Well according to the article, in those 650,000 years the highest CO2 levels were at 380ppm, we are now at 390ppm with no sign of slowing down. The temperature highs in that period were a little higher than now, but not by much. So we would not expect the methane to be released yet but sometime in the future. As we have done so little to slow down our CO2 contributions that time could be pretty soon.

A great site for this is The Discovery of Global Warming.

Also note that the last IPCC estimate did not include the effect of melting glaciers and ice caps as they felt the predictions were not accurate enough. The next IPCC report is bound to include them so expect that estimate to be dramatically higher than the one before.

Exactly!

First thought is, will adding new features actually be productive? I sense that the problem is probably not a lack of features but either poor selling or a small market. Adding more features will not fix these business problems.

My 2nd thought is that if you are asked to work 10 hours day it has to be for a limited time as it is not sustainable. Therefore you need a good reason and a goal. If this deal is open-ended what is most likely to happen is all this work generates no extra revenue and burnt out workers.

You're not a teenager obviously. :)

Really?

In you compiler example you cannot keep speeding it up - the fastest it can be is instant. You may argue that the economy can be expanded by creating new industries but again with finite people this cannot go to infinity. A 1% growth rate is a doubling in 70 years this cannot go on for more than a few centuries.

What will happen is that growth will slow and keep on slowing.

Snowball Earth is an interesting hypothesis and shows us some things about the climate system of Earth - that it is a complex dynamic system with many variables.

The more recent snowball Earth glaciations are thought to have happened as three or four glaciation events with the most recent, the Marinoan, happening about 650 million years ago. At the beginning of these glaciations the CO2 was relatively low for the time and the continents were distributed around the equator.

The mechanism which started the cooling periods is not known, but if they are cold enough the resulting ice can spread down to close to the equator. As ice has a higher albedo, about ~60% compared to the sea which reflects about 6% of incoming light, we get a "positive" feedback where cooling reflects more of the suns energy away from the Earth causing more cooling. This locked the Earth into a frozen period for millions of years. This poses a problem how can the climate system unfreeze now most of the Sun's energy is reflected away?

With much of the Earth frozen, CO2 will build up as there is very little rock weathering as it is all covered by ice and not much photosynthesis either. By the end of the snowball Earth period, CO2 may have risen to 12,000 ppm. The warming effect of the CO2 would have been weaker in this frozen state then it is now, because CO2 traps infrared radiation while most of the sun's light was being reflected in the visible part of the spectrum. This is why the CO2 level had to raise to such a high level to bring us out of this cold phase even though we are presently in a much warmer climate with less CO2. This is physics!

Only if the population does not increase, otherwise new resources will have to be gathered or we have a drop in the amount of our material goods.

But what happens in that transistion period when the oil price sky rockets? There are trillions of dollars of resources sunk in the petrochemical infrastructure. It will take at least an equal amount of resources and money to replace that with a new energy resource. For this to happen without problems the infrastructure has to be put in place before the shortage and therefore before the market has naturally responded.

Therefore we should be intelligent and realise what the future is likely to bring upon us and act with plenty of time to spare. However too many talk about the cost and how everything is OK now. Yes things are OK now, but what about 20 years time?

??

The water estimate is way off if you actually want to grow and produce things. Considering that agriculture is ~70% of our water consumption and industry is ~20% you can see we are not factoring in alot of water in this calculation.

The linked document estimates 350 million cubic meters of fresh water is required. Considering that the USA alone consumes 470 million cubic meters of fresh water you can see that it gives a very false impression of the resource use of the human race.

So in essence the document is interesting but does not show that we have plenty more resources because it does not factor in much of our actual consumption.

While beta amyloid is like a prion in that the protein is "misfolded" and forms a tangled insoluble protein mass. It is not "contagious" like a prion disease. Beta amyloid is formed after cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein by alpha-, beta- and gamma- secretase.

The current state of knowledge for Alzheimer's is still very hazy, for many years there has been a discussion whether amyloid plaques are the cause of Alzhiemer's or a symptom of some other problem. More pieces of the puzzle are continually being found but what is really happening still remains elusive. An article I read in New Scientist suggested that the plaques themselves may not be the problem. With the real damage being done by the shorter chains which are created when the amyloid precursor protein is first cleaved.

There may be links to prion diseases. This study in mice suggests that non-infectious prions make Alzheimer's worse. While this older story suggests their may be a protective effect. Bleeding edge science can be confusing :)

I don't like dark matter as an explanation for anomolies in galaxy rotation. Nor do I want to believe inflation, which apparently solves many problems with the Big Bang theory. But what I have learned to accept is that there is usually a good reason why the consensus theory is considered more likely. For instance with dark matter it can explain many different problems like galaxy rotation, the mass of galaxies, gamma ray fog in the Universe, formation of structures in the Universe...
Also dark matter ties neatly with particle physics, the most popular extension to the standard model, super symmetry, predicts a plethora of new particles. The neutralino for instance fits the bill as a dark matter candidate very well.

Of course we may be right that dark matter is the wrong explanation, but the more likely truth is the majority of physicists are correct on this issue. Damn inflation, I hate it!

The issue with GM is not where the genes come from. The basic genetic machinery is very similar between species and even domains of life, the genetic material does not possess a certain "fishiness" or "insecteness". What GM is doing is very similar to what viruses have been doing since life began. The only difference is that GM is more targeted to our wishes.

The shotgunnung argument is fairly weak as that is even a greater problem with traditional breeding. Each hybridisation results in many different genetic changes and we choose the ones which show "good traits". In fact the point of GM is the targeted manipulation of genetic material which limits "free rider" DNA.

The reason to be wary of GM is it's power to transform a species attributes. Of course we have many technologies which are powerful and yet we manage quite well. The problem with GM is as OzPeter says, "If a pharma company releases a drug that is later proven to be a bad idea then you can do a recall and destroy all known stocks. With GM crops you can't do this as once it is in the wild it is in the wild.".

In the fullness of time a GM species will be created with the desired characteristics, yet its capability to change its ecosystem will not be fully appreciated. This will result in a costly mistake which will tarnish GM technology. Therefore to prevent this likely scenario we can either:-

• Do as we do now, test GM organisms for safety. These measures will not prevent all problems, some may be serious.
• No GM.
• Have some sort of kill switch built in.
• Make the species infertile.

None of these solutions are perfect though I would suggest that making a GM species infertile would be the most workable. Unfortunately this would put even more power in the hands of companies like Monsanto and destroy one of the great things about GM. GM’s potential could be greatest in developing countries to make drought and salt resistant crops. Or crops which have a greater nutritional value. If these cannot be propagated then their advantage to the developing world is severely hampered.
Finally whatever you do don't create GM food plants with powerful drugs in you do not want to eat!

I'm not defending the GP's post but to describe nuclear power as cheap, at least historically, is not true.

The reason France's electricity is so cheap is because the government sets the price and has subsidised the cost. Recently EDF have been investigated for price fixing because of this.

The real reason why no nuclear power plants have been constructed for decades in many countries is mostly because gas and coal were cheaper. The fact that some considered it to be unsafe was a secondary issue. Now that gas prices are rising and there is growing concern about the environmental effects of coal, nuclear power starts looking competitive again.