Oil and NASA's mission statement change

LB, Yes, I meant methane hydrate.

MV, My allusions to cirrus cloud albedo versus greenhouse effects are not much more than authoritative hearsay unfortuneately. Scientists writing these things seem to know what they're writing about. I haven't looked into their detailed energy auditing myself as much as perhaps I should have.

Also, it is probably GW-enhanced tropical storms generally, rather than just the hurricane component, that ¡°ultimately drives a significant portion of low level water clouds into the stratosphere where they [may] contribute to GW as high level cirrus cloud¡±.

I was making a joke, probably a bad one. The site I referenced was a diatribe on how anyone who emitted any more energy would cause the Earth to explode. In essence, according to the article, the matter was such an imminent emergency that there was no more time for rational inquiry.

Since I am in the business of developing new energy sources, I will temper my "engineering humor".

If the Earth were going to explode because of any more surface heating, then Venus and Mercury would have exploded long ago.

Gregg Wilson

I got to that "authoritative hearsay" by Googling on "contrails" and narrowing the search down by copying key phrases from key listed scientific papers and re-Googling, and so on and on. I recommend this method now that, as Tom mentioned, Spambots and viruses are messing up direct hyperlink referencing.

MV, That clouds produce strongly opposing albedo and greenhouse effects is clearly indicated on extremely albedic (White) Venus, where enormous surface temperatures of ~400-500 C degrees are explained in terms of greenhouse effect.

The cirrus H20 line of argument is worth pursuing because my Point 1 from 19 Aug 2006 : 03:37:20, is still true: "H2O has been overlooked in the Climate Change debate . . . so-called Science consensus leaders put [it] in the "too hard" basket". MV's 17 Aug 2006 : 09:01:26 "Global Warming to IceAge prediction" scenario, explained in my 19 Aug 2006 : 22:44:07 update of Points 3-4, is corroborated by the geological record:

Terrestrial catastrophic warmings have frequently been immediately followed by Ice Ages. The Phanerozoic event is just one example of this happening, as I have explained in paper y.3 page 2 of my ebook, in terms of super huge impact.

Don't be too apologetic Gregg. Mucking around can be very creative.

For example, your 16 Aug 2006 : 14:50:08 post to this thread got me thinking about the big problem of Unreproducability of Cold Fusion experimental results and I came up with an explanation:

The usual explanation given by Hot Fusion mainstream physicists for why they don't take Cold Fusion more seriously is the problem of unreproducability of Cold Fusion experimental results.

I have never been happy about this explanation because many real phenomena are elusive. Elusive phenomena have often been at the cutting edge of much important research, not least in particle physics, my first specialty.

It has occurred to me that there may be an explanation of Cold Fusion's problem in the extreme, multiscale variability of meson densities in the meson soup at the bottom of Earth's atmosphere.

It has been suggested that mesons would be able to catalyse Cold Fusion reactions by greatly reducing Coulomb (electrical repulsion) barriers between Deuterium atoms via replacement of orbital electrons.

Such catalysis would be strongly dependent on meson particle densities, which are in turn strongly dependent on the energies of the cosmic ray interactions with the Earth's atmosphere which generate these background mesons which are putatively affecting Cold Fusion reactions.

The energies of cosmic ray interactions with the Earth's atmosphere cover an enormous energy range. Energy interactions near the bottom of this range are extremely frequent. Energy interactions near the top of this range are extremely infrequent.

The optimal energy of interactions producing mesons most strongly affecting Cold Fusion reactions would be between these two extremes. The frequency of occurrence of these optimal energy interactions, and sub-optimal intervening periods, would be somewhere between the extreme frequencies of these extreme interactions.

This intermediate frequency may well be of the order of the frequencies of Cold Fusion experiments producing contradictory results . . . Hence unreproducability of Cold Fusion experimental results:

While successful Cold Fusion experiments have generally been done within optimal meson soups, unsuccessful Cold Fusion experiments have generally been done within sub-optimal meson soups.

I am not sure using Venus as a model for GW on earth is acceptable due to its extremely high atmospheric pressure and mostly sulphuric acid atmosphere.

Mark Vitrone

Venus can be a good model for learning about Earth's climate but it should be first understood that Earth was Venus like in the past. The atmosphere of Earth has evolved over time whereas the atmosphere of Venus has not evloved. The reason is what makes Earth and Venus so different now when they were so much alike 4bya.