New Mars Forums

Popular Japanese fashion chain Uniqlo has a message for President Trump: We'll leave the U.S. if you insist we make all of our clothes in America.

The complete reason for no tarrifs is the companies make a specific level of product with in the US which creates american jobs....

Why would SpaceX be the company to do it, rather than setting up a new corporation which can raise the money? Perhaps a Lunar Consortium, co-owned by Bigelow, Musk, and other players who would be interested.

America is a federation of states. Why does the federal government have to run a healthcare system? If Massachussets wants to have government run hospitals, they can. If Texas wants to have a fully private system, so what? The only thing the federal government should be concerning itself with is getting out of the way - reforming the FDA, preventing patent trolls from jacking up the price of drugs etc.

"So it seems to me that liberals are proposing that we cool the Earth as a means of storing water at the poles, s they are reaching for a second order effect rather than just storing the water itself."   

"Liberal" or "conservative" has little to do with the science of acting or not acting.  Stop injecting politics where it doesn't belong.

I do observe that more conservatives reject the notion of acting to mitigate CO2 emissions than liberals.  This has been true for decades.  It has to do with which party historically favored corporate profit more.  This irrationally ignores the science,  and the basic logic of the little trade matrix that I posted just above. 

The outcome "sitting pretty" favors higher short-term corporate profit,  all three of the other outcomes involve loss of profit (if not outright destruction of economies and even civilization).  But you cannot vote for that outcome without risking "lost $, lost lives",  which as a worst case is the destruction of the economies and civilization.  The selling point for this public policy position was always,  and still is,  that anthropogenic global warming is unreal or unlikely.  The science I outlined says it is very real and very likely.  The logic of the little matrix says you choose columns,  not rows.

How politics gets into this at all,  has to do with selecting something you can extremize to differentiate yourself from the other guys.  The GOP made anthropogenic climate change denial a part of their political belief system,  and to differentiate themselves,  the Democrats went overboard the other way.

Both parties' positions on this issue are fundamentally irrational (although the GOP position looks even more irrational to me than the other side),  but they are the source of funding for most of the research on it.

And THAT is how politics corrupts science!

GW

Trumps economic growth is negative, Despite Trump promotion — Caterpillar will close plant in Aurora, Illinois, that employs 800 with Fox News trying to help Trump take credit for Obama economy while blaming Obama for Bush’s depression. Trump Promised Job Creation — but His Budget Axes Many Job Creation Programs..
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy … on-n734531

American Jobs Are Headed to Mexico Once Again

Illinois Tool Works Inc. will close an auto-parts plant in Mazon, Illinois, this month and head to Ciudad Juarez. Triumph Group Inc. is reducing the Spokane, Washington, workforce that makes fiber-composite parts for Boeing Co. aircraft and moving production to Zacatecas and Baja California.
TE Connectivity Ltd. is shuttering a pressure-sensor plant in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in favor of a facility in Hermosillo.

GW and Tom,

This thread was much more interesting when it was still focused on the science of global warming / climate change, rather than mega-scale engineering projects that we've never attempted for lack of technological capability to do so.

Tom,

Flights of fancy into the wonderful world of tomorrow are fun to daydream about, but the problems before us may not wait for centuries of technological advancement.  There is no practical way, at present, to do what you proposed.  GW's response to your proposal was a truthful statement about our present engineering capabilities, however roughly worded.

GW,

Getting upset over the musings of the daydreamers amongst us is counter-productive.  Whether you fully understand the thinking of other people or not, there are quite a few people on this planet who still think flying machines are "magical" and may have had a bit of pixie dust sprinkled on them.  A little bit of imagination, backed with a healthy amount of "engineering pixie dust", may be required to solution major problems.

All,

At some point in the future, we may require the capability to literally move mountains.  It's pretty clear that the technology doesn't presently exist.  Rather than throwing our hands up in the air over what seem to be intractable problems, maybe it's worth the effort to figure out exactly how we could go about some of these proposed mega-scale engineering projects.  That said, mega-scale engineering projects are a topic for a different thread.

Tom:

1 able-bodied person can move about a ton of dirt and rocks a day with picks,  shovels,  wheelbarrows,  and the like.  For about 1/3 of Earth's population,  that's all they have to work with.  We in the industrialized third can move about 10 or 20 times that with power equipment.  If we had that much equipment,  which we don't.  The rest fall in between somewhere. 

Say by some unprecedented means (that also does not exist) we can put all 7 billion of us to work building your ring of mountains.  Just for an approximation,  half with hand tools move 7 billion tons in one day,  the other have moves 70 billion with power equipment.  77 billion tons at specific gravity 2.5 is some 31 million cubic meters,  or 0.031 cubic kilometers.  (Denser is even less volume.)

Now,  assuming 40-degree angle of repose and 3 km tall,  the cross section of your ring wall is 3 km x 7.2 km triangle,  whose area is 10.7 square kilometers.  Using the circumference of a 3000 km dia circle to represent the length of your ring wall (about 9400 km),  the volume to be moved is 101,000 cubic kilometers.  Dividing by the 0.031 cubic km per day just above,  the job is 3.2 million days long. 

Tom,  that's 8,900 years to build your wall.  That's a bit late,  don't you think?

Even if all 7 billion of us had big power equipment (and we don't,  that many power shovels and dump trucks do not exist on the planet,  not by an overwhelming long shot),  the rate is only about .06 cu.km per day,  only about a factor of 2 faster.  Still a 4400 year job.

NOW do you understand why your ring wall idea is impractical to the point of being extremely silly to even suggest?

And yes I know methane is a greenhouse gas.  But it's also a clean fuel.  That which is lost due to careless extraction and transport has a short life before being oxidized to CO2,  a few years.  It does greenhouse damage during that time,  but it also clears much more quickly.  Trying to slow the careless leak rate is one of the things your precious Trump is rescinding.  Or didn't you know that?

As for claiming I said frac water stops rainfall,  that is absolutely the STUPIDEST thing I have ever heard anyone say!  You claim to be a free market conservative.  Do you NOT understand what happens when there is more demand for freshwater in a river than there is supply of fresh water in that river?  Some go without (imagine that!!!,  and it's fatal,  too),  prices skyrocket,  and there is chaos and tumult until something can be done to relieve the shortage.  HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT?

I swear,  arguing with you is like arguing with an ignorant 3 year old child who knows nothing.  Sometimes I think you cannot be real.  You must be a "bot" programmed to say stupidly-irritating things just to start arguments. 

No real human could be that ignorant and stupidly argumentative ...  no,  strike that.  Middle eastern religious extremists certainly are. 

GW

"It can because it will cost money! and my mountain scheme will at least give you something to show for the expense CO2 reduction will not!" -- from Tom post 37 above,  who could only make that comment in response to what I wrote in post 35.  Other readers:  please go read what I wrote for yourself. 

Tom,  your mountain scheme is technologically infeasible for anyone but God,  and I already took you to task for that idiocy in post 35 above.

It ain't the money,  it's simply orders and orders of magnitude beyond any earth-moving capabilities we have ever had.  If you could read at a 6th grade level,  you would've understand that's what I said in that post.

We are already ahead of schedule reducing emissions of CO2 in the marketplace,  because at today's prices,  natural gas is a more cost-effective fuel than coal in power plants,

and it simply has less tons of CO2 emission per MW-hr of electricity produced.  THERE's a market-driven solution in operation for you,  right there!  AND,  it is cleaner in terms of poisonous emissions:  no fly ash,  no acid rain,  no radioactivity (and don't kid yourself,  there is radioactivity in natural coal).  Win-win for everyone!

And the extraction methods for natural gas are less objectionable:  no piles of mine tailings leaking acid in surface streams,  no disfigured mountaintops clogging valleys with moved earth,  and such like.  The only real downside folks are talking about is earthquakes induced by the too-enthusiastic deep injection disposal of used frac fluid.  Spread it out some,  and they don't happen at perceptible levels.  That's simple enough,  and economically acceptable to all but the most criminally greedy.

No one is talking about freshwater shortages induced by massive freshwater consumption as frac fluid,  but that's coming.

Until they start reusing frac fluid,  and figuring out an additive package that works with brine instead of fresh water.  And they will,  once conditions force the issue.  THAT's how the market really works:  enlightened self interest,  but operating within the bounds and rules acceptable to us all. 

Plus,  more jobs have already been created doing wind and solar than have been lost in coal mines.  That's because those are installer jobs,  which are (for the near term) invulnerable to automation.  The coal mine jobs were lost to automation and to coal mine closures as natural gas outcompeted coal.  Simple as that.

Automation is what cost the factory jobs,  too,  in automotive,  steel,  and similar.  Bringing car factory work home will just not add many assembly line jobs,  precisely because those were automated out of existence after the original outsourcing,  for the most part. 

What Mr. Trump is doing rescinding all this energy and environmental policy will not create that many jobs.  It will kill Americans with dirtier air and fouler water,  all for the profit of the giant corporate few.  That's not to say outfits like EPA don't need serious reform,  because they do.  The Byzantine EPA rules bullshit was written by lawyers who want to litigate,  instead of scientists who mostly want to serve mankind,  at EPA.  So fix that!!!!  Our stupid congress and senate doesn't seem to even be aware of that as the real problem. 

Lest you think I am some sort of "liberal",  I am most definitely not.  I hate both party's ideologies and belief systems.  Neither makes good public policy.  No ideology or belief system ever has.  No ideology or belief system ever will.  THAT is the lesson of millennia of political history. 

GW

"Because that connection is counterintuitive to make, when glaciers melt, you get more water not less."  --  NO it is NOT counterintuitive when you consider the passage of time with physical processes,  instead of just the rhetoric of words on a page. 

The way glaciers feed rivers is by a time delay.  During the warm months,  that's when the ice slowly melts,  feeding the rivers.  Once the ice is gone,  the rivers dry up.  If the ice is gone permanently,  those river cease to flow altogether,  at any time.   

Honestly,  Tom,  don't you know ANYTHING about how this world really works?  I learned about this stuff for the first time in the third grade about 6 decades ago.  And in every Earth science topic of every science course since.  This is the stuff that keeps you alive,  you blithering idiot!  You really ought to understand it. 

GW