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You're ignoring the progress in fracking technology, which is likely to get even better than it is now. There's amazing amounts of natural gas, in places that weren't thought to have gas and oil.

In the last 20 years, the "proved reserves" of natural gas in the USA have about doubled, and the curve is still going up.

Total extinction? Preposterous. We'll all going to die, one Tuesday afternoon, from climate change?

John

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But there's still only so much in the ground, and fracking is more work than just drilling a hole. And you are still importing oil. There's may be more fossil carbon underground than we know about at the moment, but we aren't discovering more faster than we are exhausting what we've found already, and haven't been since about 1980

Anatomically modern human beings first show up about 200,000 years ago at the end of the last inter-glacial but one, and have survived through two ices and an interglacial since then. It has been hypothesised that our intelligence and language are mechanisms that allow us to adapt to rapidly changing climates by allowing us to learn new ways to behave rather than have to evolve them.

As a species, we'll almost certainly survive anything that climate change is likely to throw at us.

Modern industrial society is a whole lot more complicated and interconnected than hunter-gatherer bands of around 150 people. Sufficiently drastic climate change - like a re-run of the Younger Dryas - could tear it apart. Our population would crash to the one billion the planet supported in 1800 before we had mechanised agriculture, and could crash quite a bit further if we had trouble adapting our agricultural practices to the new climate. It took us a few thousand years - when the climate was stable - to work out the agricultural schemes we use at the moment. Before we developed agriculture there were only about a million of us.

Some of our descendants would survive, but our current society wouldn't. And the decline would take a while, and it would be pretty brutal until the population had got down to a sustainable level.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And you are clearly not equipped to teach me.

Here's a problem in general relativity which you might use to exercise what's left of your mind.

The strong nuclear force only exists inside the atomic nucleus, which is a couple of femtometers in diameter.

In Minkowski space, the distance between nuclei on the light-cone is zero - since the square of the time coordinate cancels the sum of the squares of the distance coordinates - so adjacent nuclei are attracted to one another by the strong nuclear force acting between the components of their - effectively coincident - nuclei.

In solids, where the atomic spacing of the order Angstoms (10^-10metres) this attraction is diluted by the rest of the surface area of the contact sphere - 4.pi.10^-20metres - while the interaction area is only a couple of femtometers in diameter - 2.pi.10^-30.

Why doesn't this explain gravitational attraction?

Minkowski space is special relativity. The problem gets interesting when you allow the light-cone to extend back to Big Bang, when space was very tightly curved, and you've got nucleus being exposed to the repulsive (universe expanding) force that drove inflation.

Why doesn't this explain the accelerating expansion of the current universe? It's more parsimonious than "dark energy" ...

Have fun.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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and fracking is more

It has caused the price of natural gas to plummet, so it's apparently easier.

And you are still importing oil.

Maybe. So if oil production declines, that will solve your AGW problem. As I've said before, we're going to dig up and burn all the fossil fuels we can, and move to something else when that's economically advantageous.

John

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That doesn't follow. The US was importing natural gas a few years ago,

and the international transport of natural gas is expensive and somewhat dangerous - it's liquiefied and shipped in specialised insulated tankers, and any stock of liquefied natural gas is a potential fuel-air bomb.

The US price of natural gas has plummeted from what it cost to import the stuff rather than from what it cost to let it bubble out of a non- fracked natural gas field.

It has been claimed that there is not enough oil left in the ground to push the atmospheric CO2 concentration up to truly dangerous levels even it you burnt the lot. There's a lot more buried fossil carbon in the form of coal, and we really can't afford to burn anything like all of that.

e-Carbon-Full-rev2.pdf

- see page 8.

Which is to say that you are predicting that the human race - as a whole - is going to remain as recklessly ill-informed as you are. Anthropogenic global warming is going on at the moment, and is already creating problems in some regions - China is already worried by the way current changes in climate are compromising it's ability to grow enough food to feed their population.

Another few decades of reckless irresponsibility is going to make this kind of problem worse, and more obvious. Rich people in the advanced industrial countries will be the last to fell the pinch, but the penny is eventually going to drop for them too. You will probably be dead by then, but since you already seem to be incapable of absorbing new facts, this may be irrelevant.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

John Larkin has to maintain his position as the the most frequent poster to this usegroup - 28008 posts so far and counting. Pity about the content, which contains a lot of off-topic nonsense snipped from right-wing news sources. This thread could almost be a typical example, if you see CNN as a right-wing news source - it's not left- wing, nor rigorously impartial, but I don't see it as actively righ- wing. Sadly, he hasn't marked it as off-topic,presumably because he finds it interesting, even if the rest of us won't think that it has much to do with electronic design.

Jim Thompson - at 17611 posts - is number three and snapping at his heels, much of it particularly moronic right-wing political content.

The number two poster doesn't post here any more and Jim will probably overtake in him in less than a year.

I'm number five at 16193, and have to try harder. I can't expect to catch John or Jim, but I may overtake John Fields who is currently number four with 16627, but only posting at half my rate this month.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The fact that you tally this at all is absolutely pathetic.

The fact that you are likely right about why Larkin posts is an indicator of some pretty pathetic behavior on his part as well.

I don't tally it - it's all from google's "about this group". I'm not proud of my tendency to post responses to stupid off-topic posts - like this one - and I could scarcely be rude about John and Jim without admitting my own defect in this regard.

No disagreement there then.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Socialism is a tragedy of the commons. No one benefits from bankrupting the gov't, yet, once monies are being redistributed, it's in each person's individual interest to get as much as possible--a feeding frenzy.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Don't be silly.

redistributed, it's

A process that has brought the German economy to its knees?

Try and think about the way the world actually works, rather than the way your favoured political delusions would predict that it worked.

Socialism isn't about stripping every last cent from the well-off, it's about people with money giving up some of it so that people with less money can still be adequately fed and effectively educated.

This has the advantage of letting the children of the poor grow up into healthy, educated and useful members of the work force - a trick that the US hasn't yet entirely mastered.

Modern socialist governments generally aren't bankrupt - the Greeks are an exception, but it wasn't socialism that brought them to their knees but an unwillingness to collect the tax revenue that they needed to cover the money they were spending. That wasn't socialist, just stupid.

The current US situation where the rich - as in Warren Buffet and Milt Romney - pay about 17% tax on their income, while the middle classes pay 35%, is equally stupid, but - since the tax avoidance involved has been written into law by easily influenced politicians, there's no actual law-breaking going on, apart from the breaches of the laws of common sense.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

l.

g redistributed, it's

A bankrupt principle, since it doesn't address the problem: less-well- off people aren't doing the thing they need to do to be better off.

Simply throwing food into their nest never fixes that, only makes it worse.

Buffett and Romney pay 35% federal tax on their income, the same as anyone else. The lower percentages touted by the ignorantii are capital gains taxes. That's not a loophole, preference, or tax avoidance--those same tax rates apply to anyone with capital gains.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

redistributed, it's

If you add the 35% corporate taxes onto the capital gains tax, they're paying AT LEAST a 50% tax rate.

You no doubt win on aggregate number of characters, and absolutely win on off-topic volume.

You probably win in the specialized category of turning objective discussions into personal insults.

John

If so, you certainly win on veiled insults then. You also lead as the group hypocrite, SHITHEAD.

pill-poppin' Limbaugh

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Disasters have been few.

Which reminds me of a system I did once, working with Simmonds Precision. It was a gas liquefaction barge, to be semi-permanantly moored in Indonesia. It was full of LNG tanks, long cylinders with hemispheric end caps. There were Simmonds capacitive level probes, 4 per tank as I recall. And there were inclinometers to measure the roll and pitch of the barge. My job was to digitize all that and compute the volume of LNG on the barge, all in bare-metal PDP-11 assembly language. There was some ugly math all about the shape of the liquid inside the tank geometry. Geez, I've done so many weird projects I don't even remember them unless prodded.

I considered working for Simmonds after I left New Orleans, but Vergennes, Vermont looked a little harsh. I do remember getting about as drunk as I've ever been, one night in Vergennes. People in cold, bleak climates tend to do that. I considered moving to Juneau, too, a very similar situation.

One debate in the US now is whether we should export LNG. We certainly have enough, but some people want us to save it for our own long-term use.

You are accusing me of being ill-informed because I am predicting things that you don't want to happen. But I'm very likely right.

Their biggest problem is probably that they are using up all their groundwater.

John

Exactly. We elect the representatives that we think are the most skilled at going to Washington and getting the most "Federal" money for useless local projects that "create jobs."

It's always been that way, but it wasn't as damaging when the Feds redistributed 5% of GDP.

John

redistributed, it's

It's the process that has Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal demanding that Germany finance their irresponsibility.

You are confusing absolute tax rates with marginal ones.

John

You win on scat content.

John

--
Their very biggest problem is that with a land area comparable to that
of the US they have about 25% of the world's population.