The environment thread

[StrangeSox]

Actually, it was leaks at two other sites (Byron and Dresden) but not at Clinton.

 

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-11689816.html

[BigSqwert]

Neat way to save paper...

 

It seems like 99 percent of the mail we send is electronic these days. The other 1 percent is letters and postcards that we want to postmark with our (usually enviable) location for the recipient. That's why we dig these uber-accurate Google Maps envelopes. Now we can say Hello from 100 Holomoana Street, Honolulu, HI, 96815!

 

 

via

[lostfan]

So I'm on someone else's Facebook status and this dude comes in doing what I suppose he considers "dropping knowledge" by citing a bunch of 5th grade science as if it's some kind of big secret the government is covering up with a conspiracy to promote the idea of climate change... lol. Like the fact that "climate change has always existed" because the earth used to be scalding hot billions of years ago, and that the moon had crashed into earth, and the 24 hour rotation is gradually slowing down. I'm like uhh yeah none of this has much to do with anything, dude. Humanity's only existed on earth for a tiny, tiny fraction of Earth's total existence. All the other stuff is pretty much what the life of planets is, and yes, earth will eventually die, a couple billion years from now. Come on now.

[Balta1701]

Actually, it's possible that life on earth has about a 1 billion year clock left on it , unless life gets its arse in gear and starts figuring out ways to fix a lot of nitrogen out of the atmosphere to reduce atmospheric pressure and the greenhouse effect by then.

 

He's also incorrect. The moon itself never crashed into earth. A significantly larger body, of about 0.1 earth masses (roughly 10x the mass of the moon) crashed into the earth, and a portion of the debris from this event is what eventually coalesced to form the moon.

[lostfan]

Still, a billion years. Unless we get to Mars and discover Prothean ruins to leap technology forward by several generations and then discover a mass relay in Pluto's moon to enable instantaneous transportation throughout the galaxy to let us colonize space (hi Mass Effect) we'd probably screw ourselves through overpopulation and running out of resources long before then.

 

I just thought it was funny this guy thought he was impressing everybody, when half of what he was saying was either factually incorrect or totally irrelevant and he missed the entire point of the climate change argument.

Edited February 10, 2010 by lostfan

[Balta1701]

Still, a billion years. Unless we get to Mars and discover Prothean ruins to leap technology forward by several generations and then discover a mass relay in Pluto's moon to enable instantaneous transportation throughout the galaxy to let us colonize space (hi Mass Effect) we'd probably screw ourselves through overpopulation and running out of resources long before then.

Humanity screwing itself out of existence ≠ the end of life on earth.

[lostfan]

Humanity screwing itself out of existence ≠ the end of life on earth.

I know. This guy doesn't seem to, though.

[lostfan]

But hey, Balta, you actually went to school to learn this stuff so you can see it in a lot more depth than I can, I'm just your average smart guy who can see recognize bulls*** without much difficulty. Just wait until he sees what happens when you pour vinegar into baking soda!

[Balta1701]

But hey, Balta, you actually went to school to learn this stuff so you can see it in a lot more depth than I can, I'm just your average smart guy who can see recognize bulls*** without much difficulty. Just wait until he sees what happens when you pour vinegar into baking soda!

"Now bart, you know what happens when you mix acids and bases, right?"

[lostfan]

omg I just ran wires from a 9 volt battery to a magnet!

[lostfan]

btw, Balta isn't the earth's orbit gradually moving away from the sun, and not towards?

 

I'm pretty sure all celestial bodies do that, the other planets are gradually escaping their orbit because they lose their angular velocity or whatever. He claimed the earth was getting closer to the sun

Edited February 10, 2010 by lostfan

[Balta1701]

btw, Balta isn't the earth's orbit gradually moving away from the sun, and not towards?

 

I'm pretty sure all celestial bodies do that, the other planets are gradually escaping their orbit because they lose their angular velocity or whatever. He claimed the earth was getting closer to the sun

Over longest time scales, there are 2 effects that are going to slow the duration of a year. First, the sun is slowly losing mass due to the solar wind. Decrease the mass of the sun, slow the earth's orbit, and slow the orbit of a planet and it moves out a bit. Secondly, there is some Earth/sun tidal dissipation, although the Earth/Sun system shows an order of magnitude smaller tides than the earth/moon system. This also would move the earth away from the sun slowly.

 

Worth noting, there are even smaller effects that move the other way; the Poynting/Robinson effect works to move objects towards the sun, although it is much smaller than the other effects.

 

Probably worth saying also is that the size of these effects pales in comparison to the orbital variations due to the effects of the other bodies in the solar system (the milankovitch cycling) which is what your friend may be trying to say without realizing it. Currently the Earth's orbit is quite close to circular. It will get more elliptical and then cycle back on roughly a 120,000 year timescale.

[lostfan]

I think the sun also loses mass/gravity from the nuclear fusion process but the accuracy of that is still fuzzy to me.

[Balta1701]

I think the sun also loses mass/gravity from the nuclear fusion process but the accuracy of that is still fuzzy to me.

The answer to that is from Einstein. You've heard the equation, E=MC^2. If you add up the mass of the protons that combine to produce a helium atom during nuclear fusion, there is a slight mass deficit. This is the case for virtually any stable combination of atoms from Hydrogen up to 56Fe. When fusion takes place, that slight amount of mass is converted to energy via that equation. That energy is what powers every star in the universe.

[Balta1701]

So, today, Obama pissed off me and many on the left by softening some of his recent stances on Wall Street and tried to say that what they were doing was, yeah, ok.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

 

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

(ignoring the fact that these guys are terrible businessmen who would be flat broke without the huge intervention of the government)...so now, Obama has made a pro-bank, pro-business-as-usual statement. The logic of this thread tells me that stocks should have skyrocketed today.

 

Link. Flat to down.

 

(You hear a weird sound as balta's confused brain breaks, unable to process this contradiction.)

[southsider2k5]

So, today, Obama pissed off me and many on the left by softening some of his recent stances on Wall Street and tried to say that what they were doing was, yeah, ok.

(ignoring the fact that these guys are terrible businessmen who would be flat broke without the huge intervention of the government)...so now, Obama has made a pro-bank, pro-business-as-usual statement. The logic of this thread tells me that stocks should have skyrocketed today.

 

Link. Flat to down.

 

(You hear a weird sound as balta's confused brain breaks, unable to process this contradiction.)

 

I heard earlier that JPM was the leading gainer on the Dow today. I don't know how it ended up, but the Dow was down like 8 points when I saw it.

[Balta1701]

Damn, I meant to put that in the finance thread. Phooey. Seriously, did in fact break my brain i Guess.

[Balta1701]

This is how dumb our discourse is.

Global warming is at the bottom of their list. And now, on top of that, the paralyzing snowfalls have made the prospect of winning support for a climate bill this year even less likely.

 

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Tuesday used the D.C. snowstorm to make a political jab, saying that it provides evidence for global warming skeptics.

 

“It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries “uncle,” the conservative Senator tweeted on Twitter.

 

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said the blizzards that have shut down Congress have made it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger.

 

“It makes it more challenging for folks not taking time to review the scientific arguments,” said Bingaman, who as the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee has jurisdiction over energy and climate change issues.

 

“People see the world around them and they extrapolate,” Bingaman said. “I think that it’s hard to see an economy-wide cap-and-trade [proposal] of the type that passed the House could prevail,” he added, though he suggested a more limited alternative could have a better chance.

That's right, our government officials can not tell the difference between temperature and precipitation.

[lostfan]

Balta, that's exactly what the Facebook comment that prompted the asshattery I was talking about earlier was talking about. It snows because that's what it does in winter, nobody ever has, or probably ever will, claim that rising temperatures are going to make winter go away and it's going to stop snowing in northern climates.

[bmags]

this extreme weather we rarely have before is an EXAMPLE that things are fine harf harf harf pass the brandy artmore and spray a few more aerosol cans in the air

[Balta1701]

You know what I find to drive some mix of hilarity and insanity? ONe of the reasons for the weather pattern stuck in the SE US is that this is an El Nino year, and because of that, we're getting this moist current of air surging up from the Caribbean over and over again.

 

The thing I want to note is...one entirely plausible outcome of dumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere is actually pushing the earth into a permanent El Nino state. It's something that has happened before, that's what conditions were possibly like about 3-4.5 million years ago before the last decrease in CO2 contents started the ice-age cycle.

 

In other words...its entirely possible that because of this El Nino year, it's unusually snowy in D.C. Therefore, we don't do anything on Climate Change this year, 10 years pass again with the Republicans in Congress and CO2 keeps going up, we wind up locking ourselves into a permanent El Nino state where this level of snow suddenly becomes the norm along the entire East Coast, with even more moisture in the air to drive it.

 

Aside from having a good portion of D.C. under water, somehow fitting...and sad.

[kapkomet]

 

3.0 to 4.5 million years ago, something happened. In 10 years, the same thing that took thousands of years will happen, and we will all DIE~~~~~~D

 

That's hilarity and instanity for you.

 

[Balta1701]

 

3.0 to 4.5 million years ago, something happened. In 10 years, the same thing that took thousands of years will happen, and we will all DIE~~~~~~D

 

That's hilarity and instanity for you.

It used to take thousands of years for CO2 contents to move by the amounts that we've moved it in 3 decades.

[Balta1701]

Really, the sheer willingness not only to be ignorant but to hold it up as something that makes you better than everyone else that we get in your posts...it's somewhat remarkable.

[southsider2k5]

Really, the sheer willingness not only to be ignorant but to hold it up as something that makes you better than everyone else that we get in your posts...it's somewhat remarkable.

 

Funny that is exactly how I felt arguing with you in the finance thread.