You forgot to mention that he believes there's something "scientific" about Intelligent Design.

He may technically on paper be qualified to make comments about the climate, but given his willingness to lend credibility to Intelligent Design, it's much more likely that he is deliberately using his reputation & his knowledge of professional jargon to sow doubt on the climate change scientific consensus.

Perhaps he's ideologically-driven, or he's been paid off, or he just likes being a "maverick", but basically the public can't trust anything that he says to be useful information, since he's versed enough in the field & jargon to fake out anyone but an experienced climatologist.

That doesn't sound like much of a different problem than what you've got with the big turbine generators, or those huge diesel engines. Wouldn't it be enough to just have ways of monitoring the stress on the components & have regular maintenance/replacement schedules? This aspect sounds more like a cost-effectiveness issue.

Also, on the ground at least, I read about a company that was installing their flywheels buried sideways in the ground, so that if the flywheel destroyed itself, most of the kinetic energy would be absorbed by the ground around it. (Probably wouldn't be so useful in space.)

As far as useful energy densities, I thought I read somewhere else that material science research similar to the sort looking for materials strong enough to make space elevator cable would help making a flywheels with reasonable energy densities while still being safe.

Even on a large enough scale? Or do larger flywheels end up with less energy density?

Would flywheels be an interesting storage device in space, without friction due to gravity supports & in a vacuum?

And with CSP, you can basically store heat from the sun in the form of, e.g. liquid salt, and use that to run your generators at night.

I always thought it would be cool to use a massive flywheel (or many massive flywheels) to store all that energy during the day - plus you'll get an awesome YouTube video if one of your flywheels disintegrates!

What is most feared is a runaway greenhouse effect, in which there simply isn't enough re-uptake of CO2 to counterbalance the domino effect, thus heat and kinetic energy keep going up and up. Ocean levels will most certainly rise, and at an increasing rate, which will lead to the increasing loss of coastal regions, large-scale loss of property, displacement of millions of people throughout the world, and various related crises.

Actually, the absolute worst case effect is if the increase in temperature & acidification of the oceans causes all of the methane hydrate stored at depth in the oceans to be released all at once (where methane is 100x more effective at causing greenhouse effects than CO2). There is some historical evidence that indicates that this has occurred in the past, and is correlated with mass extinction events (although the article that I linked to seems to be a little skeptical.

This is exactly what patents *should* be used for: secure rewards for innovators who take the risk of bringing out a future-leading product.

Bullshit. This is showing how patents can be used to be retard innovation & prevent the spread of technology. If society wants the benefits of creativity and innovation, then it should figure out a system to pay for that kind of stuff up front - not allow private individuals and organizations the power to stop their competitors from doing their own development.

More like:

Robber: *Bang*, you're dead.

Gun: lies uselessly by gun-owner's side.

If you don't support the right to bare arms you aren't really a liberal

I will fight to the death for the right to wear short-sleeve shirts and tank-tops.

As long as you don't have the kind of family/friends/neighbors who take everything you give them without feeling any sort of reciprocity (and who might even think you're a fool for giving with no strings).

Those are the magnetic poles that have been shifting, not the physical "spinning-like-a-top" poles.

Science can not speak on the existence of God

To be fair, scientists have just as much qualification to speak on the existence of God as any other human being on the planet: zero, since nobody on the planet has any basis for believing in the existence of God other than they really, really, really want God to exist. It's just that most scientists choose not to make claims about things they don't have any observational evidence for (at least the honest scientists don't).

I don't need a fancy invisible god to see that human beings are more valuable to human beings than cockroaches.

Dunno about that - if we were all starving to death, and cockroaches were the only available food, my personal conclusion would be that cockroaches (food) would be more valuable to me than other humans (competition for food). (I suppose in that scenario, other humans would probably become more valuable as food than cockroaches, so maybe my counterexample isn't very good either - as well as being disgusting.)

So has anyone ever gathered enough mass in a single place to have a detectable or measurable effect on gravity?

Yes: the Cavendish experiment. I vaguely remember doing a variation of this experiment in a high-school physics class, although in retrospect I doubt the experiment was controlled enough for stuff like electrostatics or air-dynamics to be meaningful. It has been performed properly enough for people to be pretty confident about its experimental results (at least in the Newtonian realm of gravity).

Surely if that was the case, you would weigh different on top of a mountain verses being in the deepest above water Vally.

You do (or at least a standardized weight does), and it has been measured.

There are also experiments based on monitoring the orbit of satellites very closely which use the variations in the satellites' orbits from expected "perfect" orbits to determine how much gravitational influence the Earth is exerting on the satellite at each moment (which can be translated into rough ideas of the density map of the Earth.)

Personally I would like to see mandatory tests ever 7-10 years and every 3 after you reach 65.

At the very least, they should have some driving simulators at the DMV with common driving situations, so they can test your common sense & basic reflexes in standard ways without endangering either property or lives.

It also helps a lot if you can tilt your rearview mirrors so you can see objects on the ground near your tires (like the curb or parking lines). I believe some of the luxury-mobiles do this automatically.