The problem stems from the currency. The EU consists of sovereign states that are not bound together as tightly as states in the U.S., but their economies are now coupled by the Euro.

Can you imagine if places like South Carolina and Mississippi had to pay California back all the money they receive in federal funding from California taxpayers? They'd have to throw up their hands and start using Confederate dollars again.

Figures; in the U.S., party affiliation is the most reliable predictor of one's opinion about global warming, but if you dare suggest around here that someone's opinion is influenced by politics, you get modded to hell.

And just as I predicted (and got troll-modded for saying), conservatives are already pretending this paper says something it doesn't, and spinning a new zombie lie:

NewsMax: Researchers: Earth Facing Imminent Ice Age

It's a pretty bold assertion to claim that increasing the concentration of one of the atmosphere's most optically active constituents by 30% won't have any significant consequences on temperature.

Do you have anything to back that up, other than your political leanings? What makes you believe that rising CO2 is not a significant problem, and what is it that you understand about CO2 and the history of climate on planet Earth that physicists and climatologists don't?

I had occipital lobe epilepsy (i.e. in the visual cortex), and while seizures began with visual hallucinations, I was never susceptible to flashing lights. There was no response to them even on an EEG.

The strangest case of a trigger I ever heard was the woman who had seizures every time she heard the voice of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight.

Can you imagine solar irradiance falling by 60% over 30 years?

Radiance is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That's a huge dependence, so timothy and sycodon have got that going for them. Even so, we know the temperature of the photosphere is 5777 K. Since 5777 * (1 - sqrt(sqrt(1-0.6))) / (2030 - 2015) = 80, that implies an 80 degree drop every year across the entire sun, which would have been noticed a long time ago.

These two are skeptical that Earth's atmosphere might be several degrees warmer decades from now, and they're ready to back that up with a claim that the sun's entire atmosphere is cooling down 80 degrees every year.

And they cite a paper that didn't imply that at all. What are these guys smoking?

Uh, your very argument is a prime example of how modern politics seems to be working.

OK, I looked into it a bit longer than sycodon and timothy apparently did, and I take that back. It doesn't appear that Valentina Zharkova is being funded by the Koch brothers or anything like that. Rather, these two misinterpreted her work to suggest that a 60% fall in magnetic solar activity means the sun's brightness will fall by 60%. Which is somewhat ironic for the following reasons-

1. The sun actually gets slightly brighter when solar magnetic activity falls, because of the lack of sunspots.
2. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric half-life of about 10,000 years, so a "60% fall in solar output" over a timescale of decades won't mean much for long.
3. The core isn't powering down (which would take approx. one million years to become evident at the surface, because the radiosphere is fully ionized and doesn't undergo convection, which means photons reach the radiopause via a random walk process). Any variation in solar output will be tempered by the stability of the heat entering the convective zone.
4. A fall in solar output by 60% would guarantee a following rise afterwards, because of the conservation of energy, and ignoring a rise in CO2 for this reason would eventually backfire.

So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem. From reading the comments of the submitter, it doesn't seem that we're dealing with a scientific genius here.

Of course it was. It was posted by timothy.

Water may blunt the physical shocks, but it isn't stable under water- it has to remain under an ammonia solution. I suspect it forms some sort of NI3-NH3 complex. Pure water will abscond with most of the ammonia. When it dries out on a paper towel, I think it's the ammonia evaporating that causes the sensitivity, not the water. (Like I said, good information on this crap is hard to find... most of the research on it is done by teenagers, not chemists.)

No kidding. What party was Strom Thurmond in (until 1964), exactly? And which party was "the party of Lincoln"? One would have to be tremendously ignorant of history to confuse Democrat with liberal.

It seems pretty stable if you keep it under ammonia. In fact I had some in a bottle of ammonia for a few weeks. I uncovered it later and was really surprised- the black powder had undergone some sort of metamorphosis into these large bright orange opaque crystals, kind of pretty looking actually. I still don't know what that stuff was; and never found any information ever since. I guess people don't do much research into nitrogen triiodide.

Vitamin C is a reducing agent and makes a pretty good explosive if you have an oxidizer, even a mild one like a nitrate salt. It has an electron pair that it's dying to get rid of.
I used to make nitrogen triiodide out of iodine and ammonia. In an excess of ammonia it seemed pretty stable, but once the stuff dries out, a feather can make it detonate. I'd leave a soaked paper towel in front of some other kid's house, run off, and once it dried... kaboom! So of course, I spilled it on my shirt once, and the crystals were already going snap-crackle-pop before I could take it off. I remember my mother asking why my shirt was making such a racket.

For your grilling pleasure, here's an entry for the Biggest BBQ Grill
... complete with super-cool looking Griller! ;-)

Screw you, SourceForge!