npts2020

I would take issue with the notion that the atmosphere or ocean are the *primary* cause of the lag. In order to have net warming you have to recieve a certain amount of sunlight each day. That means that after the winter solstice (I will use Canada as my reference for seasons) the Earth is still cooling, until it reaches a point where there is net warming each day. Read carefully iNow's second reference.

What? Open a bottle of wine and not drink it all! Why that's sacrilege.

Just curious. Why would one want to freeze wine when it keeps so well in the bottle?

Feet first with arms and legs crossed and toes pointed downward. I have done this from at least 25 meters (once). Finishing the plunge was rather exhilirating but I wouldn't recommend doing it for entertainment.

I think he (GWB) was only referring to profligate consumption. That way of life requires no other freedom or ethics than to be able to consume.

The auto manufacturers would be ok if the economy made a u-turn fairly soon and oil stayed cheap. What are the chances of both those things happening? IMO about the same as the flying spaghetti monster showing up and taking over the world. Firstly, I see no reason why an economy, leveraged to the point ours is, will suddenly turn around when the underlying reasons for the problem have not been addressed. Secondly, if it does turn around, the price of energy (especially oil) will go right back up to where it was a couple of months ago and beyond.

Carbon sequestration is barely out of the "proof of concept" phase and has never been used on any scale for a long period of time to actually see if it works the way we think it should. If coal is going to be used over the long term it may be necessary to use it. I just think there are far better options insofar as they are cleaner, more sustainable, and close to the same price (maybe even cheaper if you don't count carbon emissions as zero cost).

Does anyone know for sure how or why the ballots get "challenged" to begin with?

Carbon sequestration is the best hope for the coal industry but it is similar to radioactive waste disposal for nuclear plants in that the harmful product will be around for many years and require constant monitoring. If there were no other options, this might be an acceptable situation but there are literally dozens of less environmentally destructive options: wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, piezoelectric to name just a few. This is the direction we need to be looking, IMO.

So failed we are only going to give them $17.4 billion. I hope if my company ever fails I can get a few billion $$$$ from Uncle Sam too.

Changing to wind power can happen much faster than most people think, especially if you can put a soon to be unemployed auto sector to work on it. I have recently read (I will try to find the source) that grids the size of Australia, U.S., or E.U. may not even require storage for backup. The same authors say that a grid the size of the British Isles is approaching minimum area required for no backup but probably would not be 100% dependable. I wonder where tidal generation rates on their scale, I didn't see it mentioned?

Or you could take the parents' line......'cause I said so.

So consciousness=existance? If I am sedated for an operation, does that mean I cease to exist for a period of time?

My mathematics prowess is abyssmal but I will take a stab at this. Axiom iii only states that "a" will appear at the beginning of any string of numbers it is in. Axiom iv further implies there are no strings of numbers without an "a" in them by stating "a" is always at the beginning of any string.

Bouncing lasers off of the moon and measuring time to do so is how we get the most accurate measurements of the moon and its orbit.

HOLLYWOOD. Bah humbug. (It was a pretty good movie though)

Penury, calorie?

It seems to me you would have similar effects to a diver rising to the surface too quickly, decompression sickness (bends). Divers often have many atmospheres of pressure pushing on them and have to resurface slowly enough to allow equalization from inside the body. I would think jumping out of a spaceship would be similar only not as extreme due to less pressure change. Other things like temperature, lack of anything to breathe, and radiation would have far more effect IMO.

Yes, I can now see why you had questions about what I said.

Well, in America you and your wife can incorporate or form a church simply by filling out appropriate paperwork. (Expect the IRS to be watching if you ever accumulate substantial assets or cash flow).

Yep. This is basically how skin grafts are grown for burn victims.

I misunderstood exactly what a thermite reaction is, thinking it applied more generally to burning metals. The point about the airplane still stands though. Firefighting protocol on an aircraft carrier says to get a burning jet overboard ASAP before it burns its way through the decks, the fire would be hot enough to melt steel.

Clothes will also dry in freezing cold air when hung out on a line so the fact that the heating element doesn't work only decreases the efficiency and doesn't prevent the machine from totally working. I am not familiar with spinners in a pool locker room but I would be willing to bet that their rotation speed is much higher than a dryer, similar to a washing machine's spin cycle. The high speed will fling the water out of the fabric. In a dryer the idea is just to keep exposing surfaces to hot air for efficiency sake (reason for the slower speed). Assuming they are already wrung out from the spin cycle of the washer, somebody would have to show me that a dryer spins fast enough to be above the minimum speed required for a measurable amount of water to do anything besides evaporate from the clothes.

CaptainPanic; You might well be correct but there is absolutely nothing in "The Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" to prevent the Secretary of the Treasury from giving the TARP money to whomever he wants. It would be fairly surprising to me if there is any of that money left by Inauguration Day. While I am all for big auto discontinuing their line of "horse buggy whips", to allow it to happen precipitously with no plan for replacement will not do a struggling economy any good. Of course, if the goal is just to keep labor cheap, it should succeed spectacularly.

At any rate there are more reasons than any climate modeling (good or bad) to be able to discern that humans are having a major impact on the environment especially with regards to climate change. When someone can show me that human activity does anything besides add to any other cause of global warming, then I will agree it is not necessary to take action to severely limit those additions. Look at satellite photos of the poles for as long as they have been taking them. Visit a glacier and see how far it has receded in the past 40 years, there are several near Mt. Rogers in Canada that have been kept track of for at least that long. Look at migrating species, some have started going south two weeks or more later in the season or northward that much earlier. Even where I grew up in central Pennsylvania I can see the difference, in the 50's, 60's, and 70's it was normal to have snow on the ground all winter long once there was an initial heavy snow, in the past 20 years I would be surprised to learn that there had been snow all winter a single time. In the Poconos the season for our family maple syrup operation has definitely gotten earlier in the year by at least 2 weeks. In the 60's we never began setting up before mid-March, now you will miss much or all of the season if you wait til then, these days you want to be finished with setup before March 1. All of the syrup producers I have spoken with in the last ten years have told me similar stories about the season getting earlier as far away as Quebec and northern Maine. Look at temperature records for as many cities as you can as far back as you can get them, how many record or abnormally hot vs. cold days are there? None of this tells me that humans are the cause but then we come to ice cores. Ice cores are not a good year-to-year measure, however, they are very accurate for long term trends, which fortunately is what we are interested in for climate change discussions. Those long term trends tell us that the climate undergoes periodic changes of warm and cold, even fairly sudden ones on occasion. The part that should concern us is that those same ice cores tell us that the rate of warming is unprecedented for at least the past couple of hundred thousand years (as far back as they go). Once one accounts for all other possibilities, the elephant behind the curtain becomes human causes. Expecting a model to exactly predict what happens in the real climate, is similar to expecting one to model evolution and come up with a human after starting with a one-celled organism. Just because it can't be accurately modelled doesn't invalidate the theory which works in all other respects. If anyone wants links to support any of the above I will do my best to find them but it is basically a compilation of what I have experienced and read on the subject for the past 35 years or so.