Hmm, makes sense. Water is about 1000x as dense as air, and has 4 times the specific heat. The top 10 feet of water would then be about as "heat massive" as 4000 feet of air at surface pressure.

I hadn't thought about the Sun's radiation being essentially black box, but I can see that it is so and the interesting implications such as guessing the temp from the color.

Thanks for commenting about the score. I not only see my starting score as 1 in my comments, but also when I look at stories. As long as other people see them at 2, I guess I don't care.

Does anyone know what happened to my karma bonus? "No Karma Bonus" is unchecked, and my karma still shows as Excellent, but posts start at score: 1.

Oh, and some more math: it looks as if when you take the sphere around the sun circumscribed by the Earth's orbit, Earth takes up about 1/(2 billion) of it. So if the sun is radiating in all directions equally, it radiates about 2 billion times 16,000 tonnes = 32 trillion tonnes = 3.2 * 10^13 kilograms each year JUST IN ENERGY, ignoring particles. The sun weighs 2 * 10^30 kilograms.

Once again I expected the math to show a proportionally shocking amount of the sun being radiated in energy, but it turns out the sun is just really fucking big.

Thanks, I was going to go through those same calculations, because I couldn't believe the numbers. In fact, I double checked your numbers (because I still had trouble believing) and came up with the same thing.

It's shocking to me that the energy accumulated by Earth from solar radiation is measurable in tonnes! Remember that the devastation from a nuke comes from a fraction of 1% of the mass of a relatively tiny piece of uranium.

To add a little more math, the atmosphere weighs roughly 5*10^21 grams. The specific heat of air is about 1 joule per gram-kelvin, so the solar radiance of the earth should raise the temperature 200 degrees centigrade each year if none was reflected or absorbed into the ground/water!

Even if you only assume the mass that this report claims is absorbed, it would add 2 degrees centigrade each year. Obviously some is absorbed into the ground, but either way it's clearly unsustainable. At some temperature, the Earth must radiate more than it is absorbing, otherwise we would burn up.

It seems clear to me that the temperature of the earth is going to be vary wildly depending on albedo/reemission, which life on earth affects by varying the composition of the atmosphere and surface reflection. This must be an influence on evolution - over the long run, organisms that tend to pull the temperature up when it gets too low and down when it gets too high would tend to succeed. By which I mean organisms that don't fit this profile would tend to wipe out virtually all life on earth, including themselves.

Maybe this is the cause of some of the extinction events in the fossil layers? It seems unbelievable that this hasn't happened before - some microscopic organism produces methane or CO2 in bulk and is very successful, then succeeds so well it fucks up the ecosystem for everybody.

It also looks like this is an existential test for humanity - maybe we can be the first multicellular organism to influence the temperature feedback loop enough to wipe ourselves out. Although I think it's more likely we'll just screw things up so badly lots of us die, until we lose the ability to influence the feedback loop enough to break it or we finally get the sense that our actions matter globally.

I do have numbers; they were easy to get. Support was evenly mixed.

The original sponsor was R. There were 32 cosponsors (including the original sponsor), 16 D and 16 R.

It is true that more republicans withdrew support than dems: 6 R withdrew vs 2 D.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261

Most privacy policies are just as bad as the "worst" privacy policy: https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=privacy+%22or+as+allowed+by+law%22

Note that they give a bunch of circumstances in which they will use your private information, but then they add in "or as *allowed* by law" which means they can do absolutely anything with your information that isn't illegal.

Somehow I think people misread it as "or as required by law" which is an altogether different thing.

Yeah, I'm familiar with Chainmail (thirdhand only, I haven't seen a copy).

I'm also jealous.

Wow, I'm out-pedanted.

Well done! And thanks for the education.

Hrm, I don't remember that from 3e, or from 2e for that matter. In 1st, it was kind of hard to miss, because the rules were not complete, and in some cases sort of conflicted (see the other thread about initiative).

I can point out explicitly where the 1st ed DMG said that the DM has final say, even when his say conflicts with the rules as written.

Well, I said *his friends* said I was cool. I doubt he feels the same way ;-)