Comments on: Global warming: we must give up before it’s too late

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:28:08 +0000

“These are the kinds of insurmountable engineering challenges overcome every day by plants. Plants.”

Sure why not, it only took a couple billion years for nature to get that one right.

I think the damage is irreversible at this point. We should be spending money to build dams around coastal cities, and forget about trying to stop global warming. We are f@&*ed.

By: Global warming is a loser and I will kick its ass « The Poor Man Institute

Global warming is a loser and I will kick its ass « The Poor Man Institute — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:01:58 +0000

[...] energy available is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. And extracting it is, fundamentally, not a very difficult problem. So a couple of [...]

By: Major Woody

Major Woody — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:08:15 +0000

Global Warming? It’ll just help our transhuman-microprocessors run faster!

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:24:18 +0000

In terms of dog fucking, I am reminded of a doorway I saw emblazoned with this graffito which I used to see every day going to and from work:
Fuck
Them
Hole
Dogs

By: Moot » Blog Archive » Iraq and Climate Change, Climate Change and Money, Money and Iraq

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 04:32:44 +0000

[...] The people at Oil Change International provide some analysis. The current cluster-fuck in Iraq is creating a whole lotta atmospheric carbon. It’s not hard to believe that major combat operations burn a lot of fossil fuels. But 25 million cars worth of GHG? I guess it’s possible. On the bright side, the Iraqis themselves have significantly reduced their electricity consumption since we took over!Aside from the direct contributions to global warming, the occupation of Iraq is consuming a lot of money that could be better spent, you know, mitigating the climate catastrophe upon us. And it is upon us. Just ask the penguins. Or the polar bears. Or the penguins and the polar bears (yes, there are penguins and polar bears together in the photo on that box).Via via. [...]

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:48:14 +0000

Local being defined relative to nuclear positions. So, between two nuclei situated < 2 A apart, if such a spatial correlation with such given energetic properties exists, and between 3 nuclei < 3 A apart or so, the central nucleus being a proton, likewise.

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:49:17 +0000

Actually I’d say we have a fairly good idea how purple bacteria (Bacteriorhodopsin) goes into its excited state upon absorption of light and releases a proton assymmetrically to one side of its membrane, generating an electrochemical gradient. Monkey with this system a tad and you can certainly generate H2.
It will require lots of genetic enginnering and materials science to maybe encapsulate a very similar system into a non degradable bunch of tubes or something. But nothing a hundred billion wouldn’t solve in 10 years.
Making carbon carbon bonds a la true photosynthesis is of course a bit harder. Mostly because the precise Q-M meaning of ‘bond’ is, from very close up, kind of ill-defined. I would say in DFT language: ‘a local correlation of the one-electron density function with the exchange-correlation hole density, which is at least a local saddle point in energy.’

By: fs

fs — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:44:44 +0000

Sorry, but it’s too late to move to Kansas.

The latest news is that little towns out in western Kansas are being inundated with toxic levels of ozone pollution seeping up from Dallas.

Even the middle of nowhere isn’t safe any more. Fortunately, once you’re dead from the ozone, global warming isn’t such a big threat anymore.

By: wjb

wjb — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:54:16 +0000

…But yeah, I’d much rather spend a trillion we don’t have on an enormous boondoggle that doesn’t kill so many people, and may even work.

Nah, if it wasn’t this, then it would have been spent on something similar, like building a Death Star. Five hundred billion in one hand, half a trillion in another.

By: Charlie Tuna

Charlie Tuna — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:51:45 +0000

This could get more tedious. Of course that would require a dentist coming to my house and drilling a cavity down to my sphincter while I listened to MSNBC’s coverage blasted in Spanish simulcast. But, theoretically, it is possible.

But the reality is that this stopped being exciting a while ago. The gears of intellectual consistency and moral principle have been stripped clean off Al Gore’s arguments.

The Republican Party voted for NAFTA and took the lead on the Cold War when the Democrats ran and hid after Vietnam.