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Perhaps it is your choice of news sources that is the problem.

I don't like the way that the Uknainian problem is reported. There are two sides to it, but none of our media even adresses the Russian side. Russia gave up control of Ukraine voluntarily. It was part of the USSR. Would the USA do the same for Alaska, or Hawaii? Not a chance. But instead of getting credit for that, they get villified. Crimea was historically part of Russia, till a rather drunk Nikita Krushchev (a Ukranian) signed it over to Ukraine on his birthday. (from memory) When Ukraine was given independence, the understanding was free access to Crimea for Russia. When it became obvious that the West was doing all it could to gain control of Ukraine, and hence severely damage the Russian Black See fleet, Putin did the obvious, and took Crimea back. In hindsight, Russia should have retained Crimea, when Ukraine was cut loose. In even better hindsight, Ukraine should have been made to sign up to neutrality agreements as a price for independence, but that was done by Boris Yeltzin who was drunk most of the time. The west has been interfering in Ukrainian politics from the word go, with money and encouragement for anti-russian factions, all with the intention of denying Russia a base on Crimea for the Black Sea Fleet. When Putin put an end to that, it caused major rage in the US and CIA, they didn't like being thwarted. In view of all that, it's hardly surprising that Putin would object to Ukraine joining NATO. NATO is just an anti-russian military alliance, it has no other purpose. Why would Putin just roll over and accept all that? The politics of Ukraine is just about the most rotten in all Europe, they've never run a free and fair election. Both sides are as bad as each other. The idea of Ukraine being a member of Nato is pretty much an invitation to world war 3. If everyone could forget their egoes, the best way to progress would be for NATO to agree to Ukraine not being eligible to becoming a member, and for the West to stop trying to squeeze the pips out of Russia. The Russians lost nearly thirty million people in WW2. They have a right to be paranoid. What if Russia and China formed their own version of NATO ? Where one committed to fight alongside the other, in any conflict? That would be a nightmare, but it's not exactly impossible if we keep pushing.

I think ANPR cameras do a better job of speedsters because they calculate average speed between two distant cameras, rather than just the one camera capturing a single speed data point over a short distance. These can be easily circumvented by people familiar with speed camera locations by slowing down just in time. That's more a recipe for accidents and reckless driving because it puts people in two modes: fast and slow. ANPR cameras probably force more people to drive in a more steady fashion because the mental mathematics of getting around them is too difficult to work out in real-time.

In my experience, most folks follow the passive markings and the road laws to a certain extent, but inevitably there are those who drive the streets competitively and just do what they feel like, and others have to brake to avoid collisions with them (I shall call them Le Mans-ters). It's almost a guarantee here that if the traffic lights have all failed, Le Mans-ters are going to sew chaos every couple of minutes because they either don't know who's turn it is or don't care, and just go as soon as they reach the front of the line. That's the argument that shuts down any talk of implementation around here, that it's some kind of scam by the police to make money. To me, it just sounds like using a bigger net that catches more fish and frees up more fishermen to do the parts of the job the net can't handle. Even with ten times the police officers, they couldn't catch every violation the way the technology can. Do you think the speed traps and red light cameras make people drive slower and take less risks when they know such tech is around? That would be ideal. Having fewer police officers around seems like a trend, and one that the Le Mans-ters are taking full advantage of. I was hoping to make it harder for unapologetic assholes to drive a vehicle on the roads with the rest of us who understand how pieces of a system should behave.

! Moderator Note Posts on Automated Traffic Enforcement Effectiveness split to here.

I have no problem with empire, if you are moving into an empty space. A dead rock in the void counts as that as far as I'm concerned. I've very concerned about extinctions here on earth, but I don't extend that concern to bacteria. And certainly not to bacteria-like basic forms of life on another planet. That's bordering on the plain silly in my opinion. Apart from the fact that it would be virtually impossible to wipe out primitive life living in rocks, it would probably take billions of years to accomplish, and you could easily preserve some if you wanted, at practically no cost. As far as it not being scientific, that's rubbish. Science is about learning, and there's a lot to learn about how life adapts to a new home. And the practical gain for me, is knowing that life has two chances of survival, not just one. Even though that's of no benefit to me personally, it's something that I would like to know, and I would therefore vote for it, if given the choice.

Full circle. Fourth time? Fifth? Enough.

Are you saying those are the only two choices? Invade or stagnate? Me, if I saw more scientific endeavour, political commitment and financial investment going into climate mitigation, alternative energy sources, family planning, health and nutrition, food security, and maybe killing off fewer native species, I wouldn't call it hand-sitting stagnation. But that's an ideological position and doesn't answer the original question: What's the purpose of seeding other planets with life?

Someone should start a thread to try and figure out what Dimreepr considers worth fighting for. Or even worth making an effort. ( certainly not lengthy responses on this forum 😄 )

Good luck with Callendar. I hope it is useful. But thinking more about your response, I find myself wondering what sort of experimental work you are hoping to find. I don't profess any expertise in this field, but I'd have thought that the principal challenge is in the modelling of the climate, rather than in gathering data on CO2. Once you have the molar attenuation coefficient of CO2 as a function of wavelength, i.e. a well-characterised absorption spectrum (which is well known), I imagine the other data inputs on CO2 that you need are its concentration, perhaps as a function of altitude, and then it's matter of putting that into the mix with all the other horrendously complex factors to do with radiation intensity, albedo, the effect of the oceans and so on and so on, none of which involve CO2 per se. So what further experimental data on CO2 are you thinking would be needed? As for the comments on the variation between models, I'm not sure that is surprising, bearing in mind the complexity of the modelling. But I note we have convergence, rather divergence, which seems to suggest the modelling process is likely to be valid, plus of course 20 years more of actual experience of climate change since the start of the graph, against which to judge the models.

I spend a lot of time watching youtube videos and I've noticed that some of the less reputable sites are using buzz words to try and get you too watch lately "massive" seems to be the word of choice ie " Scientists have observed something massive near the Sun" or " Scientists have observed something massive on the Moon" I am just waiting for "Scientists have observed something massive emerging from Uranus"

you can say what you want about old data, all I know is that if you take the time to put the continents together yourself and realize the structure forms a complete ball minus the underside, and the alignment of the island itself says it was a moon that fell. I have a BA in mechanical engineering, and common sense will tell you the accuracy of my claim, if you put it together to the ball and line it up on a globe. there is no doubt at that time.

water life exists water water life exists from 3 billion years ago, but no evidence is available for life on land before Pangea. with the rotation of the earth and the tail end of Panea facing the only direction it could for a slow decent and eventual collision seems pretty cut and dried. The Picture of Pangea of course is "estimated" but when you get to places like Greenland you find areas that fit both sides of the puzzle, through "spreading". When an object the size of Mars crashed into the newly formed planet Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, it knocked our planet over and left it tilted at an angle. Earth's axis is the imaginary red line. Earth's Axis Is Imaginary In astronomy, an axis refers to the imaginary line that an object, usually a planet, rotates around. www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/axial-tilt-obliquity.html I content it was 350- 390 million years ago that the Moon of Pangea fell causing the tilt. The image of the crust is a perfect illustration of the world pre-Pangea, cooled by water and the "Shell" that formed upon cooling. The Perfect soup for life to spawn in and remained intact with a moon that orbited for stability. A Moon would have been needed for the electromagnetic shield that surrounds the Earth to function and protect new life.

Thank you once again to those who sent me responses and links to research. I assure you that I read every link that comes up with an original research article and I carefully go through the reference lists for what I am looking for. I do not follow up references to books or second hand popular journal interpretations. I uploaded a graph of publications on climate sensitivity in my last post. It demonstrated the various figures calculated by many reearch groups over the last 20 years for predicted near-surface temperatures if the CO2 concentration was doubled in the atmosphere. This is labelled ‘Climate Sensitivity’. There is a 25-fold difference (not 25%; 25-fold) between their calculations of what the near-surface average global temperature rise would be. Because there is such a wide variation in these predictions, I began to suspect that there is something wrong with the basic science on climate change. There are other reasons as well of course, but that one example is enough in its own right for me to become curious about the basics. I apologize to anybody if such a search makes them feel uncomfortable about their own belief systems in what they choose to accept. I’m personally curious as to why, after 160-odd years, we have not yet achieved anywhere near conformity in agreement as to what our near-surface temperature would be if we doubled carbon dioxide concentrations. A one-fold difference may be acceptable, but a 25-fold range from top to bottom??? I assume the results were from peer-reviewed journals. So getting on with Callendar (1938), thanks to exchemist, it’s a good paper, and I can understand why it was listed by the Wikipedia researcher as one of the significant papers in the history of Climate Change science. Callendar has produced a graph of temperature anomalies associated with varying concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. His graph indicates that a change from 300 to 400 ppm (dry air) would result in an increase of 1 degree C or so, which is about what happened over the last 100 years. But his results once again were mostly calculations, based, as he said, on the work of Rubens and Aschkinass (1898), Rubens and Hettner (1918) and Fowle (1918). I will try to follow them up, but I’m pessimistic that such old papers will be available. I’m getting the impression now that the science of Climate Change has developed piecemeal, with a sort of trial and error nature based on hypotheses and counter-hypotheses coupled with countless papers on atmospheric measurements of all kinds over a long period. Following my search so far, my expectation now is that I’ll find that the only basic laboratory-controlled experiment in the field was that of Tyndall’s in the 1860s. He used a can of hot water, a tube and a galvanometer to quantitatively assess the absorption (and radiation) of ‘heat’ by a variety of gases. It doesn’t look at this stage as if anybody has repeated his work using infrared lamps and spectrophotometers with a glass or perspex tube designed to hold a variety of pure or mixed gases at various temperatures and simulated atmospheric conditions, along with inserted thermometers and gas gauges. The design and manufacture of such a tube would probably be the biggest technical problem in a machine designed like an Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer. Special thanks to you exchemist. I realize that you had to go out of your way to obtain that Callender (1938) reference for me.