Except for Jodie Foster in Contact in the scene where she wore his turtleneck.

Notorganic seems to me one of the more amenable chaps on this forum.

I didn't mind that film, not great but not bad, then someone gave me his copy of the book. Sagan was a good writer.

the conversation evolved from there.

climate changes naturally, always has
no one is disputing that

True, but those changes were traditionally triggered by significant events. Y'know, things like volcanic eruptions or meteor impacts.

The world flooded once and some dude had to quickly grab a pair of each animal. Checkmate atheists and climate change deniers.

That wacky pre-biblical climate change.

True, but those changes were traditionally triggered by significant events. Y'know, things like volcanic eruptions or meteor impacts.

climate changes with or without such catastrophic events
orbital variation such as Milankovitch cycles means the climate is constantly changing gradually over 1000's of years

the current climate variations are well within the bounds of those cycles. there is absolutely no evidence of anything out of the ordinary occurring at all

Except that according to Milankovitch Cycles we should be experiencing global cooling, not warming.

Despite which way the evidence reads, I think it is reasonable to say burning fossil fuel is detrimental to human health.
If governments legislate (like Germany) to promote renewable and clean sources of energy than if they reach there goal mankind would benefit on the whole. Maybe we are fucking the environment, maybe we aren't, but either way renewable energy is not going to be detrimental to society.

yes, we're heading into a cooling cycle
may explain why the fraudsters are keen to get their world tax done ASAP

there's been no warming for the past 15 years

some of us will remember a certain BBC article from the year 2000 which predicted there'd never be snow in the UK again in winter. that article still exists however its been since scrubbed from an embarrassed BBC after recent winters in that region resulting in record snowfalls.

Please make a climate change thread and battle it out there.

We've been going through a cooling phase since the cycle peaked around 8,000 BCE. It's a roughly 22,000 year cycle. So we should be entering the coolest phase of the cycle. Instead the climate is warming. Your argument is invalid.

thats complete rubbish
you're making this up

Here's a question to give you a sense of scale:
Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:
1: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or
2: The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?



Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.

The gantry arms begin to close around the Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft to secure the rocket, as seen in this long exposure photograph, at the launch pad on Sunday, March 23, 2014, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Launch of the Soyuz rocket is scheduled for March 26 and will send Expedition 39 Soyuz Commander Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, Flight Engineer Steven Swanson of NASA, and Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos on a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station.

Astronomers Surprised to Find Asteroid With Rings
BY ADAM MANN



For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered a ring system surrounding an asteroid. The finding is a complete surprise to planetary scientists, who are yet unsure exactly how such rings could have formed.

The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus. At 155 miles across, or about the length of Massachusetts, Chariklo is the largest known asteroid in its neighborhood. Looking to get a better idea of its exact size and shape, astronomers trained their telescopes on the giant space rock as it passed in front on a distant star in June 2013. As Chariklo performed its eclipse, researchers noticed something odd: The star’s light flickered just a bit immediately before and after Chariklo’s pass.

The reason for this darkening was the asteroid’s two dense rings, which had briefly blocked the starlight. The thicker inner ring is about four miles wide, while the thinner outer ring is a little less than two miles. Spectroscopic analysis of the starlight also revealed that the rings are composed partially of water ice.

The ice rings reflect light like a mirror, a property that helps explain an earlier anomalous finding regarding Chariklo. After the asteroid was discovered in 1997, its brightness mysteriously dropped off and only came back again in 2008. What apparently happened was that, as Chariklo moved through its orbit, its ring system turned edge-on when viewed from Earth. As they turned back to face us with their flat side, they reflected light toward our planet and Chariklo’s brightness grew by 40 percent.

There are only four other known ring systems in our solar system — around Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and, most dramatically, Saturn — and all the other ones have formed around planets. Astronomers aren’t yet sure if Chariklo’s ring system makes it unique among asteroids. In recent decades, more than 10 other objects in its neighborhood have been searched using a technique similar to Chariklo’s stellar eclipse but have not shown any rings.

The asteroid’s rings might have formed when another slightly smaller object slammed into its surface, kicking up a huge amount of debris that settled into rings held in place by gravity. Alternatively, Chariklo could have a tiny companion asteroid orbiting around it. Micrometeorite impacts on the tiny companion’s surface might dislodge fragments that turned into a ring around Chariklo.

Thin rings around an object will tend to spread out, making their edges fuzzy. Chariklo’s rings appear to have very sharp edges, which might indicate that they contain itty-bitty shepherd moons — just a few miles wide — whose gravitational influence pries open the lane between the two rings and confines their edges. Such shepherd moon are how planets like Uranus keep their thin rings so sharp. But many-ringed Saturn also has a few very thin rings that aren’t maintained by shepherd moons, suggesting that this explanation could turn out to be wrong. Perhaps studying Chariklo’s simple ring system further could help astronomers understand the behavior of larger rings in the solar system.

Researchers have discovered a deep saltwater ocean on one of the many small moons that orbit Saturn, leading scientists to conclude it is the most likely place in the solar system for extraterrestrial life to be found.

Gravitational field measurements taken by Nasa's Cassini space probe revealed that a 10km-deep ocean of water, larger than Lake Superior, lurks beneath the icy surface of Enceladus at the moon's south pole.

David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said the body of water was so large it "may extend halfway or more towards the equator in every direction. It might even extend all the way to the north."

The presence of a saltwater ocean a billion kilometres from Earth more than satisfies Nasa's long-held mantra of "follow the water" to find signs of alien life, but water is not the only factor that makes Enceladus such a promising habitat. The water is in contact with the moon's rocky core, so elements useful for life, such as phosphorus, sulfur and potassium, will leach into the ocean.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/03/ocean-enceladus-alien-life-water-saturn-moon

I've always been confused by this whole "things necessary for life" like in an infinitely possible universe only the things we need for life could possibly be used for it.