do you belive in global wariming?

[Caydr]

Yeah, and "irradiance"... stop making up words *******.

[SwiftSpear]

I don't take responsibility for nasa's graphs.

[Teutooni]

The helium produced isn't radioactive, it's He-4 (assuming you're referring to H-3 + H-2 fusion).

Yes, deuterium-tritium fusion. Iirc the helium isn't active in itself, but due to impurities etc. you shouldn't fill kid's balloons with it either. Correct me if im wrong in this.

[NOiZE]

A huge amount of what we hear is basically stupidity, but there is a wide scientific consensus of 3 things.

A: Man made CO2 is a contributor to the current global warming trend.
B: The current trend is a serious threat.
C: Reducing CO2 emissions is a good idea.

There is also a large group of scientists who disagree with this. The CO2 story is BS, but nowadays its some kind of hype, just like BA =)

[Zpock]

I don't take responsibility for nasa's graphs.

I didn't mean to accuse you of making things up just that the graph did catch my eye as an interesting example of potentially misleading statistics. And I don't see why you would treat Nasa as some bastion of unqestionable pure scientific truth, it's at least as much a political organisation as scientific, and even then you shouldn't believe something just cause it's labeled as science for the moment. Scientists can easily go bad when their baby theory don't hold up until their really forced to give them up due to overwhelming evidence (which won't happen with a loose theory like AGW) or even then stubbornly refuse until the grave.

I'm sure the graph could make more sense with accompanying text explaining what it says.

[rattle]

Don't all the cows together produce more CO2 emissions than the USA and China?

[Zpock]

They are part of the ecosystem so anything going out has just gone in... CO2 is like oxygen to plants remember.

With burning fossile fuels they have been extracted from lying dormant below the earth so their "added" to the atmosphere when used.

[PicassoCT]

@Rattle:

Warcowbashing is old

How about Superfastgrowing Gen-Trees who swallow the whole C² store it in the Roots and take it with them once they die

[Zpock]

Maybe increased CO2 levels simply leads to more (normal) vegetation sucking it up so you don't even have to plant anything. Of course, people cutting down rain forests to produce those hip "green" bio fuels might be a problem.

[rattle]

It's too late to worry about CO2 now anyway. 20 years ago was the time to plan on cutting down on CO2 emissions, and executing said plan without ruining the economy.

[manored]

Fusion sounds nifty and all, but they haven't even been able to make a net positive output yet from a single reactor, for a single second, even once. I'm starting to lose hope that it's even possible.

Well mankind spent most of its existence thinking that flying was for birds, bats and insects only... :)

As far as I know trees liberate all their CO2 then they die, so I dont think the tree stuff would work.

This is a somewhat stupid idea, but how pratical would it be to capture CO2 from the atmosfere, turn it into dry ice and then store is somewhere? :)

[HeavyLancer]

Fusion sounds nifty and all, but they haven't even been able to make a net positive output yet from a single reactor, for a single second, even once. I'm starting to lose hope that it's even possible.

The problem with nuclear fusion is scale. You have to build at least a reactor the size of ITER (Which is only a research reactor, not a power-producing one btw) to be able to break even.
However, given enough fuel, fusion is practically self-sufficient and it will produce heaps of power, more than enough to both cover net operating costs in energy and to power a hell of a lot of houses.

Fusion is still early days too, I read an interview recently with a scientist stating that it will be at least 50 years or so before we get affordable fusion technology.

[manored]

I wonder how can they know how long its gonna take if they dont know how they are going to do it yet :)

[HeavyLancer]

I wonder how can they know how long its gonna take if they dont know how they are going to do it yet :)

They (the scientists working on fusion) have a fairly good idea of how fusion works, and how to do it. AFAIK It's just the smaller details that they need to work on.
They're already working out some new designs for reactor chambers, and they figured out how to do deuterium-tritium fission efficiently on a large scale recently too (it involves putting a layer of lithium in the reactor chamber that gets bombarded by the neutrons produced by the fusion reaction and as a result becomes tritium).

[manored]

YA, but its still fun to hear previsions of then someone is gonna have a brilliant idea :)

[Felix the Cat]

Scientific progress is statistically predictable, hence the ability to predict future developments in fields where 1) we know where we are, and 2) we know where we need to be.

[Gota]

We are not responsible for global warming.
Its just another hoax to make tons of money from green technologies.
Wake up and breath the co2 in.
say no to hybrid and electrical cars and dont install solar panels.

[manored]

We are not responsible for global warming.
Its just another hoax to make tons of money from green technologies.
Wake up and breath the co2 in.
say no to hybrid and electrical cars and dont install solar panels.

Are you being sarcastic? Dont remember your opinion enough to tell...

If not, why no solar panels? Even if you dont care for emissions, its still FREE energy :)