Comment You know the answer (Score 1) 233
What would we need to do to make this kind of shit illegal? A law?
Great idea! We can append it to the Senate cybersecurity bill.
What would we need to do to make this kind of shit illegal? A law?
Great idea! We can append it to the Senate cybersecurity bill.
The size of a black hole is proportional to its mass: its diameter is 6 kilometers per solar mass. You're probably confusing the size of the singularity (zero, or close to it) with the size of the black hole (the event horizon surrounding the singularity).
"Mahdi" is also used in Dune, along with "Lisan al Gaib" and other terms. "Mahdi" is, as someone else pointed out, a real term in Islam, upon which the Fremen mythology was based (Zensunni Wanderers).
The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.
Seriously, never heard it, certainly never used it, would have a problem if I did.
You're young, aren't you?
Talk.origins has been around since
If you can find some hits for it I would suspect it came in as a contagion from the climatology debate.
That's hilarious. Newsflash: the term "denier" is ancient history in Internet debates.
I think it is relevant to your post, because you express a problem with *disbelief*. Disbelief is the foundation of scientific thinking, it's a core value, it's not a valid criticism.
The point is that it's stupid to disbelieve a scientific theory on the basis of what terminology people who debate it use.
If you dont see that the likes of "Mikes nature trick" is what we should expect from creationists, not scientists, then YOU, sir, have a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
You're conflating one person with an entire field and condemning researchers as a whole on that basis. I thought we we supposed to be arguing about scientific facts here? There's more to climate science than Mike Mann, or the late-Holocene paleotemperature reconstruction community.
I cut my teeth on Kuhn, Popper, and Feyerebend.
Oh, an armchair philosopher of science. That's even funnier than an armchair scientist making grand declarations about what science is.
I didnt say it wasnt legitimite to bring it up. I said it does not in any way constitute proof. And it doesn't.
Fine, we both agree on that. Nobody's claiming that it is, although that seems to be your straw man representation of "global warmers".
There have been any cases where the vast majority of 'scientists' were unanimous - and dead wrong. This is normal and expected. So any headcount of 'scientists' justifies at the very most a very weak inference, nothing more.
In the history of science, there are far more examples of a scientific consensus established over decades being right, than being "dead wrong". (Insofar as theories can be said to be "right", i.e. good approximations.) You just don't read about the boring cases in philosophy or pop-sci books. There aren't any daring scientific rebels who overturned the WKB approximation but driven out of academia for their heresy.
Is that in dispute? Besides popular straw man rhetoric, of course.
Sure. There are all kinds of people who think there is still huge controversy in the scientific community.
I thought it was the projected _catastrophe_ from the AGW that was in question.
Hell, there are still people who dispute the existence of AGW, independent of any "catastrophic" outcomes.
The difference between 0.8 degrees of temperature increase or 6. Those elusive positive feedbacks. I deny those, btw. So does the scientific literature. That hypothesis has very little in support for it, and a lot against.
You don't specify what "catastrophe" is supposed to mean. But the scientific literature, as well as the evidence, quite consistently supports the existence of substantial positive feedbacks, in agreement with the IPCC range of 2-4.5 K per CO2 doubling.
Never heard that language used by anyone on my side in an evolution debate.
Oh come on. Just Google "evolution denier", or search the talk.origins archives.
Don't 'believe' in evolution in any sense that involves faith.
That's nice, but irrelevant to my point.
The analogy is obviously imperfect, but it would be a better fit to compare the creationists and the global warmers together rather than apart.
If you think the people who debate global warming are more akin to creationists than scientists, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of science (as well as the people who debate global warming).
Scientific fact is never, ever established by a vote or a survey of opinions.
That too, is a strawman. Scientific fact isn't established by vote. It is, however, entirely legitimate to bring up the relative balance of scientific opinion on the matter when discussing it with someone who isn't going to sit down and teach themselves climate science.
I'm a professional physicist. There are all kinds of cranks who claim to have disproven quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. It's can be fun to pick apart their arguments, but at some point, when they say "Deepak Chopra has an argument and you have an argument, and I can't evaluate who's right", it's perfectly reasonable to say "Look, quantum mechanics has been working on and tested for a century, and there's a reason why the scientific community as a whole has come to different conclusions than Deepak Chopra".
First, you claim that it will take a hundred years to develop and deploy a new technology and I'm curious as to what the basis is for that number -- I think you pulled it out of your ass.
Come on. Look at fission, a much simpler technology than fusion. That took 30-40 years to deploy after they had working reactors. We're decades away from having a fusion reactor that creates a nontrivial amount of net energy. Hell, look at how long it took to remake the world's economy around even simpler technologies like coal or oil. A good portion of a century.
Second, you seem to be claiming that is it more reasonable to go with existing technologies which are already deployed but do not address the problem of climate change
Existing technologies do address the problem. They are displacing some fossil fuel use and will displace more in the future. They just won't displace all of it on the climate timescales, but that's the best we can hope for.
rather than developing new technologies that actually will address the problem.
Developing radically new technologies will not address the problem on relevant timescales, because they're even further behind the R&D curve than existing technologies. At best, we could hope for incremental improvements on technology (like more efficient solar cells, or nuclear reactors, etc.) exploiting existing economies of scale, experience with engineering, deployment, and maintenance, etc.
You claim the new technologies will not address the problem, I can see your skepticism, but you do not show how the existing technologies will address the problem.
For the purposes of my argument, it is irrelevant whether existing technologies will address the problem. My point is merely that non-existing technologies are even less likely to address the problem than any existing technology.
A 1% change is not worth doing.
No point in researching fusion, then.
No, I'm making a more general point, mostly in response to his claims elsewhere about emissions policy being "changing people's lifestyles".
That's an empty claim, because no existing technology can meet the need. [...] So we have to turn to nonexistent technologies, to research.
To sum up: It is even less feasible to meet this century's non-fossil energy requirements with currently nonexisting technologies than with currently existing technologies. It amazes me that you believe otherwise. No matter how much you research some tech that doesn't exist, it's going to take most of this century to deploy it even to the extent that existing "inadequate" technologies are already deployed. It's a matter of infrastructure and business economics, not technology.
That's an empty claim, because no existing technology can meet the need.
Look, this is stupid. I didn't say anything about "meeting the need" (presumably replacing fossil fuels altogether). We are going to have SOME non-fossil energy technologies, and ALL of them can be scaled up TO SOME EXTENT. The magnitude of that extent is irrelevant to my argument, which is that fusion power will play essentially no role in whatever energy technologies we end up deploying this century. Increasing solar power by x% (even if x=1% or something trivial) is still vastly more feasible - in costs and timescales - than increasing fusion power by the equivalent amount of energy.
You're missing my point. My point is, no matter what your target is for non-fossil energy sources, that target will be more quickly and cheaply met by anything but fusion.
Existing technology will ramp up to widespread deployment faster than technology that doesn't exist yet, I can tell you that.
Your solutions are about changing people's lifestyles. People, including me, will tell you to fuck off and die.
That's hilarious.
If you really cared about nuclear power, you'd advocate a carbon pricing scheme just like James Hansen does. That would make nuclear power more competitive with fossil fuels, because they're being effectively subsidized by the market distortion which ignores their negative economic impacts on the environment.
For that matter, if you really cared about freedom and not forcing decisions on people, you'd advocate pricing carbon so the market would be aware of its real costs, and could therefore adjust the energy sector accordingly. This could be by ramping up nuclear power, or solar, or decreasing fossil energy consumption, or increasing efficiency, or whatever makes the most economic sense.
Advocating a particular technology is "picking winners", an anti-market approach. Why do you hate capitalism?
"You know, we've won awards for this crap." -- David Letterman
