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War-wise, the stalemate ends if US politics turns against and ceases support. See also: Why Ukraine was falling behind so much in first half of this year due to US Congressional Republicans blocking funding and arms transfers to help them. I hold the contrary view here. I think it was his best pick. In context of the US electoral college, the outcome of this race in 47 of our 50 states is already predetermined for whether Trump or Biden will win. Everything in this election cycle will fall entirely to Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as the fulcrum for this decision, and all three of them are well within the margin of error as currently being a tie between the two men. Vance appeals to all 3 of those states in very big ways given his background being extremely poor and understanding how meth and fentanyl and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs have crippled those regions. He speaks eloquently, lies calmly, debates strongly, he is well connected and has his finger on what's happening with rich powerful tech-bros, and regularly manages to put a pretty red bow around the bloody red meat Trump so often sells to amp up supporters of the worst parts of our humanity. Vance's appeal in these three critical electoral college states is only further amplified given that he's currently the sitting Senator for one of them, a Senator who's repeatedly won elections there. And even if they lose, he's now positioned as the heir apparent for MAGA for the next 4 decades. US presidential elections aren't about who's most popular or unpopular across the country. They're about who wins an extra coupla hundred votes in 6 or 7 counties in industrial mid-west states.

@Airbrush Careful they don't wear you out working out why their arguments are wrong only to just shift to different wrong arguments whilst conceding nothing; those debates rarely change minds. If you want to know why those arguments are wrong (or not even wrong ie irrelevant) it will only be for your benefit; anyone who can't see the logical problem with evidence of instances where warming preceded CO2 and the CO2 amplified it implying CO2 cannot be the cause of warming now (but when we get enough warming, cause CO2 stores to be released and amplify it?) isn't going to be much open to logical arguments. And if someone thinks not being convinced means the science is wrong they are not being properly skeptical - if they don't know they cannot know that it is wrong. It may be better to shift the argument to one of whether and why to trust the institutions, practices and practitioners of climate related science - to trust in the studies and reports by science agencies and science teams tasked with working out what is really going on, versus "do your own research" on a point by point basis. Why for example is every Intelligence Agency, who's job is sorting truth from lies and uncovering nation damaging conspiracies, unable to find evidence of falsification in climate science? Or are they in on it? Some points (for your benefit) - graphs of CO2 vs temperature with 1,000 year increments can't really demonstrate the connection between temperature and CO2 over very short timescales, such as between 1800's to present, where CO2 has been preceding warming that shows very rapid response to it, measurable within decades - and it is an observation that the CO2 rise is a consequence of fossil fuel burning and not a response to warming from other causes, or what do they think comes out of exhaust pipes and smoke stacks? Just CO2 and temperature seems inadequate for arguing for other causes than CO2; they need to show the other causes, and then show how those causes are working now. Looking at too long to be relevant timescales is a common way people get misled or mislead themselves - just as too short time scales where internal climate variability dominates - where each year is not incrementally warmer than the preceding one, but over time averages to a clear warming trend (remember The Pause?) - is misleading. Effects of raised CO2 on plants in isolation from the full range of environmental changes - temperatures, rainfall, growing season length - is also likely to mislead. More crop growth with raised yields but reduced nutritional value (where all else is equal) needs to be put into the context where all else is not equal. And increasing global biomass (vegetation) isn't so easy to attribute to plant response to elevated CO2 - temperature change and rainfall change seem to be more significant factors, with overall increased global precipitation a major one. But that is not leading to increased rainfall everywhere; warmer air will hold more water vapor and deliver more rain where conditions suit, whereas in arid conditions warmer air needs higher levels of water vapor to rain at all. More tundra spending more time thawed (Arctic greening), some regions getting more rainfall (eg NW Australia) seems more directly significant to change in vegetation in those places. I don't mind people asking questions - feel free - but I am not a fan of being JAQed around by people who aren't interested in the answers.

Gaia Hypothesis, in short that the earth is in some kind of self-balancing system. Proposed by late James Lovelock and promoted by Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. This hypothesis gained some notoriety because of novelty, but lacked scientific evidence; in fact some scientists have claimed that in most ecosystems, imbalance is the norm. I offer below 2 chemical reactions for review by members: 1. Carbon dioxide + Water -> Sunlight -> Glucose + Oxygen [Green Plants] 2. Oxygen + Glucose -> Energy + Carbon dioxide + Water [Plants + Animals] These are converse reactions in that one is the reversal of the other. From the chemistry that I know, these 2 reactions are subject to the laws of chemical reactions, a few of which I recall are: 1 1. Increase the reactants and the reaction will speed up 2. Remove the products and the reaction will speed up 3. Product accumulation means the reaction will slow down 4. Product accumulation and the reaction might reverse Aren't these the hallmarks of homeostasis, the essence of self-regulation? So do these 2 chemical reactions support the Gaia Hypothesis?

Congrats @joigus; a well deserved win. ( we'll do this again at the Worlds in two years ) It seems England's national is the Toronto Maple Leafs ( hockey ) of the soccer world. ( 68 years without a major trophy win )

Is this a bid for the Write4U Memorial Prize for irrelevance?😆

Please be aware that we are not talking about thermodynamic equilibrium here as that is incompatible with life processes (which depend on the existence of various gradients). Some of us (me included) have used the term 'equilibrium' when what we actually intend is better described as 'steady state'. This supports @joigus comment on solar influx and the consequent gradients of temperature, pressure, concentration, density etc that drive most of the Earth's surface processes, both organic and inorganic.

That’s an excellent question. First and foremost, the original Alcubierre metric requires that spacetime outside and inside the “warp bubble” is Minkowskian, and thus flat; it is only the “bubble wall” which exhibits non-trivial curvature. If you take away this condition of asymptotic flatness by allowing non-negligible background curvature, the Alcubierre metric is no longer a valid solution to the Einstein equations under those circumstances. This is because GR is a non-linear theory, so one can’t simply add metrics together and expect the result to again be a valid solution to the field equations. IOW, the warp bubble wouldn’t remain stable if it came under the influence of a gravitating body; you might suddenly get strong tidal forces acting on your ship, or the bubble might simply break down and disperse. Which begs the question - is there any kind of topological construct that behaves similar to Alcubierre’s warp bubble, but can exist in the presence of strong background curvature? I don’t know the answer for sure, but potentially this is possible. But then, such a construct would depend on the specifics of the gravitational environment, so if it propagates from a region of strong curvature to a region that is nearly flat, it would almost certainly not remain stable, so you’d have the same problem. So is it possible to have a warp bubble metric that remains stable irrespective of the gravitational background? Due to how the Einstein equations work, I would say almost certainly not. What may be possible though is to find a specific warp metric for a specific flight path through a given, specific gravitational environment. You’d have to know where you want to start and where you want to end up, and the exact spacetime curvatures in all regions in between. If you then had a powerful enough computer, you could try and find a metric that describes a stable warp bubble propagating through this setup. You would have to perform this calculation anew for every journey you want to undertake, since it’s specific to the parameters describing each journey. It’s another interesting question to ask whether it is guaranteed that there always exists a solution; perhaps some routes cannot be flown at warp speeds…?

Yep, in nature the principal limiting growth factors are water and soil nutrients, so more CO2 is not going to necessarily help, especially if it is raising the temperature in places where that leads to more drought and wildfires. Plants need the right balance of water and soil nutrients and pH and so on to take advantage of more CO2 - a balance that rapid AGW tends not to provide.

Exactly. Buffering is the term. There are processes that react to change by mitigating it, but which do not restore the system to quite the same state.

You can really get dragged into the weeds trying to react to individual random graphs generated to sow disinformation, unless you are an expert in the field. There’s a whole cottage industry peddling disinformation “talking points” and as soon as you knock down one they will come up with another. The question really is whether these people seriously believe all the climatologists are wrong, whereas they, with their barrack- room lawyer’s opinions, are right, or whether they think the climatologists are all - worldwide - engaged in some kind of conspiracy, and if so, to what end?

Get a proper password manager. Use different IDs across every service. Make your ID a long string of gibberish characters. It’s lazy to do otherwise and barely inconvenient given the added protection. You know. Or don’t. Let yourself be an easier target and THEN learn the true definition of inconvenience while you work to fix and cleanup future breaches and identity thefts.

Whatever version of my name, it is likely to be occupied already. More importantly, it won't make a difference to what I said above. Did you read what I said above? As I said, gibberish characters will more likely give an exact search results on Google.