And with a clever bit of licensing, will be co-marketed alongside the inspirational and dramatic family comedy: We Bought a Tauntaun Zoo

Highlights of the early 70s include the USA abandoning the gold peg, the CIA overthrowing the government of Chile, the Vietnam War showing itself a failure, the oil crisis, Pol Pot killing millions in Cambodia, African countries overthrowing their leaders, etc etc etc.

The 70s were a dark and stormy time.
And don't forget that the Cuban Missile crisis, despite happening the previous decade, had a serious effect on the US psyche.

The pessimism and dystopia in sci-fi doesn't come from a lack of research resources on engineering and science. It mainly comes from literary fashion.

If the fashion with editors is bleak, pessimistic, dystopian stories, then that's what readers will see on the bookshelves and in the magazines, and authors who want to see their work in print will color their stories accordingly. If you want to see more stories with a can-do, optimistic spirit, then you need to start a magazine or publisher with a policy of favoring such manuscripts. If there's an audience for such stories it's bound to be feasible. There a thousand serious sci-fi writers for every published one; most of them dreadful it is true, but there are sure to be a handful who write the good old stuff, and write it reasonably well.

A secondary problem is that misery provides many things that a writer needs in a story. Tolstoy once famously wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I actually Tolstoy had it backwards; there are many kinds of happy families. Dysfunctions on the other hand tends to fall into a small number of depressingly recognizable patterns. The problem with functional families from an author's standpoint is that they don't automatically provide something that he needs for his stories: conflict. Similarly a dystopian society is a rich source of conflicts, obstacles and color, as the author of Snow Crash must surely realize. Miserable people in a miserable setting are simply easier to write about.

I recently went on a reading jag of sci-fi from the 30s and 40s, and when I happened to watch a screwball comedy movie ("His Girl Friday") from the same era, I had an epiphany: the worlds of the sci-fi story and the 1940s comedy were more like each other than they were like our present world. The role of women and men; the prevalence of religious belief, the kinds of jobs people did, what they did in their spare time, the future of 1940 looked an awful lot like 1940.

When we write about the future, we don't write about a *plausible* future. We write about a future world which is like the present or some familiar historical epoch (e.g. Roman Empire), with conscious additions and deletions. I think a third reason may be our pessimism about our present and cynicism about the past. Which brings us right back to literary fashion.

there is no dissenting data.
theres more sea ice because it USED TO BE land ice. before it melted. and ran into the ocean.
if there was a giant stream of fresh water (and continent worth of melting ice) in teh arctic, we would probably see expanding sea ice up there too.
conversely, if you could block all that fresh water in Antarctica from reaching and mixing into the ocean, we'd probably see decreasing sea ice down there.

the science is consistent, regardless of your ability to grasp it.

The rest of your post is irrelevant because these lines are bullshit and simply reflect your own ignorance.
One side does have a common set of facts and a theory based on them that predicts and explains the observations.

sea ice builds in pretty much the same way, at both poles.

the increase in sea ice in the antarctic is because there is more ice there to start with (an entire continent worth) and more feeding in, whereas the arctic sea ice is declining because it doesnt have a ready source of additional fresh water, or as much of one.

if we could quarantine the fresh water running off the melting ice sheets in the antarctic so it didnt reach or mix with the ocean, we would probably see declining sea ice levels there as well.

bingo.
that's pretty much exactly what scientists say too.

We will, of course, run all your errands for you without gathering the data for marketing and other purposes; because doing that would be just too easy...

The assorted 'laws of war' are heavily leavened by what their framers suspect that they can actually get at least some people to agree to; but the overall theoretical foundation always seems to be an attempt to steer weapons in the direction of "Kills outright, or leaves a wound that, if treated, will heal with comparatively limited permanent damage."

It's not an easy standard to maintain(both in terms of convenience, mass-maiming is a hell of a shock to morale and logistics, and engineering, something that will kill if it hits you as designed will likely cause serious tissue damage and/or amputation if it scores a sub-par hit); but it's not really a terribly strange shared desire, from the perspective of the warring European powers of the 20th century that wrote most of them.

I'm fairly out of my depth with this stuff, so this is an honest inquiry: how do the magnetic nanoparticles fit into the equation?

I realize that, once coated with a suitably tailored binding protein, the particles will collect whatever target the binding protein was specified for (presumably this could even be tailored, for any target where a suitably tame binding compound is available), and probably fairly efficiently because of the absurd surface area of nanoparticles.

What I don't understand is the necessity of using the nanoparticles. It was my understanding that, outside of seriously immunocompromised victims, T-cells(and possibly other flavors of phagocytes, I'm fuzzy on the details) are extremely adept at engulfing and destroying foreign bodies, including 'clumps' produced by targets bound to the antigens produced by B-cells. This technique appears to be using a synthetic/introduced antigen(which makes sense if the immune system isn't producing the necessary antigen, or not ramping up production fast enough); but it also introduces the nanoparticles so that the antigen clumps can be magnetically scrubbed from the bloodstream, rather than cleaned up by the T Cells.

What is the peculiarity here that would make introducing the novel clump-scrubbing mechanism necessary and worthwhile?

Its not a distinction without a difference.

the volume, age, and coverage of Arctic sea ice exhibits a very clear, very strong trend downwards. scientists have been repeatedly wondering if this will be the year we see an ice free summer, especially after 2012's record minimum.

in comparison, Antarctic sea ice shows a weak upward trend.
so yes, its a very important dinsticntion.

and the reason for action is simple: do you have any idea how much energy it takes to increase the temperature of entire ocean or continent to change the rate of ice formation or loss? hint: ITS A LOT.

as opposed to the hundreds of Republicans in congress who make wrong statements daily?

Statements like "God created the Earth, and as such global warming is impossible", "CO2 is a natural, harmless gas", "Coal ash is harmless", "CFCs have no effect on ozone", "Nicotine doesn't cause cancer", etc, etc etc etc?? Seriously, the list is endless. I dont have to post em all. And these are the same individuals on the science committee btw.

Al Gore is an activist with little real power unless he decides to run for office again.
He's also not that influential anymore, as basiaclly everyone has alrady taken a side in regrards to him (hint: only one side is backed by actual science!)

However all those Congress critters are actually current serving politicians. I'd be far more worried about them if you're going to play the "what he says matters" card.

Al Gore is not a scientist.
He is an activist, and he can draw attention to issues because of that.

He is also a lightning rod for dogwhistle politics.
The only individual who triggers a bigger "do the opposite of anything he says" spite reaction for certain folks is President Obama.

So tell me Mr Troll....
what drives the creation of antarctic sea ice?

The scientists arent confused by this, because they know the answer already.
Only you and your fellow trolls are confused by this development.

And this at the same time that Arctic sea ice is still are record lows
(and no, it hasnt "recovered 41%" unless you want to ignore the past 3 decades of data to focus on only the past year or two, when it hit its lowest level ever)

And now cue my mod point stalker who mods every factual post i make "flamebait".