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Aeronaut wrote:
I used the word fiction in that case to mean that which has not yet been proven. Predicting surface conditions of a gas giant is science fiction.

You could call it speculation, but i think fiction is something different.
For example while we could speculate that life forms exist inside suns photosphere,
thinking they could be of the same biology as ours would be completely fictional.

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jamesr wrote: Have you read the analysis done by David MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

He also mentions an organization Desertec which has been promoting the idea of large solar arrays in north Africa supplying most of Europe’s needs.

No I haven’t, but I am already cautioned by his claim of “without the hot air”.
Basically there are 2 camps in energy field – renewable camp and nuclear camp and they are trying to disprove each other all the time.

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msmith wrote:
The criticisms of Svensmark’s CRF/Cloud formation theory have been rebutted.
The wikipedia article you posted has links to some but not all of these replies.
Some replies may be found here: http://www.sciencebits.com/SloanAndWolfendale
The “CLOUD” experiment at Cern is currently underway to further test his theory and hopefully provide a detailed explanation of this cloud formation mechanism.
Time will tell.

Well good luck to him developing his theory. It is appropriate that scientific measurements are being used to look for evidence.
I prefer better established explanation of co2, but if evidence would suggest otherwise I could even believe in cosmic rays, gravitational waves, sunspots or whatever…
I am not a physicist to evaluate whatever evidence can be available, so probably would have trust what most of scientific community thinks about it.
One thing that does not bare well with me is global conspiracy. Of course there is a lot underwater currents, but only in North Korea a contrarian position is always right.

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Brian H wrote:

It seems clear that the author is talking about the a atmospheric fraction (AF) that is ‘nearly constant’ since the start of industrialization. All the talk about increases seems to be speaking to the increase in the amount of CO2 industrialization injects into the atmosphere, and to the amount of natural sequestration that’s taking place.
The take-away point seems to be that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is nearly constant, and has been for some 150 years.

Pat

Indeed. The 45% which persists beyond one cycle is a result of mixing, which is counter-balance by “other” CO2 which is sequestered by the same bio-geological processes which have turned most of the planet’s supply into limestones, etc., over the past few hundred million years.
If anything, the density and mass of the atmosphere have dropped considerably over that time span, possibly by a factor of 2 or more, over that time, so the total mass of CO2 has probably gone down substantially.
So now the earths atmosphere is shrinking at an accelerating pace to produce the apparent increase in co2 concentration,
all while the fossil fuel emissions are being magically sequestrated in the limestone – yes that’s how the world works:
“CONSPIRACY AND MAGIC”.

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Great! Back to “silver bullet”. Much easier to debunk:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/All_palaeotemps.png

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On the other hand where it is easy to see clear misrepresentation of facts, misinformation, data-manipulation, paid-propaganda and outright lies it seems appropriate to invoke the term Denier.

Monckton’s deliberate manipulation

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Knock yourself out Brian. You have until June 7. This was made for your benefit actually,
as there is not much facts in the misinformation you spread.
So you are back to the “Muddying the waters” tactic now? What about the “Silver bullet”?
I would be interested to discuss any sensitive position with any sceptic, but the postion of
“There is NO GW,
but if there is one it is certainly not AGW,
even if there is AGW we cannot predict it,
and even if we can predict it is actually beneficial.”
is not skeptical. It is just presumptuous.

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Ivy Matt wrote:
If you have seen The Phantom Menace, and still recall having seen it, you may remember that the Gungan army fought off the droid army with what appeared to be some kind of children’s toy. These “energy balls” supposedly consist of a blue plasma contained within an organic shell. However, I’m not quite sure what sustains the plasma, or how the blue slime fits into the picture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

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vansig wrote: …
please, someone, at least tell me what are the next hard problems to solve, this month, for Focus Fusion?

While this months problems will come an go, the biggest future problem will be extracting energy.
Eric has presented some hypothetical methods, but to realize them there will probably be a lot of challenges to overcome.
I think this is the direction somebody could actually prepare himself to help with (independently or not). My guess it will be so hard as to take >5 years to address.

The issues as I see them are:
Thermal management,
Material degradation due to ION flux,
Electron recombination and efficiency in X-Ray converter (the biggest issue IMHO).

I really wonder what will be the response to FF achieving break even – is everyone going to hop on board or will LPP stand alone to address the rest of the challenges?

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If we are not plasma or EE scientists how can our discussion about the topic of fusion be of any scientific value?
The only thing I think we can do (other than wait) is to spread the awareness about alternative concepts that other people are working on.

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Phil’s Dad wrote: So what “shady methods” is Svensmark employing?
(and can we agree that not all scientists are advocates and not all advocates are scientists?)

I don’t have any dirt against Svensmark, so probably he is legit,
still he seems far away from a full hypothesis, even further to a full alternative theory for AGW.

Edit:Regarding the advocates vs scientists, actually all scientists are skeptics (or at least should be). Ok, not all them are convinced of AGW at the moment.

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Phil’s Dad wrote:
…
Therein lies my only problem with the article itself; that it identifies the scientific community as an homogeneous entity; whereas there are differing opinions within it (as Mr Learner would testify regarding the origins of the universe for example). I would have liked within the passage at least the level of honesty that recognises that you can reject a scientific argument without rejecting the whole of science. Without it the author of the piece falls into the very trap so eloquently described
….

Yes of course it is possible to turn (almost) any weapon or argument to defend or attack (almost) any position. A denialist, might consider the whole scientific community as “scientific impotents”. He might be even right in some cases by chance or otherwise. Still I think some characters in GW denial community would be very surprised to find out that they were right – even the oil businessmen are not trying to disprove GW anymore, at least publicly.

I believe in this because I see a lot easy to spot dirty tricks from the deniers side, but nothing of the sort from advocates (or alarmists if you want to call them so). While the scientists do make some mistakes, they do threat the aggressive attackers harshly, maybe some people loose jobs over their position on GW unfairly (nothing concrete), they are not trying to misrepresent the data, methods, credentials or results when doing science. On the other side I see a lot of press misinformation, credential misrepresentation, association with political-scientific organizations, funds from vested-interest organizations, association with other type of denialisms (tobacco,ozone,aids,evolution), FUD over uncertainties, reiterating attack from every possible angle, ignorance of reliable results, mistake exaggeration, probably more, but I don’t remember now.

So this is why I believe Mr. Lerner is doing sound science – I think he is not employing any shady methods. Although the mainstream fusion community might not like it they will have to validate his results.

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Henning wrote: I don’t follow this discussion because it disgusts me, but there’s a quite fitting article on Ars Technica:

When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent.

Okay, I’m telling you “read this”, whilst not reading what you’ve written above. Yes I know, it’s quite ignorant, but that’s how I am. And it’s how everyone here is…

Very relevant article. Probably fits a little better under title of
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/528/P15/
but it seems each thread becomes the same in the end – facts vs fiction.

Regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted the students’ existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened.

Nobody has the time to go over all the information about a specific issue.
Hopefully some automated methods will come out to analyze information in the future,
but I wonder if in the end a denialist or scientific impotent would believe the analysis?
Edit:On the other hand scientific impotent is probably not the same as denialist,
where one does not understand science the other is cherry-picking facts.

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Brian H wrote:
…
That paper was immediately challenged and no response was obtained; the slur that two specialist physics professors didn’t understand the 2nd Law, issued by an unqualified non-physicist, was laughable to begin with.
…

I think this was the response (no pdf unless you want to pay for it):
http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:12y9TN4AzwsJ:scholar.google.com/+COMMENT+ON+“FALSIFICATION+OF+THE+ATMOSPHERIC+CO2+GREENHOUSE+EFFECTS+WITHIN+THE+FRAME+OF+PHYSICS”&hl=en&as_sdt=2000

So I guess there is no response to this paper? So it probably must be true then…

Edit

	In particular, without the greenhouse effect, essential features of the atmospheric temperature profile as a function of height cannot be described, 

	i.e., the existence of the tropopause above which we see an almost isothermal temperature curve, whereas beneath it the temperature curve is 

	nearly adiabatic. The relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed temperature curve is explained and the paper by Gerlich and 

	Tscheuschner [arXiv:0707.1161] critically analyzed. Gerlich and Tscheuschner called for this discussion in their paper. 

	

	actually a pdf in german:

	http://www.ing-buero-ebel.de/Treib/Hauptseite.pdf

	

	You could ask the author to send you the English one, but probably who cares?

	Also other refutations in the link I posted previously:

	http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gerhard_Gerlich#Refutations

Brian H wrote:
CAGW and the GH hypothesis is junk science, not even testable in Physics terms. The equations on which it is based are invalid on the face. No possible linear approximations can account for the sub-grid scale processes which dominate after very short periods (days or weeks). In fact, as noted clearly in the paper, neither the mathematics nor the computer power to process the equations and the extremely detailed data necessary for their functions exist, or can even theoretically exist. The processes are irremediably chaotic at even moderate time scales, much less decades and centuries.

If you have a degree in physics, then you could publish a paper in GW field and expose all the flaws you are talking about. Or not?
It would also save me from having to go over long debunked arguments, even if they seem to get newer and more original every time.

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Brian H wrote: {cont}
>”Today I’m in a good mood, so I’ll give you a twofer: Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner. Neither of these physicists has produced a single peer-reviewed paper bearing on any aspect of climate science, or even on the radiative physics underpinning climate science.”
Indeed, this is a great advantage for the whole discussion, both scientifically and politically. It is a presupposition for to have a fresh look at the topic. We (Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner) are unbiased totally independent theoretical physicists, familiar with stochastic description of nature and quantum field theory, respectively, and last but not least familiar with the physics lab and software engineering. Of course, we have published our papers in peer-reviewed journals, and on topics that belong to science, not to science fiction as the computer games of global climatology do. We are physicists, not climatologists.
…

{cont}

Gerlich was a member of the European Science and Environment Forum. The agenda of this group was to discredit government safety regulations and reports on such things as genetically-engineered bovine growth hormone, pesticides, public smoking, and global warming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Science_and_Environment_Forum
The European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), now defunct, called itself “an independent, non-profit-making alliance of scientists whose aim is to ensure that scientific debates are properly aired, and that decisions which are taken, and action that is proposed, are founded on sound scientific principles.” Typically this manifested itself in questioning the science upon which environmental safety regulations are based.

The Forum was linked, via shared staff (Julian Morris and Roger Bate) and a shared web server, to the International Policy Network and the Sustainable Development Network. The most prominent academic members were US scientists known for skepticism on global warming and the relationship between Chloro Fluoro Carbon or CFCs and the ozone depletion.

In 1996, Roger Bate approached R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company for a grant of £50,000 to fund a book on risk, containing a chapter on passive smoking [1], but the grant request was denied and the money was never received. In 1997, the ESEF published What Risk? Science, Politics and Public Health, edited by Roger Bate which included a chapter on passive smoking.

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