cool science thing

It makes me wonder what is going on so that they need to use cat litter to soak up nuclear waste!!!

I'm not sure what in this article would make you like the idea of nuclear energy and the resulting waste products.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman
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Actually there is no way to "prove" a law correct. We can prove it wrong by showing counter examples. But there is no way to exhaustively test all possible cases and prove something right.

We have to reach a point of testing and ideological acceptance to call a principle a "law".

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

Other than the little world of electronics design, John doesn't really know how to study something. He applies the same techniques to every problem even when it is not appropriate and can't produce a useful solution. When others apply appropriate techniques he criticizes their work as "unscientific" or just wrong. Meanwhile he has no idea how to do any better.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

And what would it take to convince you that global warming may be irreversible once reaching that point?

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

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Karl Popper argued that you couldn't prove a scientific theory in the way that you can prove some mathematical assertions, and argued that that a scientific theory was one that could be falsified, and hadn't yet been falsified.

Real science doesn't actually work that way - plausibility does come into it - but it's close.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Kitty litter is great at sucking up all sorts of liquids... (I keep a bag in the barn for the various fluids that leak out of my tired backhoe.)

Ahh I said it was depressing. The current state of nuclear waste storage is a travesty.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Needlessly. There are all sorts of effective ways to dispose of used fuel rods, one of the best being to reprocess them into more fuel. The only problems are political.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

But a political problem that still hasn't been solved after fifty years does need to be taken seriously. John Larkin does live in a quasi-democratic state, and if you can't get the majority of the population on board, you've got a problem.

There's an obvious answer to the obvious problem of anythropogenic global warming, but John Larkin prefers to deny the existence of that particular problem, as is his right in a democratic society.

Robert Lowe said that "We must educate our masters" after the UK Reform Bill of 1867 greatly expanded the franchise, but the idea doesn't seem to have made it across the Atlantic, where indoctrination seems to be preferred.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

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Reply to
Robert Baer

That principle is in reverse here, where emotional rabble rousing is the order of the day :(

Currently the popular press is vilifying the High Court judges who stated that the UK parliament is supreme and that the government is not.

As a respected journalist (Robert Peston) succinctly put it:

"It is spectacularly delicious that leading Brexiteers are arguing that the High Court today got it wrong today in ruling that we cannot leave the EU without the assent of Parliament - in that almost their entire campaign to get us out of the EU was that British courts and Westminster must be sovereign, and no longer subjugated to Brussels.

"We'll also hear plenty from them about a corrupt stitch up by the pro-European establishment to frustrate the revealed will of the British people that we need to be out of Europe.

"But the question for Brexiteers is why on earth they want courts, MPs and Lords to have more independent power if those pillars of the British state are all so appallingly twisted and feeble.

"You have to laugh, or maybe weep."

Reply to
Tom Gardner

If Al Gore wrote a book about it, that would pretty well settle it for me.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

Al Gore isn't a scientist - and doesn't pretend to be.

He does seem to be able to understand scientific advice - which is more than you and John Larkin can manage - and his first book on the subject,"Earth in the Balance" published in 1992, still reads pretty well.

It was the first book written by a sitting U.S. Senator to make the New York Times bestseller list since John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. This was a neat trick at the time. Has there been a Republican competitor since then?

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

So we could synthesize those compounds and release them at ground level in the Sahara to seed clouds, maybe?

Islam was probably founded in reaction to a climate change. I wonder what effect bringing them rain would have.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

What nobody seems to have noticed is the evolutionary implications. One tree has no measurable selective advantage from manufacturing organics and spewing them into the air. But billions of trees cooperate to do just that, create the seeds that make the rain that they need. So how could that evolve, when it's probably a differential disadvantage for any one tree to do that? It's like altruism in animals, an individual cost but a group advantage.

I always wondered about the Great Smoky Mountains. I figured the organic smog was just some accidental side effect of tree metabolism.

It's likely that more CO2 will enable these trees to make and release more organics to seed more rainfall. It simultaneously makes them more water efficient. This stuff is complex.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

The climare models are still at the tea-leaf-reading stage of prediction.

As I noted, Spice is accurate, given good models, correct inputs, and non-chaotic dynamics. Some circuits don't sim at all well. Even simple circuits, like crystal oscillators, can have impractical runtimes. Earth's atmosphere is immensely more complex than some opamp circuit, and even the inputs are poorly understood.

So people twiddle the models to get the behavior that they expect. Hindcasting is easy: twiddle a bit more to make the model look good, which is essentially curve-fitting old data. Change the old data if that helps.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Probably, but it would take a lot. There are roughly 3 trillion trees on Earth.

And how long would it take them to change?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

No, the reading of tea leaves is not repeatable among practitioners of that art, nor are leaf-readers known to adapt their algorithms according to any observations. There's little if any open discussion of tea-leaf-reading methods. In fact, I can't think of any similarity between tea-leaf-reading and climate modeling.

That analogy sucks.

Reply to
whit3rd

They're both frauds. The analogy is apt.

Reply to
krw

I noticed immediately.

I was chatting with a "kid" the other day who turned out to have a pretty impressive resume in biology and forestry science.

Looking outside to see if it was going to rain, she explained you can see tell it's coming when the trees here turn their leaves over-- yes, turn them over--in advance, to collect more water through the stomata on the undersides of their leaves.

The local oaks and nut trees synchronize somehow, producing bumper crops of fruit at the same time every few years, on a schedule NOT related to growing conditions.

Plants are pretty smart after all.

Yeah. Ironically, all the Gaia-worshipers think of the Earth as a cold, dead static marble. They can't imagine it as a thriving, adaptable biosphere, much less envision it actively optimizing itself to suit.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

It is indeed complex, but given the undeniable significance of forests to the climate, perhaps we should be a bit concerned that we have already removed half of the planets forests and are continuing to remove more in order to have enough farmland to support an exponentially expanding population.

The notion that increasing CO2 levels will significantly increase forest growth has already been proved false; in testing with CO2 flooding from an array of towers forest growth temporarily increased and then returned to the baseline rate as other factors became limiting. Poison Ivy benefited a lot more than trees.

Seen this?

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Reply to
Glen Walpert

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