicans stop controlling Congress, all of a sudden, wham, they start talking about the desperate need for fiscal responsibilty.
Conclusion? The party in power likes to spend money. Don't pay attention to how they talk; pay attention to what they do.
No, Clinton and the Republican Congress didn't have a surplus, even once, in spite of what either side would have you believe. The closest they got was $18 billion in the red in Clinton's last year in office - impressive in itself to get the deficit that small even once, but not a surplus.
To be fair, when you get to numbers that are low, it depends on the details of how you account. The current way the budget of the US is accounted includes social security. If you include social security as income (and payments as expenses), and if you count "the government buying debt from itself" as well as "the government paying interest to itself" as a wash, the Clinton administration did run a slight "surplus."
In any case, it was damn impressive that he got the budget under control to the point where it was even close.
Without subsidies your electricity bill would be larger.
And that would be a good thing. It makes sense that the people who use electricity should pay for electricity.
This is known as a "market economy," and it encourages things like efficiency, and matching the supply to the demand.
There's some sense to subsidizing an emerging technology: encouraging the fledgling technologies in hope some of them will grow could result in a large payout further down the line. There's no sense in subsidizing the giants.
...In the case of the major oil companies it's very dubious that they should still get handouts, but some of the tax breaks have been useful to small operators...
And only a trivial percentage of the tax breaks actually go to small operators, because the big operators have much more money to lobby with; and also much more money to pay lawyers to find the loopholes to enable them to qualify for the subsidies intended to support small operators. (Much like farm subsidies, actually-- the bills that are passed because they will be "supporting America's family farms" actually end up supporting the huge factory operations.)
Global warming is a deceptively mellow term for what will potentially happen. At a certain turning point the entire atmosphere will change to make life on this planet entirely impossible. No hiding, no adaptation, no recourse: no one spared, not child, animal or plant. If we don't have interstellar travel and civilization methods by then, our best "hope" is a similar species evolving somewhere else.
Well, eventually. For a sufficiently large value of "eventually".
That's the Venus scenario. Since the sun is gradually getting brighter (about 10% every billion years), eventually the oceans will boil, and at that point, it's pretty much over unless life exhibits a lot more adaptation than we've currently seen.
I've seen calculations suggesting that this might happen as early as 500,000,000 years from now. But most peope think it will take longer.
Of course, if by "child, animal, or plant" you don't count anaerobic life, we can make the planet uninhabitable faster just by converting the oxygen in the atmosphere entirely (or almost entirely) into CO2. (Yes, plants do need oxygen-- they may "breathe" CO2, but they also breathe oxygen). Looking at the slope of the atmospheric CO2 increase, http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ , and fitting this to an exponential, I get roughly a thousand years for that to occur. Give or take. (Which is short compared to half a billion years.)
His only source is a post on a message board, which is itself nothing but speculation.
Well, and this: http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Blog/Custom-ROMs-and-Motorola-s-Android-Handsets/bc-p/4290#M432title=Custom
"Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years."
Don't mess with our tidal bulge, it stabilises the orbit of the moon ;)
Actually, the difference in tides in the Atlantic and Pacific contributes to the lag in the tides, which is what causes tidal damping, and is ultimately the cause of the moon receeding from the Earth.
If we implement this scheme, it will delay the departure of the moon!
In five or ten billion years, that may be important :)
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
If they decide to charge during the day (for example, if people charge them at work), it could strain the grid. Particularly if they charge during hot summer afternoons.
Unless a significant part of the grid goes to solar, which produces the highest power during the daytime at summer, of course.
You're aware that the papers that Jones was referring to when he said he would "keep them out somehow" from the IPCC report were, in fact, not kept out, and did appear in the report?
So attempts to quell rival viewpoints are ok as long as they don't succeed?
Well, if your proposition was "peer review doesn't work because, look, here is a scientist who was trying to "quell" a paper that he thought was stupid!"-- well, in fact, the paper was not suppressed, so apparently that argument is faulty.
(and, by "quell," you mean "not reference that paper when writing in a review.")
But, I don't see any evidence that there even was such a purported attempt. I see a stolen e-mail from a scientist who was caught blowing off steam in a private e-mail.
So, can I please have access to all your e-mail accounts so I can see whether out of two thousand or so e-mails I can dig up you having said anything that, taken out of context, might have been read as intemperate?
except that they didn't originate that data, they collected the data from other sources. Presumably the other sources kept (or didn't keep), their data. If they had known that, twenty-five years later people would be going in and claiming that their old work was fraudulent, I expect more effort would have been made to preserve the details, but, basically, the critics are saying "it's too much trouble for us to go to the original sources."
It's nice to have the idea that all scientists keep every scrap of paper with any piece of any data forever, and that all the data is in such an easily readable form that anybody can glance at it and know exactly what each number on every scrap of paper refers to, but, actually, in the real world, sometimes stuff gets lost, and it's not fraud, it's just stuff getting lost. (For that matter, a lot of the data from my PhD thesis are on old 5 1/2 inch floppy disks in a format I haven't been able to read in twenty years; if somebody asked for it, no, it's not "lost," but I'm not sure if the disks are still readable now, and it would take me a month to figure out what the heck those long columns of numbers meant.)
No, he just doesn't want a bunch of people funded by exxon-mobil selectively quoting tiny portions of his data to support bullshit positions,
Funnily enough, none of the people who asked for the data were funded by Exxon-Mobil. Its boring how facts get submerged by a straightforward lie.
Uh, except actually they were. It's not even particualry a secret-- take a look at who funds the "Heartland Institute" (Hint: Exxon Mobil). Google the "American Petroleum Institute".
For a while they were even offering a payment of ten thousand dollars to every scientist who published a paper casting doubt on global warming. (They stopped this when it got publicized in the Guardian.)
Of course there's the problem of those private emails revealing naked attempts to massage what qualifies for peer review and who qualifies as a peer to do the reviewing.
You're aware that the papers that Jones was referring to when he said he would "keep them out somehow" from the IPCC report were, in fact, not kept out, and did appear in the report?
This was, basically, a frustrated scientist blowing off steam in a private conversation. Out of a thousand stolen e-mail messages, one of them was frustrated and hot-tempered. Turns out, scientists actually are human.