LV98

I also watch this show its hilarious!

Unfortunately I've noticed a lot of young people at university are latching on to environmentalism, becoming vegan etc and of course never going 30s without mentioning it. I do find it funny though that they are still more than happy to take a transatlantic flight to America for a conference or try and get a lift in my car though, a sort of environmentalism on demand.

I'm not sure why some people have this irrational obsession about going into space, it's a completely hostile environment where you have nothing to gain going up there, but everything to lose. On a personal note my views are similar to other's posted, I have zero interest in going to space, all you are doing is irradiating yourself.

May be a bit of an odd option but the weihrauch hw66 is very accurate and has a lovely trigger. I managed a 0.75 inch group with cci minimal, could probably do even better with higher quality ammo and a better shooter

I agree with you that there is only a finite amount of carbon and oxygen on planet earth but the thing is O2 molecules don't absorb much, if any Infrared radiation meaning they allow heat to be radiated away from earth unhindered however CO2 has a different structure which causes strong absorption in the infrared region meaning it absorbs a portion of the heat radiating from earth, as you can see in the figure below. This means increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere will cause an increase in temperature its simply a question of how much. Not only that, but from what I understand, increasing CO2 levels are causing other problems such as ocean acidification which damages ecosystems such as coral reefs. Also, I would be interested to know where that uncertainty values came from in measurements. My understanding was that gas composition analysis is pretty precise with uncertainties of only a few percent.

You make a good point, sometimes in science we don't know about or are aware of all the factors at play in the systems we study, which can lead us to be wrong, but also make new discoveries of course. You may have noticed that most of the time I did not write things in definite terms, that is because I understand I don't know everything and could by wrong.

The cycles I know of which can affect the climate are sunspot cycles which have a period of about 11 years and Milankovitch cycles which have a period of about 100000 years or so. Therefore neither of these can really explain the increase in warming over the past century as their periods of oscillation are either much too long or short. There is some evidence that sunspot cycles fluctuate in strength with a period of about 400 years if I remember correctly, which could be responsible for the warming but many climate scientists claim not all of it the fluctuation is not strong enough to cause the level of warming observed.

There could be many factors which caused the changes in CO2, ranging from volcanic activity, changes in solar output, earth's rotation and orbit also have an effect as far as I understand.

The reason I can't state these things with a higher degree of confidence is (I should have mentioned this at the start for which I appologise) is that I decided not to specialise in climate science, instead I focused more on plasma physics,nuclear physics, material science and optoelectronics. So whilst my knowledge of the physics behind climate change is ok I don't know the specific details behind the models used to make predictions. However, having looked at the evidence which is the very strong correlation between increasing CO2 and global temperatures, all occurring whilst mankind is undergoing industrialisation it is pretty compelling. Also these increased are much more rapid than any others that have been measured in the past (using ice cores in the arctic to look at past atmospheric composition)

I would say that I'm a pretty independent thinker. Whilst I do believe that climate change is a mostly man made phenomena, I don't think it to be quite the existential threat threat that some people would say. So don't worry I'm not the type who's going to glue myself to the m25 any time soon. Also this may just be a speculation but I believe there may be another, more sinister agender behind some of these environmental protests, as a way of getting people to voluntarily give away their freedoms in the name of saving the environment.

Not sure to be honest, I'm a PhD student. The reason I have a bit of knowledge in this area is I did a masters degree in physics, in which I studied the science behind the greenhouse effect as well as other areas.

Light is an electromagnetic field which propagates as a wave, you have an oscillating electric field which induces an oscillating magnetic field and vice versa as shown by Maxwell's equations. This disturbance then propagates through space at the speed of light. The earth's magnetic field is relatively static and therefore does not interact (or interacts very little with electromagnetic waves, you may have confused this with the ionosphere which is a low temperature plasma in the upper atmosphere ( if i remember correctly) which can and does reflect radio waves due to the free charges in it (electrons and ions) which try to cancel the electric field of incoming electromagnetic waves.

My understanding of it is that visible light and UV which constitutes most of the light output by the sun can pass mostly unhindered through earth's atmosphere as it is close to any of the resonant vibrational frequencies of the atmospheric gas molecules. This light is then absorbed by the earth. This energy is then re-radiated as lower frequency infrared radiation, which is close to the resonant vibrational frequencies of greenhouse gas molecules and therefore strongly absorbed. Increasing the concentration of these greenhouse gasses increases the amount of absorbed light and therefore the amount the atmosphere is heated. Stonepark, touching on what you said "Greenhouse gas is a misnomer, Co2 neither acts like a solid band or contains heat like glass. Over 99.996% of light (energy) never touches a CO2 molecule on it's passage through the atmosphere" I am not sure what you mean by "acts like a solid band" , but I am sure CO2 contains heat, at the end of the day all matter we interact with has a heat capacity. Aso I am not sure what you mean by light touching things, light is an electromagnetic field, therefore it is not simply confined to one small point, rather it is a field who's strength decays as you get further away from it meaning it will interact with greenhouse gas mollecules in the air as the oscillating electric field of the light produces a force acting on the electric dipoles in the molecules. Regarding your paragraph here "Not only do CO2 pundits try to convince you that CO2 is affects temperatures more than H2O which is 10 times more abundant in the atmosphere (and responsible for 75% of all heat retention), they fail to notice the oceans, which are on average 3,500m deep and absorb heat to such an effect, the atmosphere is neglible as a whole, and planetary heating which is due to the SUN and it's light and heat absorption into the oceans at the tropics in particular.". I agree that water vapor in the atmosphere does also have a significant affect but disagree with the statement that the atmosphere is negligible. Whilst its heat capacity is, the insulating effect it has is not, a significant amount of infrared radiation absorbed by the atmosphere is re-radiated back down to earth and absorbed again thus heating it, of course the more IR that is absorbed by the atmosphere the more heating there is. This means the planet absorbs more light that it radiates meaning there is a net energy surplus and its temperature increases. If I remember correctly, it doesn't take a huge increase in the amount of radiation flux trapped to result in a 1 or 2 degree rise in temperature. Regarding this paragraph: "This CO2 obsession ignores what we are experiencing precession in planetary terms with our orbit, our cycle through space (hint both we and the sun are moving in a linear fashion through space as well as rotating and Earth circling the sun), passing through not only the solar current sheet, but also the galactic current sheet, and which have effects on solar output, earth input, etc etc that are all totally ignored under the CO2 models and mantra.". I agree that there are other affects to take into account such as changes in the earth's core and magnetic field, precessions in the earth's rotation al axis and other effects. However many will say that these cannot explain the rapid rise in global temperature that has been observed over the last 100 years or so. I am not sure how big the effect of the solar current sheet is as the current density of it is quite low, I would have thought that the solar wind would have a greater heating effect but I may well be wrong. Not sure what the galactic current sheet is though and how big its effect is I was under the impression that the effect of even the nearest stars in the galaxy (except the sun) is negligible as they are light years away, maybe your could explain, I am interested.

Hi Everyone, thought I'd throw my two cents into the mix as well. In my opinion the change in global temperature is a result of both increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the natural fluctuations that have been occurring for thousands of years. If people are interested, I would be happy to explain some of the science behind it.

I think some of the more modern diesels have solved the problem of oil dilution, instead of performing additional injection pulses during and after ignition in the combustion chamber there is an additional injector which sends fuel directly to the dpf to burn off the fuel thus reducing the risk of fuel getting into the oil