You start with an incontrovertible claim,

And you use it to justify pure poppycock?
The atmosphere is big. The earth- it's also really goddamn big. The energy required to raise a hemisphere's atmospheric temperature enough to "fry" us is so goddamn big that there's no point in worrying about it. If something the size of Texas is about to hit us, we're just fucked.

The beast that (I guess contentiously, now?) knocked out the dinosaurs, spread across an entire hemisphere would yield about 193MW/m^2, to dissipate through a 100km column, giving us... 1.9kW/m^3 of dissipation, assuming impossibly worst case scenario (instantaneous thermal conversion across entire air volume)... which is quite survivable.

Realistically, the dissipation will be far better distributed over time and area (a lot of impactors will take long paths through the atmosphere, being not direct hits, better improving their dissipation at high altitudes)

It's not a... "good" thing, for sure... But it's not the total annihilation of a hemisphere.

I'm pretty confident that absorbing half of the energy output of a significantly sized fusion explosive (say, dozens of megatons) is going to do a lot more for you than just the ablative propulsion effects of the vaporized surface.

You're still going to send a pressure wave through that rock that is going to be a very formidable force in comparison to the very weak gravity holding it together.
This obviously isn't too helpful for a world-ending impactor (hundreds of miles+), but I'm guessing highly dangerous ones of that size and smaller could be reduced to buck shot.

One NASA-funded plan involved hitting it with an impactor first and then having the nuclear explosive follow it in. Even more energy absorption, and even more fertile ground for a very serious pressure wave.

The 5MT device detonated 1.8km deep on Amchitka lifted the ground at the surface by 20 feet. Imagine what that'd be like without 9.8m/s^2 of force pulling it back together, and without the weight of nearly 2km of rock to fight the expansion.

Unlikely. This isn't a stationary object, and the velocity of it is almost stupid. Sure you'll slow a lot of pieces down a lot, but I sincerely doubt you'll reverse their trajectory.

That's ok, rock absorbs high energy photons and neutrons even better than air. The shockwave of a nuke causes the serious damage away from the fireball, but I assure you the people within the area of atmospheric ignition due to high-energy radiation couldn't give two squirts of piss about the pressure of the atmosphere there. Definitely detonate close to the bolide.

You could be right... But I doubt it. Someone would have to do the math to see what portion of the energy output of a large hydrogen bomb would hit the object, how much the object would absorb, and how it would react to the incidental heating. (my guess is very traumatic explosion of the object itself)

I think we all agree here

A gigaton of energy spread over the entire face of the Earth isn't as bad as you make it sound.

It's about 2T/km^2. It might be fun to watch, it might even raise temps a bit, but we're not going to all incinerate in hellfire.

Come on, now.
Your second sentence is certainly correct, however, your first couldn't be more wrong in its conclusion.

Which would you rather be hit with? A ~150J .22LR round, or a ~320J baseball?
Contact area of the kinetic energy matters. The atmosphere is going to do a great job of absorbing nearly ALL of the kinetic energy of a large impactor, if you can reduce it to small enough rubble, while it isn't going to do shit against a big dense bolide with a minimal contact area.

I'll take atmospheric buck shot over a .50 cal any day.

+1. Haven't heard that one.

Normally, I say something like,

You effect a change to affect something with an effect.

Yikes, put the shovel down man.
Your definition is correct, now, insert into your sentence.

How are you acting physically on, or having an effect on change?
You quite clearly used it in the way that the verb effect is used, which is "to cause".

Nope.
You effect change, and whatever you effected the change upon has been affected by the effect you caused.
It's confusing as fuck- nobody should look down on someone who messes it up. Plus it doesn't affect the point you were making in any way ;)

Kinda how I see it. Don't let the door hit you on the ass, gents.

Done. Still stands. Your argument is vindicated because you argued with someone who disagreed with you, and used information from their side against them. They lost, but you sure as hell didn't win.

That's so non sequitur I'm unsure how to respond to it. An infection upon what? The solar system? For the destabilizing influence it has upon it? The Universe? Help me.

This is nonsense. The glacial/interglacial oscillation of the current ice age is quite stable. The fact that catastrophes have occurred to destabilize it on 2-3 occasions in the last million or so years does not unstable make.

It's funny that you make it political. Your colors are showing :)
I'm no leftist. I would classify myself as socially liberal, for sure, however, I'm as capitalist as the next guy.

Both leftists and conservatives should call you what you are- A person who thinks only in partisanship. The very problems of the world for you can't be seen as anything but right-wing or left-wing.
I don't care who Big Oil votes for today. Their loyalty lies only in the price of their commodity. They have no ideology beyond that. But they and their blind supporters (which admittedly do tend to be conservative, however, that's simply because that's who the conservative football team is playing for right now. It could change next election.) are the opposing side I referred to.

Erm. Ignorance by people on my side of the debate certainly doesn't debunk my side of the debate. Since the information you pulled was from a panel that can most certainly be characterized as an "anthropogenic global warming proponent," I think that makes your paragraph entirely circuitous.

Only when it behaves as such. The Earth is our host. If we seek to alter its ecosphere uncontrolled, then we most certainly are an infection. If we seek equilibrium and stability, we're not.

I refer to any of the people who are not included in the group of people who believe that we should pull every fucking ounce of carbon sequestered in the dirt and inject it wholesale into the extant cycle. You'd think the opposed group of people would be small, as that viewpoint is shamelessly reckless and narrow, but it's not. Legislatively speaking, it's quite massive. Moneyed interests and all that.

Poppycock. Sure, it's no slam dunk, but forensic experts often determine the trajectory of a bullet without ever seeing it, either. I suppose you're going to argue that CFCs weren't causing ozone depletion, as well. After all, the actual full causal link there is pretty hypothetical.

And placid? Sure, compared to the leading hypothesis for the Younger Dryas ending and such, I guess it's placid. For human civilization, we may look back on it and find it to be not very placid at all.

Yes, they are. Only by our efforts. You point to our success as evidence that we should stop? Like it won't flip? There's still a *lot* of coal left.

I know the guy you were responding to was wrong.
Your citations are even good.

But certainly you don't think these were non-causally linked random events caused by God sneezing or some shit, right?
All kinds of horrible shit has happened to this planet over time to wipe out massive portions of its population, toss its climate way out of its regular cycle, and generally really make the place a shitty place to be for anyone expecting stability.

The problem is that the only current traumatic event the planet seems to be going through at the moment to cause this particular geologically rapid climate shift is an acute infection of industrialized ostrich-human hybrid civilization. If we can't find something else to explain it, it seems safer to assume that the gigatons of carbon we're pulling from outside of the carbon cycle and injecting into the goddamn gaseous portion of it might possibly be related, rather than assuming it's just a random fucking coincidence.

Argh. I was about to mod you insightful, then:

That's too much bullshit to cope with. I had to sacrifice my mod-points to tell you that you are terribly, terribly wrong. I have family in the midwest and the east coast.
My Uncle literally believes that humans can't possibly alter the climate, as God says that the Earth is unchanging. He's not a... stupid man. He retired recently from a life-long career as a network engineer at the Census Bureau; he just really believes his cultural interpretation of the vague writings in that damned book.
He absolutely believes that God does intervene to help him with his fuckups.

I know anecdotes are general pretty poor data, but he's not alone. http://www.motherjones.com/env...

I think where you went awry, is that people who do believe in Jehovah the bipolar micromanager are actually the majority, not whatever minority you belong to.

That provision was going to expire regardless of whether the Freedom Act was passed that night or the next day. It's not like a vote to reauthorize it was going to happen that night, then get kicked back to the House for reconciliation.
Again- all he did was prevent McConnell from putting in a vote for extending the Patriot Act, which wasn't going to happen. Nobody thought that was going to happen.
To begrudgingly quote Ted Cruz, "It is abundantly clear that a clean reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act ain’t passing this body, and it certainly ain’t passing the House of Representatives."

So again, kudos to Paul for at least being noisy about all this nonsense, but he ultimately did nothing but that.