Jed wrote: "Super volcanoes are unlikely."
For someone who is so keen on reading history, this statement is a bewilderment to me. Surely you realize that the SCIENTIFIC evidence for volcanic eruptions far more powerful than M.S.Helens is well established. If what you are referring to is how likely it is to happen *in our lifetime*, then I might agree. For all natural disasters, their size/destructiveness is inversely proportional to their frequency of occurrence; i.e., the more destructive they are, the less often they occur. However, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the larger historical volcanic eruptions triggered a mini ice age. The point being made here, so it can't be missed is, people were NOT present in any significant numbers, or at all, when ALL PREVIOUS MAJOR CLIMATIC CHANGES OCCURRED, WHICH MEANS, THE EARTH DOESN'T NEED OUR HELP! SHE IS PLENTY POWERFUL ENOUGH TO CAUSE MAJOR CHANGES ALL BY HERSELF, AND SHE WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO LONG AFTER WE'RE GONE. It is perfectly clear and irrefutable, that there are NATURAL forces which have been operating over hundreds of thousands of years, and probably ever since the planet formed, which cause this planet to have regular, periodic changes to its climate. all with no human help whatsoever. You can be sure that those forces are still present and working today!! Are we helping to initiate those climate changes with our CO2/thermal pollution and other man-made effects? Probably, but contributing how much compared to the natural processes?? "The largest asteroid imaginable can probably be detected ahead of time and deflected. It might take a space elevator, trillions of dollars, and the efforts of 100 million people, but I am certain we could do it, if only we have enough time, and the will to act." I agree that we most certainly should be able to detect them, and NASA has had programs to catalog all NEO objects larger than 1km. However, deflection is much more difficult. but at what cost for something that might not happen in 10000 years? You want to spend $1T on that? Sorry, that's absurd. in 200 years we'll have "deep space asteroid detection satellites" and space-borne vehicles that could fly out to meet the asteroid when it is still far away, and nudge it gently, but continuously so that its trajectory is altered enough so that by the time it gets to earth, it is far enough deflected to not affect the earth in a signif way. and all for a fraction of the $1T . no, that is what I mean by wasteful spending. It will make sense sometime in the future though. Getting back to my point about the magnitude of natural disasters, the Tunguska event leveled a 2000-kilometer area (a much greater area than St. Helens did, mind you) and the object is believed to have been only 30-50 *meters* in diameter (speed X mass). That's if you don't buy the speculation that it was an unintended mishap from Tesla's testing one of his devices! Also, an impact by a 10 km asteroid on the Earth is widely viewed as an extinction-level event, likely to cause catastrophic damage to the biosphere. Depending on speed, objects as small as 100m in diameter are *historically* extremely destructive. -Mark Iverson From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 3:41 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Koch founded climate skeptic changes sides David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote: Jed, I think Mark is just pointing out that nature has the power to veto anything that we do in a moment. If one of the super volcanoes erupt, many of us will be toast. One large asteroid and ... Super volcanoes are unlikely. The largest asteroid imaginable can probably be detected ahead of time and deflected. It might take a space elevator, trillions of dollars, and the efforts of 100 million people, but I am certain we could do it, if only we have enough time, and the will to act. A space elevator on that scale would soon pay back far more spectacularly than the Transcontinental Railroad did. We have the power to stop nearly every catastrophe than can occur, from asteroids to another outbreak of bird influenza (like the 1918 pandemic). We have reduced pollution by a large margin already -- by a factor of 10 or more in many industries. Factories that used to produce tons of pollution per day now produce a few kilograms. There is no technical reason to think we cannot eventually reduce it by a factor of a thousand. Or that we cannot root out and destroy every invasive species, and fix every eroded stream and river. The physical power that we will soon command in robots will exceed the combined muscle power of humans, animals and insects on earth. As Francis Bacon said, knowledge is power: "Man as the minister and interpreter of nature, does and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature, either with regard to things or the mind, permit him, and neither knows nor is capable of more. . . . Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect. For nature is only subdued by submission . . ." What J.F.K. said with regard to the cold war and the nuclear arms race applies equally well to global warming, pollution, and other problems caused by our technology: "First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again." If you doubt that, you have learned nothing from history, and you have no imagination. Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Fleischmann and a handful of other scientists handed us the keys to unimaginable wealth and control over nature. Try to be worthy of this gift. At least try to use it to solve our problems, instead of passively watching while cities flood and people die for no reason. Because of simple technical problems that we should have fixed decades ago. - Jed
