Good News On Global Warming

You people are insane. The article is laughable. You have long ago gone well beyond being merely an embarrassment to the nations, you are a clear and present danger to responsible stewardship and rational governance.

You epitomize failure and incompetence.

In short, you are complete frauds.

"You people are insane..."

Mr. Elifritz, I presume?

I agree, sure sounds like Elfshitz.

Rand, don't you think he could be spoofing his IP?

There are readily available plug-in's for firefox that allow one to do that.

Yeah, it probably was. I was thinking that as I changed the moronic screen name.

Firefox has a plug-in to detect IP shifts? How does that help me with my blog software (which doesn't even effectively block IPs, as one of the "features" I got when I upgraded MT)?

Oh, sorry, Steve. I just realized that I misread your comment.

Yes, it's not hard to spoof your IP address. But that's the least of my current problems with blocking problem commenters, like Elifritz.

As I said, I should have recognized that the troll continues to lurk, and comment, when it can get away with it. Since we've discussed it so much, I'll leave it, so that sane people can see what we have to deal with.

Well, there's always comment registration, not that I'd prefer that.

Dr. Davis I presume? I didn't realize you were a connoisseur of the koolaide here as well. You always struck me as reasonable and rational. Silly me.

See, Doctor Joesef Mengele Elifritz drops by again to share his non-wisdom with us mortals.

I expect the universal medical care system the Obama Administration brings us will include psychological coverage. That's good news for people like our friend above, who sorely need institutionalization   nuclear-powered shock therapy   horse-grade antipsychotic suppositories the gentle, understanding ministrations of the mental health professions.

This is silly, everyone knows that global warming causes cooling -- it is a fact. Global warming is responsible for 4 distinct temperature variations to occur during a given year. The warming coldness, the warming mild, the warming hot, and the warming wet. Or, in other words, how a successful date with a female often turns out -- or so I hear. In fact, I blame women for the extinction of the polar bear. The immense heat generated by their nether regions is a blight on humanity. Never mind, that polar bears are not extinct yet, that is besides the point, we have to believe they are so that we can react to climate change appropriately. Gird thy loins!!!

Well, it may be funny in a gallows kind of way, but this is not good news at all. I'd rather have the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming wacks proved correct.

The Sun is behaving strangely. No sunspots for nearly two years, a sputtering solar wind, a lack of solar neutrinos from fusion. Not good. The Sun is perfectly capable of varying its output by plus or minus 10%, and that kind of change could easily be fatal to life on Earth. We're not talking merely twice as many hurricans or the polar bears going extinct, nor even a new Ice Age, but such horrifying possibilities of a complete glaciation of the planet -- no open land or water at all -- for five hundred thousand years. Only bacteria would survive such an event.

Carl, about the lack of solar neutrino output I wouldn't worry too much.

Two possibilities; either you are talking about the fact that neutrino captures are about a third of what theory says they should be, or you are saying that the output is down from even that.

First case; there is increasing evidence that this is due to "neutrino oscillation" - neutrinos change from electron to muon to tau neutrinos more-or-less randomly, and since the detectors are only sensitive to electron neutrinos this would mean that about a third of the neutrinos would be found.

Second case; fusion neutrinos down from say ten years ago. Well, this could be serious; but it takes ten million years or so for radiation to escape from the core. So, even if fusion has completely switched off, we have maybe half that before it starts having serious effects on the Sun we see.

If we can't cope with that in five million years' time, then we won't be here anyway - and won't deserve to be. Five million years is a hundred times as long as Homo sapiens has existed. Stone tools to nuclear accelerators, spaceships and the Internet in that time, and the pace of development is accelerating; what and where will we be a thousand times longer from now than it has been since the Pyramids?

I am much more worried about the answer to one famous puzzle, inaccurately called the Fermi Paradox. We stand a completely unquantifiable risk of finding out that answer - but when we know. it will be too late. I, and no doubt you, can think of a few; but does any of them reflect reality?

Fletch, I haven't followed the theory of solar neutrinos in twenty-some years, so I didn't know there's thought that oscillations would fix the problem. I'm always a little leery of neutrino theory just because it smells so much like post-facto ad-hockery, and the little buggers are so hard to lay hands on. But I suppose I'm willing to take the HEP people's word for it.

I dunno if one could confidently say that if fusion went weird there'd be no trouble until the radiation flux dimmed. What about the Sun's magnetic field? Would that take as long to change? It may not change because of any fusion weirdnesses, but fusion weirdnesses and changes in the magnetic field may both proceed from a third cause (oscillations in the solar mass density near the core?). I would not be surprised if the Sun's magnetic field has a larger effect on climate than we have heretofore imagined. There's that interesting correlation between sunspots and climate, after all.

Yes, the Fermi paradox is a bugger. I admit, it strikes me as weird. I find it very hard to believe in improbable events. It's always seemed to me that if intelligent life can evolve in the Universe, then it must do so bloody well all the time. Given that our existence supposedly proves the premise, what's up with the lack of evidence of the conclusion? Where the hell are they?

It's hard not to think that, yes, they're out there, but there's some reason that interstellar communication or intercourse is just flat impossible.