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Comment Re:Golly (Score 0, Troll) 69

Gotta tie it into global warming somehow.

This particular issue has nothing to do with it, and is at a faster rate.

Wrong. It is not the cause of Global Warming, and it is not caused by Global Warming. So far you would be right. But it is a problem whose consequences get worse due to Global Warming. So yes, it has to do with Global Warming.

Comment Re: Starship to the rescue? (Score 1) 65

Reaching Mars requires at least planetary escape velocity (11.2 km/s). That means you need a three stage rocket. Usually, the lower stage is about five times the next one. Starting from Mars requires only one stage (escape velocity 5.0 km/s). But still, you need a rocket large enough to carry a fully loaded ICBM as payload to get this one to Mars. A very small ICBM like the Midgetman weighs about 17 metric tons, the usual sized Minuteman twice that. Carry this one on a three stage rocket, your first stage has to have about 125 times the size of a Midgetman or Minuteman, thus between 2000 and 4000 metric tons. This would easily be in the size range of the Saturn V (2200 to 2900 metric tons).

In fact, the Atlas Centaur which carried Mariner 6 and 7 to Mars, weighted 136 metric tons while carrying just 400 kg of payload. At this ratio, we would need more than 300 times the payload, hence a rocket able to carry an ICBM to Mars would weigh between 6000 and 12000 metric tons or four times Saturn V.

Comment Re:Why are they punishing me? (Score 5, Interesting) 185

My wife has a laptop built in 2014, and it runs perfectly fine. We upgraded it to 32 GByte RAM, a new screen with higher resolution (yes, it was possible to get a new screen!) and SSD, and with them, everything my wife uses runs fine and dandy. There is no reason to switch to another laptop, as this one is more than sufficient for all her use cases. In no way, it feels under-powered except for graphic intensive games, which none of us plays anyway.

And yes, our car has 110 HP (81 kW). It has a top speed of 120 mph. It gets up to 60 mpg. I don't see any reason to call this one under-powered or garbage. We are driving about 25,000 miles per year with the car, and there never has been a situation where I felt that there was a serious lack of power. It even has a towing hitch and is licensed for pulling up to 3400 lbs.

Comment Re: interesting (Score 1) 158

Basically, you are hinting that I should do an NPR and suppress my viewpoint to let the other guy's viewpoint stand, because my viewpoint would help the wrong people.

Or did I misunderstood you completely?

And there I was thinking that the free exchange of thoughts and ideas implies that you can freely state your thoughts and ideas? Those are mine. And my thinking is that to pinpoint a (geologically or historically) short term trend, it is sufficient to look at a short time period. I don't know how the climate on Earth will be in one million years, and my interest into the weather forecast for the year 10002024 is mainly academic. But I am very interested in the next 30 years, because that's what I expect to experience myself, and I am quite interested in the climate in 2100, because that's what my children maybe, and my grandchildren hopefully will experience. And for that, looking back 30 or 80 years, is very intriguing, while the climate at the time Homo neanderthalensis appeared for the first time is less interesting.

Comment Re:But it might include far less humans (Score 4, Interesting) 158

You can easily calculate how many years of plant growth you need until the damage done today is reversed, and this does not include all future damage.

Humans have added about 700 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the last 120 years. You can look up the yearly mining of coal, lignite and oil since 1900 until today to compare them to the increase in CO2 content in the atmosphere, if you are not sure where this increase comes from. This is equivalent to 270 billion metric tons of pure Carbon. Your average plant contains about 15% carbon. So this amounts to about 1.6 trillion tons of plant mass, which you need to add to the world, just to offset the current increase. All harvests right now on the world amount to about 5 billion tons of plant mass per year. This amount you have to add would be equivalent to 300 years of world harvests, of which none can be used for human consumption, because you urgently need the carbon to stay sequestered.

Additionally, plants growing better in higher CO2 are mostly dicotyledons, while monocotyledons don't profiteer as much. There have been experiments where, depending on the CO2 levels, dicotyledons will suppress monocotyledons at higher CO2 levels, while at lower CO2 levels, monocotyledons outcompete the dicotyledons. Sadly, with the exception of the potato, most of our food providing crops are monocotyledons, like wheat, rice,bananas or corn. Dicotyledons give mostly fruits and some vegetables, but not the starch rich crops, which yield the highest harvests. The same goes for temperature: Higher temperatures are preferring dicotyledons, while moderate temperatures are better for monocotyledons. There is a reason why most food is grown away from the equator in the moderate climate zones, and why the most people are living there.

What you are doing with higher CO2 levels and higher average temperatures is basically killing off all our crops and forcing us to really fast find new, dicotyledon based food sources.

While I agree, that higher CO2 levels will increase plant growth in general, it will not increase the amount of food we can grow. For that to happen, we are planting the wrong crops.

Comment Re:"C3S' dataset goes back to 1940" (Score 2) 158

Yes, because the life span of a human is about 80 years.

No one claimed that climate change will destroy the planet. Or wipe out Life on Earth. It will affect humans. It will affect human living conditions. It will affect human civilisation. It will affect human housing, human harvests, human migration patterns.

Earth will happily spin around Sun for the next few billion years. Some kind of Life will evolve which can cope with the new conditions of Earth's surface. But it might include far less humans as of today, and not all of the missing humans will die peacefully after a long and fulfilled life.

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