Nasa is considering a Manned Mission to Venus before Mars!

[jwenting]

well said, RedPine.

I'm not working in science at the moment, but saw the signs on the wall even while doing grad work 20 years ago.

Guy in the next office over was doing environmental research, not atmospheric but relating to the dispersal of nuclear waste seepage from reactor cores and waste dumped in the Barentz sea.

His (and he wasn't alone, it was a multinational, multidisciplinary study performed on UN, EA, and Russian Academy of Sciences grants) results contradicted the alarmist headlines about how those dump sites were polluting the oceans for thousands of miles around, destroying fishing all over the north Atlantic because of the massive amounts of radioactive materials leaking into the oceans.

Instead he found that within a few hundred meters, in extreme theoretical cases like sudden total containment failure a few kilometers, the dispersal of the spill would be so rapid that there'd be no risk to wildlife, humans in the area, or anything, that within a few tens of kilometers there were no detectable levels of contamination or radiation.

He found it impossible to publish the study. None of the publishing houses would accept it, even though it was heavily peer reviewed and verified independently by multiple other groups.

When asked, one publisher came clean and stated bluntly that they would not publish anything that contradicted the official agenda from the environmental movement because it would be financial suicide for them, would lead to their main income stream (subsidies and sponsorships from environmental groups and "scientists" and government agencies controlled by them) drying up.

And that's been the case ever since from what I understand from scientists and engineers I have contact with. Try getting anything published that doesn't conform to the alarmist agenda and you're ostracised, lose your funding, lose your job, and likely end up with death threats (which sometimes are acted on, people have ended up dead or injured in attacks on themselves, their lives, and their property for daring to speak out against the environmentalist alarmist crowd).

[Fel]

When mass media, politicians, and forum readers like you guys claim that we meteorologists "know" that global warming is happening, I feel a little offended. Nobody asked me about my opinion, instead they pay university researchers millions of dollars to study global warming, ask those researchers for their opinion on global warming, and then stop funding those researchers if they deny global warming.

You guys claiming to know that meteorologists like me believe in global warming is like you guys claiming to know what NASA scientists believe in sending people to other planets. The world of space travel is far more complicated than layman like us understand, especially since the experts don't fully understand the complicated issues either.

He found it impossible to publish the study. None of the publishing houses would accept it, even though it was heavily peer reviewed and verified independently by multiple other groups.

When asked, one publisher came clean and stated bluntly that they would not publish anything that contradicted the official agenda from the environmental movement because it would be financial suicide for them, would lead to their main income stream (subsidies and sponsorships from environmental groups and "scientists" and government agencies controlled by them) drying up.

And that's been the case ever since from what I understand from scientists and engineers I have contact with. Try getting anything published that doesn't conform to the alarmist agenda and you're ostracised, lose your funding, lose your job, and likely end up with death threats (which sometimes are acted on, people have ended up dead or injured in attacks on themselves, their lives, and their property for daring to speak out against the environmentalist alarmist crowd).

I think there's quite a bit to be said here. While I, personally, do not believe the "alarmist agenda", I do feel that their message is often lost as they cling to the extremes. "What are we doing to the environment." The truth... probably isn't that interesting to people with the changes, if any, affecting the non-human inhabitants more than the human inhabitants and only after a much longer period of time than people think about.

Nuclear waste is absolutely disgusting stuff; and the effects it can have on PEOPLE is terrifying. Sure, the likelihood of incident may be 0.001% (It may be far lower than this while still being non-zero.) That 0.001% somehow matters more than the 99.999% chance of nothing happening... and getting people to talk about some 0.001% chance, something that seems insignificant, ends up happening only if you bring it up to 100% chance and start making people scared of something happening.

I don't doubt that they come to believe the insanity. Undetectable nuclear waste, hurricanes that destroy a country, the world flooding with water and leaving only a spec of land around Mt. Everest. Lie often enough, and you will come to believe your own lies. I just feel that the message behind it all isn't terrible; though it could do without the whole "we're gonna kill each other off if we don't switch to renewable energy"

[jwenting]

Nuclear waste is absolutely disgusting stuff; and the effects it can have on PEOPLE is terrifying. Sure, the likelihood of incident may be 0.001% (It may be far lower than this while still being non-zero.) That 0.001% somehow matters more than the 99.999% chance of nothing happening... and getting people to talk about some 0.001% chance, something that seems insignificant, ends up happening only if you bring it up to 100% chance and start making people scared of something happening.

I've worked in nuclear research, on nuclear waste classification issues (in fact I graduated on the study of classifying nuclear waste).

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of things classify as nuclear waste that you'd never even consider to be such. Things like sludge flushed from the burners of coal fired powerplants.

Things like the clothes of lab technicians working with radio pharmaceuticals.

And silly enough, a lot of our nuclear waste could be condensed into far smaller volumes, separated out by range of half life values, and stored or processed into other things depending on that.

But it's illegal to do so, even as (or rather because) doing so would reduce the amount of waste in long term storage by 95% or so.

The vast majority of "nuclear waste" isn't, it's just whatever else was in the batch of material that contained that radioactive material. And that goes even for exhausted reactor fuel. If we separated out the "hot" components, with half lives of a few years to decades at most, and stored those separate for that period of time, nuclear waste disposal would become a lot cheaper and more manageable, but it's illegal because of laws pushed by the anti-nuclear lobby in the 1970s that used the fear of anything nuclear as their sole argument.

The spent Uranium and other elements in that waste can be either reprocessed into new fuel elements, handled as chemical waste (it's not much over background radiation levels, if at all), or used as raw materials for other stuff. For example the steel that could be recovered from those fuel elements could easily be smelted down and used for underwater construction projects where the slightly increased radiation levels (if at all) are irrelevant.

Mind, I'm not saying the USSR dumping those reactor cores in the relatively shallow Barentz sea, in direct violation btw of international treaties they had signed and ratified, was a good idea. But it's a far better idea than storing them on land, in unguarded warehouses where every wannabe nuclear terrorist can just walk in with a bucket and collect some of it to turn into a dirty bomb (which sadly was and in part still is the status of nuclear materials security in the late USSR and in Russia).

At least now anyone wanting to steal the stuff has to rent a submarine and support ship, which is far harder to hide and a lot more expensive.

[AngelLestat]

Try to not derail the topic.. global warming and climate models are kinda related to this mission so is not problem.. Nuclear talks not so much.

This is my personal experience and might not be representative of my field but... look, my job revolves around pattern recognition using images, graphs, and text. If it were easy to prove global warming did or didn't exist using scientific evidence, the debate would have ended long ago.

You may find pattern in weather with that, not on climate.

Also, meteorologists don't understand clouds. I'm not joking, we really don't.

I pointed this in this topic, but is more related on the reflective effect than clouds had.

When mass media, politicians, and forum readers like you guys claim that we meteorologists "know" that global warming is happening, I feel a little offended. Nobody asked me about my opinion, instead they pay university researchers millions of dollars to study global warming, ask those researchers for their opinion on global warming, and then stop funding those researchers if they deny global warming.

You research for weather or climate? To study global warming you need to take the average world temperatures, the co2, methane and different global values parameters depending its location on the globe and compare it with previous world average data.

Is not about weather.. is about climate.

You guys claiming to know that meteorologists like me believe in global warming is like you guys claiming to know what NASA scientists believe in sending people to other planets. The world of space travel is far more complicated than layman like us understand, especially since the experts don't fully understand the complicated issues either.

I was in a seminar last year, it was a geologist talking about earth history and he also talk about global warming. He did not believe in global warming, then after the seminar I exchange mails with him to discuss about that.

What was super clear, that all its hypothesis were based on inaccurate data, some times just picking evidences and ignoring the ones that point in opposite way.

His bigger error was to claim that the CO2 emitted by volcanos was much more higher than the caused by human activity.. When in fact is all the opossite, the co2 emitted by us is 100 times greater than by natural causes. He also claim that the heat wasted of all our machines was the cause of the higher temperatures. But if you do the math, even converting all the energy used in the world as waste heat, that amount of heat is nothing in comparison with the needed to rise the world temperature. But if you use the actual co2 and other gases values to calculate the increase in temperature, then all numbers match.

Here there is a good resume:

When asked, one publisher came clean and stated bluntly that they would not publish anything that contradicted the official agenda from the environmental movement because it would be financial suicide for them, would lead to their main income stream (subsidies and sponsorships from environmental groups and "scientists" and government agencies controlled by them) drying up.

So you are saying that the 2% of the energy players who just barely enter in play few years ago with huge waste of money in development to try to compete with a world already ruled by fossil fuels.. You are saying that these 2% of people had the money to buy the 98.5% of the climate scientist? Meanwhile all the fossil players (90% of the energy sources) who won money all these years and they keep doing it, are "victims" of the injustice propaganda that came from the other 2%?????

Please.. use your common sense..

And that's been the case ever since from what I understand from scientists and engineers I have contact with. Try getting anything published that doesn't conform to the alarmist agenda and you're ostracised, lose your funding, lose your job, and likely end up with death threats ?

That was true.. but it was all around.. The first scientist blamming the fossil fuels were persecuted.. But the true always win.. The overwhelming evidence can not be stopped.. that is why global warming is a fact supported by 99% of scientist that study this phenomenon.

Edited April 25, 2015 by AngelLestat

[Bill Phil]

I think there's quite a bit to be said here. While I, personally, do not believe the "alarmist agenda", I do feel that their message is often lost as they cling to the extremes. "What are we doing to the environment." The truth... probably isn't that interesting to people with the changes, if any, affecting the non-human inhabitants more than the human inhabitants and only after a much longer period of time than people think about.

Nuclear waste is absolutely disgusting stuff; and the effects it can have on PEOPLE is terrifying. Sure, the likelihood of incident may be 0.001% (It may be far lower than this while still being non-zero.) That 0.001% somehow matters more than the 99.999% chance of nothing happening... and getting people to talk about some 0.001% chance, something that seems insignificant, ends up happening only if you bring it up to 100% chance and start making people scared of something happening.

I don't doubt that they come to believe the insanity. Undetectable nuclear waste, hurricanes that destroy a country, the world flooding with water and leaving only a spec of land around Mt. Everest. Lie often enough, and you will come to believe your own lies. I just feel that the message behind it all isn't terrible; though it could do without the whole "we're gonna kill each other off if we don't switch to renewable energy"

0.001% of the time it happens 100% of the time.

Which is still 0.001%, after all.

[jwenting]

follow the money trail, kid. The global warming crowd has an order of magnitude more money than everyone else combined.

Of course your highly indoctrinated mind, flooded with "evil Big Oil", "Big Coal", etc. etc. can't grasp that.

[Bill Phil]

follow the money trail, kid. The global warming crowd has an order of magnitude more money than everyone else combined.

Of course your highly indoctrinated mind, flooded with "evil Big Oil", "Big Coal", etc. etc. can't grasp that.

Who is that aimed towards?

Oil companies and similar entities do support those who deny climate change...

But climate change happens anyways, so...

[Rakaydos]

I see it like littering. Yes, the world wont end if we dont clean up our Co2 emissions, but if we dont start picking up our trash, or paying someone to pick up our trash, or making less trash to start with, the world will start to resemble a landfill. And THAT's when the dire predictions start coming into play, the global equivilant of catching bubonic plague from the rats in the trash all around us. We need to do something, or we deserve what we end up with.

[AngelLestat]

follow the money trail, kid. The global warming crowd has an order of magnitude more money than everyone else combined.

Of course your highly indoctrinated mind, flooded with "evil Big Oil", "Big Coal", etc. etc. can't grasp that.

Sorry but your little green guys conspiracy has not base or evidence to support it. In fact all the evidence point 100% to the contrary from any angle.

One more things, scientist compete between them all the time.. the best achievement that a scientist can do is prove everybody else wrong. But in this case there is a 98.5% of agreement and that % is rising...

The same as the sea levels.

Ok.. to those who wanna keep talking of global warming conspiracies they can make a new thread or use those already made it for that. Because the relation with Venus is due the potential that it has to improve our climate models, and it will do it even if there is not global warming.

[PakledHostage]

Ok.. to those who wanna keep talking of global warming conspiracies they can make a new thread or use those already made it for that. Because the relation with Venus is due the potential that it has to improve our climate models, and it will do it even if there is not global warming.

I respect your wish, AngelLestat, but I hope you'll allow me to point out a problem with RedPine's post that may not be clear to some. I realise that you have touched on it already but I wanted to highlight it:

I'd like to clear up a misconception about my field, meteorology (the real kind that airplanes use, not the weather channel or scientists).

...

When mass media, politicians, and forum readers like you guys claim that we meteorologists "know" that global warming is happening, I feel a little offended. Nobody asked me about my opinion, instead they pay university researchers millions of dollars to study global warming, ask those researchers for their opinion on global warming, and then stop funding those researchers if they deny global warming.

...

RedPine is making an argument from authority. He (I assume RedPine is a he) is a meteorologist but not just any meteorologist. He's an aviation meteorologist! He claims to share an opinion with all of the aviation meteorologist colleagues with whom he works.

Trouble is that meteorology does not equal climatology. Being qualified to forecast changes in weather does not necessarily qualify one to forecast changes in climate. That and the accusations of a conspiracy in academia, and in particular the field of climatology, is ridiculous.

If RedPine were a climatologist and backed up his argument with data that solidly refuted the vast body of evidence that supports the existence of climate change, I and many others would listen. As it is, the argument in his post is nothing more than an unscientific logical fallacy.

Edited April 27, 2015 by PakledHostage
On sober second thought, removed an ad hominem

[RedPine]

The nuclear waste guys will get a kick out of the carbon dating scandals, if they don't know about it already. http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html

RedPine is making an argument from authority. He (I assume RedPine is a he) is a meteorologist but not just any meteorologist. He's an aviation meteorologist! He claims to share an opinion with all of the aviation meteorologist colleagues with whom he works.

Trouble is that meteorology does not equal climatology...the argument in his post is nothing more than an unscientific logical fallacy.

I am very well aware of the gaps in my weather education. I do know, however, that when a 200 year old science we barely understand, is presented to the public who doesn't understand weather at all, a little... "simplification" and "generalization" takes place. Depending on how you simplify the raw data, we can prove or disprove global warming on a whim. If you have taken a class on statistics, I think you can understand how you can "honestly" lie with "real" data.

That's why I choose to look at global warming from a political/economic point of view. It makes things so much easier to understand.

Type of Meteorologist---+-Believes in Global Warming?--+-Paid to Believe in Global Warming?--+----Actually Studies Global Warming

------------------------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------------+----------------------------------

Aviation Meteorologist---+---------------No------------+--------------------No------------+---------------No-----------------

TV Forecaster-----------+-------Half Yes, Half No------+-----------------I Don't Know------+------------I Don't Know----------

Researcher/Student------+--------------Yes-----------+--------------------Yes------------+--------------Yes----------------

"If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.... Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc²." Well, I think we can all at least agree that meteorology is not a "solid" science. (except hail, snow, volcanic ash, etc.) In any case, since both aviation meteorologists and climatology researches supposedly have 100% consensus, both groups should be ignored. Get your opinion from the daily TV weather guy instead.

Bringing the discussion back to Venus, studying Venusian weather - although fascinating - will have the same if not worse problems than with studying earth weather. Last I checked, weather models go off of weather balloons, not satellite images - so attempting to model Venus would require sending thousands of balloons throughout the Venusian atmosphere that would have to survive at least a year of extraterrestrial turbulence, chemicals, and radiation. Studying Venus would be fascinating, but by the time we figure out how to study Venus we will already have tools needed to understand our own planet without the need for extraplanetary exploration. Tools like, satellite soundings, satellite calibrated models, and quantum/photon/organic computer models, are all already in the prototype stage. Wait 20 years and we will have an unprecedented understanding of our atmosphere.

The benefit to be gained from studying Venus is a complete unknown. There is no tried and proven way to profit from going into the void. We can't go into an adventure like a Venus mission thinking that we already know what we will find when we get there.

[SargeRho]

Your table is wrong, and the last column shows why you have no authority on the subject. Studies intended to disprove global warming have confirmed it. Every single time. Recently there's only been ONE author rejecting global warming, of over 12000.

Scientific consensus is the easiest way of finding the correct answer. Of course, one should still look at the data - which, by the way, shows a clear warming trend, correlating strongly with the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

If it's consensus, it's settled science. If it's not consensus, it's not.

[Vanamonde]

Nothing posted in this thread has had anything to do with the topic for days now. Time to put it out of its misery.