I set up a pretty cool set of small towers at two remote field sites. They monitored soil oxygen, moisture, temp, redox. We had rain gauges and air temp. Each one was nicely duplexed to deal with the large number of locations we needed to measure. I'd wired up solar panels so I didn't need to go replace batteries all the time. I'd gotten a pair of cell modems so I could remotely download the data.

I'd put them on posts about 4' off the ground for convenience of access. One day an adjacent land owner comes out and tells me that the area sometimes floods up to a couple feet. I scratch my head, get some chunkier posts, run some guy wires, and now the whole thing is a minimum of 8' off the ground. Take that!

Illinois experiences 100 year flooding. My field site becomes a lake. The TOP of the solar panels were easily 20' under water.

I was able to recover a decent number of sensors, saving me a bunch of money, but the amount of time (and morale) lost was a real bummer.

Free-Air Concentration Enrichment studies such as soyFACE artificially raise CO2 (among other variables) and monitor plant response. SoyFACE, as the name implies, is focused on soy, an important food crop. Imagine a crop field surrounded by CO2 sprayers and heaters to simulate elevated CO2 and its effects.

Findings from the experiment include that increased temperatures will likely reduce yields of soy, even at elevated CO2. Higher average temperatures also increased susceptibility to herbivory by the Japanese beetle.

A related meta including 228 experimental observations found that barley, rice, wheat, soybean, and potato all have lower protein content at elevated CO2.doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01511.x

14 years of publications can be found here: http://www.igb.illinois.edu/so...

In short: even if water use efficiency were to increase, that does not result in increased yield, or crop quality.

If timescales didn't matter your point would have some relevance. Zero sum over millions of years has a vastly different real world effect from zero sum over a growing season.

Zero sum over long time scale (burning coal) means an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases, year over year. The fact that no Carbon was actually destroyed or created in the process is irrelevant here.

If you want to go down that road, let's just skip straight to "universe started, universe will end, nothing in the middle matters."

Maximizing biodiversity is a decent goal to have high on your list. The more organisms there are, the more resistant a given system is likely to be. If you've got one species of tree in a forest and beetles come and wipe out that species, you're in trouble. If you've got high biodiversity, you're more likely to have less trees that will be affected, plus a better chance that there's somebody that calls the beetle dinner.

Why should humans care about resilience? We derive a lot of services from natural systems. Protection from extreme events (flood, fire, insects, etc); diverse food stocks; tourism; unique chemicals for pharmaceuticals; groundwater purification; local weather stabilization; and so on. Even if you don't "like" nature, you derive a tremendous number of services from it. The best way to maintain longterm comfort/longevity of humans is to make sure those systems continue to be able to perform those services.

Because nobody Rs TFA: This was found in Carlsbad, closer to San Diego than LA -- any chance we can skip the Encino Man jokes? Please?

Does [anyone else] find that this [summary] is (a bit) hard to read? The (highly)-disjointed nature gives [me] a "headache" ((H)-DNGMAH).

Not only was science not "wrong," but if science was wrong there would be no story. The science says that this was a statistically improbable event. If the science was wrong, this would happen all the time and the fact that it happened again wouldn't be newsworthy. So not only is this the dumb clickbait that we know it to be, but contradictory to the whole premise. No internal logical consistency; complete garbage.

Summary is misleading. Nye basically says US as a whole is failing when it comes to educating average people about science. He admits that, sure, we have top top-tier institutions and scientists, but we need to do a better job educating the average person.

Hardly the swipe aimed specifically at Slashdotters that TFS makes it out to be. Furthermore, if we use /. as a case study, given some of the gems I've seen here recently, I think "semi-science-literate" isn't a bad estimate of the average.

I'm excited to see data from this and the atmospheric CO2 satellite which was launched (again) not long ago overlayed. Seeing how CO2 and soil moisture correspond is important for understanding limitations on microbial communities which make up a large part of the global carbon budget. It will be particularly interesting to measure changes to how these correspond over time -- it'd be a great way to get solid data for future modelling and for quantifying changes currently happening.

Also particularly interesting is the ability to monitor changes as a result of permafrost thaw globally. There's currently some discussion whether and where permafrost thaw will be a net C sink or source. Throw in some data from a Leaf Area Index satellite (which is/are also in orbit currently) and you've got some pretty compelling global/landscape data.

In my position I hire a lot of students for a lab work. I've come to realize that the best workers aren't necessarily the people with STEM majors; the best workers are generally people who are interested and feel a little over their head. I've had many terrible pre-meds, and always had good luck with my English majors. If you're willing to start low in the food web, get a job as a lab technician somewhere (universities are often a decent bet). If you can, prioritize places that look like they have work or instruments that you'd enjoy working on. You can amass a pretty good amount of technical skill from a decent lab job.

If you have higher ambitions for aerospace technologies... probably means going back to school. But that would have meant going back to school regardless of your undergrad degree.

I'm sure that it's partially because Slashdot is a high-tech oriented site, but it seems like everyone skips to bizarre schemes before considering any of the really simple, really tame geoengineering options available. There doesn't need to be a fleet of aircraft spaying a mysterious chemical to increase Earth's albedo. There doesn't need to be a techniological marvel at the poles freezing CO2 out of the air. As with most things, simple is better.

Look at endeavors like the Marin Carbon Project (links to published peer-review articles within) which diverts waste, composts it, puts it on managed grasslands and improves plant productivity. Some fraction of the plant biomass gets stored below ground for decades or centuries. The dairy farmers don't need to buy/import as much feed which saves them money (and is an additional CO2 offset). Initial numbers look like 1 ton of CO2 per hectare over a 3 year period from one application.

I'm just not certain why we're looking so hard for lots of difficult solutions when there is so much low-hanging fruit. Some pretty simple changes in management practices (I'm looking at you, agriculture) can go a huge way to not only lowering CO2 emissions, but making land be significant net carbon sinks without compromising productivity.

Disclaimer: In the past I worked with one of the lab groups involved with the Marin Carbon Project.

I don't normally bitch about editing on summaries but, good heavens, does anyone even read this shit? The same "85% of solar energy..." line is used twice. The final line begins with "i-e" which means "that is," but it doesn't reference anything relevant to scaling. What's the appropriate tag here? !sensical? !edited? !proofed?

I'm probably just burning through karma here, but I like to think that if it's a "legitimate" rage, that the body had a way of rejecting the negative effects.

Before CO2 becomes a limiting factor, water and nitrogen come into play. We can fertilize (for a while, anyway), but swings in water availability will make the water part harder.

Even for areas which will become better suited will produce foods will make products that are less nutritious: A recent study published in Nature suggests that in addition to lower levels of iron and zinc, C3 crops produce less protein under increased CO2 conditions. http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

One of the first sentences on the nuclear reprocessing page linked reads "Nuclear reprocessing reduces the volume of high-level waste, but by itself does not reduce radioactivity or heat generation and therefore does not eliminate the need for a geological waste repository." Emphasis mine.

Of course reprocessing would be great, but it doesn't let us side-step the political bungling of the repository issue.

Growing up in the bay area in CA, I've seen my fair share of people who buy into these types of things. I've hung my head many times in shame and disbelief. But at the end of the day, all we need to do is look at the net results of these beliefs to justify how much we should care.

Homeopathy, by definition, cannot hurt you. Due to the serial dilutions used, the chances are that there are 0 molecules of the original thing in any given dose. The worst thing it can do is cost people money for no result. Some people may turn down medicine and take homeopathics instead, but once again, that's only to the end-user's detriment.

Disbelief in, say, climate change is a different story. If you think climate change is all a big lie, you are likely acting to the detriment of everyone else on the planet. If you believe that the world is a self-correcting machines and our actions have no consequences, you are likely acting to the detriment of everyone else on the planet.

So, while new-age hippie BS is annoying, it's generally quite harmless. Not so for the creation museum and its ilk.