More than looking at simple trends, correlation is important to proof of causation. Correlation of CO2 and temperature has always been somewhat vague at best. The best correlation between them has been seen in ice cores, but careful analysis of that has shown CO2 followed temperature change. Kind of bad news for the AGW theory. More short term, the correlation of recent years has been bad enough that they renamed the problem from "global warming" to "climate change". They've tried to explain the poor correlation by claiming the heat magically went straight into the oceans. Of course, if the heat skipped the atmosphere, and went straight to the oceans, then it has nothing to do with atmospheric CO2. The data used to support that claim has been pretty thoroughly debunked however, as should be done in science. They cherry picked known problematic data, and discarded known reliable data to support that theory for the missing heat. Never fear though, as Aesquire tirelessly points out, the solution remains the same. To go back to a racing analogy, it would be like regardless of what issues you are having with the bike on the track, the solution must be to reduce tire pressure. Think that race team will finish in the lead pack?
The context is important. The anti-pollution movement got started in the U.S. and England as the industrial revolution wrecked the forests of the U.K. for charcoal and the rivers and sky filled with waste. No regulation isn't always good.
Quite a lot of good was accomplished by well meaning clean up our messes types, right into the early 1960's.
Then the Soviets took advantage of the reputation of the clean up folk and cranked people and funds into the eco-movement and peace movement. With the simple intent of ruining western industry and indoctrination of college youth. ( while supplying arms and covert troops to n.Korea and n.Vietnam plus across Africa. ... Cuban troops were sent to Africa to pay back the Soviets )
The investment into the green movement increased after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Until Hillary there was no money & power in selling Communism, but golden opportunity in selling eco-fear.
The result is an authoritarian fundamentally dishonest greenie culture still trading off it's stolen Liberal past.
Most of the "shut them up and personally attack" artificial cultures using the Alinsky lie techniques have this common regressive authoritarian origin.
I'm not saying Rachel Maddox trained in Soviet terrorist camps.... ( wouldn't actually surprise me ) she's too young, I'd think. She trained in American Campus Soviet camps. Same ideology group.
This kind of chips away at peer-reviewed being a perfect standard. My outsider impression of the grant seeking process is that it is important to know your audience.
You tax booze to discourage it's use. Cigarettes. ditto.
Taxing space travel? California was going to be the center of Commercial profits in that field, but now it looks like Texas.
If Scaled Composites ( Rutan's company, and the First to privately send humans to space, albeit briefly ) leaves CA....... not a good sign for business.
While it was brief, they did precisely what they set out to do, which was to win the X prize.
Perhaps P45 should declare that entire area to be federal property, much like BO did to vast tracts of the west. That would eliminate CA's ability to levy a tax, since the ships aren't leaving from CA, but from federal land.
TX and FL are better locations geographically anyway. Closer to the equator means more boost from the spin of the Earth. Also better for a geosynchronous orbit.
If you're trying for an orbital insertion, yes, but these guys are just doing suborbital stuff. Scaled uses a mother ship, so they're not limited in where they can operate. They just need a runway. They can fly as close to the equator as they want before dropping the spacecraft. But...they currently do not care, because they're not doing orbital class spaceflight.
Oh yeah...Scaled can simply fly out of CA airspace before dropping the spacecraft, thereby not making their "launch" subject to CA's idiotic legislators.
You are still closer to the speed you need to reach space at the equator. Rutan does have an advantage in that they can fly the mother ship into a favorable area before launch of the space craft. It still costs in fuel though. It would be grate if they could avoid the tax by flying out of CA airspace. I love that idea. I'm not sure that would fly though. So to speak.
The inescapable problem of flight is the weight of the fuel to get anywhere. A modern airliner carries tons of fuel, and as the plane gets faster, the percentage of fuel to airplane gets worse & worse. The SR-71 carried more than it's empty weight in fuel.
And those can glide.
Space flight is brutal. Every pound of cargo/instruments/structure takes X pounds of fuel to lift. ( call it...35 for arguments sake ) Because the first part of any space journey is lifting the load against gravity. Add fuel, and you need to make the fuel tank bigger, and the structure to carry the tank, and more fuel to lift the extra weight, so a bigger tank, and more weight, and more fuel, and a bigger engine to lift it, which burns more fuel so a bigger tank and more weight and more fuel and........In a vicious circle of spiraling out of control ...
To the point where it actually makes sense to build the most powerful engines in the world, and the largest fuel tanks to ever fly, and throw it away when it runs out of gas.
Theoretically, you don't need heat shields, You just fire your engines and slow down before entering the atmosphere. But then you need a bigger fuel tank, and bigger engines and carry them through the whole flight, and lift them at the beginning, and push them the whole flight which means you need more fuel, and a bigger tank..................
Until it doesn't fly.
The Original U.S. Shuttle Program was supposed to lower the cost of flight by not throwing away most of the spacecraft before you reach orbit. NASA was influenced by the German scientists picked up in Operation Paperclip, and they had come to treat rockets as artillery. Artillery is disposable, you don't re-use your cargo section.
The Shuttle was an attempt to go to an airplane thought process. You reuse airplanes. You refuel them. Rebuild the engines. You might throw away simple fuel tanks but not engines and computers and air frame.
Because of Congressional Committee cheap skating, we got a partly reusable plane that threw away "less expensive" engines, ( and had a program to recover the boosters for scrap... I don't think they ever re-used anything they dragged out of the Atlantic ) and a fuel tank.
As an irony, it was actually cheaper to take the tank to orbit, than to drop it in the Indian Ocean, but NASA couldn't fly reliably and often enough to use the empty fuel tanks for building a bigger, better space station. ( massively cheaper and bigger than the ISS )
Or a balloon, like that dude who parachuted from space did. Now, granted a balloon can't actually reach a point where there's no more atmosphere, but space, technically, starts before that. Point was, speed (above zero units/time unit) has naught to do with getting into space, and everything to do with achieving orbit.
If all you want to do is leave the atmosphere, the poles are a better place, since the rotation of the planet thins it out there... But no one really cares about that.
The X prize was for a certain altitude. So flying near your home base made sense no matter where you are. Ditto the "up & down" space tourism market. Being at high altitude, like Denver, isn't a big help since the "booster" first stage airplane needs air to fly, and the mile height difference is cheaper to fly to than building a bigger plane to take off in the thinner air.
Classic Science Fiction cool stuff included using a rail with magnetic drivers up Pikes Peak in a nice smooth curve, so the first "stage" would be on the ground ( and re-usable ) and the rocket engines would start lifting already over a mile up. That would work fine. ( The Man Who Sold The Moon )
If you want to look at a variety of ways to get up there...
Note that some of the coolest ways to go to space, like a Space Elevator, will never happen, not for technical reasons, but because terrorism makes it too dangerous for investors & regulators.
The same problem applies to the "Hyperloop" super train some want. It's too easy to sabotage with mass destruction results. ( Imagine the brakes not working on the supersonic subway train coming into the station.... )
And It's a crying shame that the Evil of men makes cheap access to infinite riches harder.
There was actually a proposal to use balloons as a first stage.
It takes ( very roughly ) as much energy to go the Mach 25 sideways to be in orbit as it does to leave the atmosphere, straight up. NASA and everyone else has to do both in one shot.
Starting nearly out of the atmosphere would be a huge win. The trouble is Balloons are very tricky to fill & launch, needing very low to no winds. Highly weather dependent.
Where you take off with fuel efficient jet engines, and just enough fuel to reach a refueling plane. ( so, lighter landing gear, structure, wings, etc. ) Refuel on the way up to as high as the refueling plane can go...over 8 miles up, and then fire up the rocket engines to take you the rest of the way.
Note that one of the brains behind this, Robert Zubrin, And it would WORK!, is also behind Mars Direct.
and the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket, which is such a scary smart idea someone IS going to make them someday, but never, I hope, in our atmosphere. It's on my short list for shoving an asteroid out of a collision course with Earth.
When your fuel is water with Plutonium salts dissolved in it and you pump it at high speed into the reaction chamber, where it reaches critical mass, undergoes a chain reaction ( ATOMIC BOMB ) and pushes..... with, I might add, the bang happening in the hypersonic exhaust after it leaves the chamber, ( so the nuclear blast is behind you... and pointed backwards ) You can imagine the Environmental Impact Statement paperwork for a launch from the surface. So put this one with Orion Drives in the "works, but not near ME please" category.
Interesting. Stone tool making is more complex than you'd think. ( my anthro 102 final project was demonstrating the making of a hand axe. Got an A )
The notion that humans of the day had no sophisticated spoken language is hilarious. Based on what? Lack of peer reviewed pottery?
Not the stupidest thing I've heard from anthropology.
The "tribe in New Guinea so primitive they don't know where children come from" is breathtaking. CATS know where kittens come from. That's why the female kicks the crap out of the Tom after sex. "Get away from me! What was I thinking? Darn hormones! One moment of weakness! There goes my figure! "
Correct, but just a teasing soundbite and scary notions.
The "Day After Tomorrow" stuff, for example. That kind of effects seem improbable.
OTOH there is ample evidence of sudden temperature drops ( Not like the movie... which was visually very cool ) with phenomena like Freezing Fog which has killed, famously in Russia where units of Cossack horsemen were found frozen solid still sitting on their frozen, standing horses.
Humans break the rules making programming self driving cars hard.
The "logical" steps include teaching the self driving cars when it's ok to break the law, tough. Or teaching them to compensate, like pausing a full second at intersections to allow human late light runners to clear. Easy, but will make humans angry at robots just as they get at hyper miler human drivers.
One of the hyper miler myths is to, when the light turns green, to release the brake and allow the car at idle to begin to roll forward before touching the gas pedal. The reasoning is that the initial acceleration from zero to moving takes a lot of power. By not touching the gas you supposedly use power you aren't asking for and thus it won't hurt the mileage. After all the car at idle is in minimum power to run mode and it must be best to cheat the physics by using that gas instead of human commanded gas.
Um. Not so much.
Skip, for a minute, that you are thus holding up every car behind you and keeping several people from making that light on this cycle, costing others fuel and anger issues.
The physics in the myth is anthropomorphic and wrong.
Like global warming and my firm belief that auto correct wants to make me look stupid.
Extra points for all who see through the bad science of the "roll in idle to save the planet" myth.
More ground breaking science! Dogs can't smell any better than humans! I see stuff like this and wonder if these people have ever spent any time near a dog.