This makes a lot of sense if you are a rational thinking person. I thought I’d alert WUWT readers to it. Below is a table from the front page of Spaceweather.com today, operated by NOAA and Dr. Tony Phillips.
And this week, we saw what can happen when PHA’s come calling:
So in light of that, I thought this article was rather interesting.
Death from the Skies = Boring, Sweat from GHGs = Sexy [Jonah Goldberg]
Published at The Corner, part of NRO
From a longtime reader:
Dear Jonah,
I thoroughly enjoyed your article today, and not just because you touched on an area where I worked – at least tangentially – for over a decade. You are right, virtually nobody is doing the leg work on keeping track of all the debris and potentially nasty sized rocks out there compared to the number of people shrieking about our impending slightly warmer earth. The big reason is that it isn’t very sexy work, unlike being a proponent of Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW). If you work on space debris, minor planet orbits and earth crossing orbits about the best you can hope for is getting to name a new rock nobody else saw, or maybe getting your name in the paper while being misquoted by some reporter who doesn’t have a clue about what preliminary results or margin of error means when he says that your recently discovered rock will destroy the earth in 2029.
By comparison if you use your computer model to predict that according to your model the earth might possibly warm by somewhere between 0.9 and 3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 you get to hang out with Al Gore and Bono and morally scold the ignorant proles for driving their SUVs to pick up the kids from daycare as you jet off to Switzerland for another speaking engagement. Of course there is one other distinction. The guy cataloging rocks is actually doing science, and that’s hard work.
One of the problems many people, especially scientists, are starting to have with the AGW proponents is their use of shrill tone and authority of numbers to try to stifle debate. Science is not consensus, and though there can be a scientific consensus that doesn’t constitute science either. Computer models predicting conditions 50 years from now in a system as complex as the earth aren’t within spitting distance of science. To be science something has to be testable and falsifiable. It must produce a predicted data point, interaction or outcome that is unique to the theory and can be verified or falsified. Would you bet your future on the accuracy of day seven of a seven day weather forecast? That is essentially what we are being told by the AGW proponents we absolutely must do without delay. Of course I think the without delay part has more to do with “We must pass the stimulus without delay” or “We must pass healthcare without delay” considerations than any notion that waiting three or four years will actuall make any long term difference.
read the rest of the article at The Corner
h/t to Planet Gore
Life is full of risks.
As we have evolved as a highly technical species, we have mitigated most of those risks and… created new ones.
We have created food security and in low places we have build coastal defenses to keep the sea out in case of a storm combined with a spring tide.
At the same time we have developed Nuclear Weapons, a rising threat as more trigger happy (“button happy” would be more appropriate) countries acquired the technology making the threat of a big scale Nuclear Conflict more realistic as time goes by. No serious efforts to mitigate this threat are undertaken, especially because the USA now has a President who believes that a weak USA will allow him to make friends with the biggest thugs on earth.
Today our political establishment of Three Hugging Gaia’s (THG’s) believe that WE, humanity, have become the biggest risk and decided to mitigate us.
As most of us here believe this is a big mistake, I think the current trend to mitigate humanity on the false grounds of GHG’s causing run away global warming, a non existing problem, is the biggest threat of all.
So I would like to suggest to add the current political threat of THG’s and the increasing probability of a Nuclear Conflict to the risk list and start the discussion again.
Even if we have all the technology available to intercept and divert or destroy potential “killer” PHA’s, we will not have the time to stop one coming from the direction of the sun.
Within 10 to 15 years from now we will be able to get an early warning for those PHA’s as well, but who cares to save a society that has decided to roll back it’s technological development to live in the Middle Ages again!
Qoute of the week:
“Would you bet your future on the accuracy of day seven of a seven day weather forecast?”
John asked “What is it about the AGW debate and not other areas of science that attracts so much interest from the general public? Why are you here and why is it so important to you to prove it wrong (or right)? Why not other more contentious areas of science?hn asked ”
John, AGW research, which by the way is mostly used to project future possible horror stories, is not the issue. Public policy like cap and trade is the issue. Now we are talking trillions of dollars, and massive impacts on life style, And for what reason are we doing this. The only true agreement in science is that the effect of cap and trade policy on AGW will be miniscule. The only possible motive left is social engineering on a world wide scale.
The biggest Natural Threat is a VEI 7/8 volcanic eruption!
There’s a rerun periodically on History I think, that discusses the common “threat to the planet” scenarios. Are you looking to compete with them? If so, you might as well get the big list. http://www.armageddononline.org/end_of_civilization.php . Personally, I think it’s a pretty boring topic. Might as well speculate that termites will develop superior intelligence and take over.
I do remember seeing that the Faulkes Telescope project (schools can access large telescopes in Hawaii and Oz to do work with them) were running a project to detect NEOs . Maybe more people working on it than you thought 🙂
Clearification: The clip about Watts and deniers ended saying nature don’t care about the deniers’ right wing political agenda. (That nature don’t care about politics is correct and intuitive.) The video was (as usual) Soviet style propaganda, with its conspiracy attacks against the enemy/the opposing view (trying to silence it).
If you are young and you need a fright, follow the progress of near earth object VK184. See for example
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2007vk184.html
where VK 184, due around year 2054, is the only object with a Torino scale above 1.
Contrary to pop science belief, it is now too late to send the rockets with big nukes to blow it away. The time to do that was before we got all hot in the tube about AGW. It’s probably pushing technology anyhow as one would have to do several long range launches from space platforms that are not even on the drawing boards.
We will hear more about NEOs as the technology to detect them improves. It’s not that alarmists are blowing up their importance, it’s more that the science of detection and plotting is improving.
I understand that Victor Kilo 184 becomes more a worry each time new info comes in; there is now a credible probability that it will pass the earth closer than the Moon is. Its size has been better estimated when passing in front of a light object and it ain’t small.
@ur momisugly John (03:06:43) :
Because it’s about “redistribution of wealth”, which translates to some tribes getting wealthier (better standard of living ) at the expense of others. The continuing struggle to be “King of the mountain”. Same as it’s always been. Not the absolute cost/tax.
Global warming can make the impact of an asteroid more severe because heated gases offer less resistance to giant space rocks, so carbon taxation is even more justified now.
Well, you have PHDs who mess with GHG, AGW, PHA and so forth but the biggest threat to humanity is the JDs.
asteroid defense is much more likely to turn into asteroid offense. If you can deflect an asteroid out of earth’s way, you can deflect it into earth’s way.
Why create a weapon that every mad dictator in the world will be trying to get control of?
If anyone truly thinks we have the ability to do anything but bend over and kiss our butts goodbye in the event a real PHA becomes a real HA, they’ve been watching waaay too much television. Like with AGW, we continue to muddle along with the complete inability to appreciate scale in global and cosmic realities. It isn’t just about knowledge, its also about capacity. We’d have as much chance if everybody on the planet faced the incoming and simultaneously just blew.
The original Jonah Goldberg column to which his reader refers is here:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGY5ODY5Njk1NTVjNzU5NDFhOTQ0MWYxNzZhMmU5ZGM=
Good piece. If you linked it at the top, I missed it.
/Mr Lynn
Ned Flanders has a shelter.
I can just imagine an article in New Scientist:
“Scientists link metoerite falls with CO2 emissions”
“A new study by a group of researchers at I. Tower University has indicated that increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase meteorite strikes on earth” “Dr I.P. Seesee from the Centre de Atmos Feric claims that manmade global warming will decrease the density of the atmosphere, thus reducing the friction on incoming meteors. Dr Seesee said it is well known that global warming increases the amount of water vapour the atmosphere can hold, thus reducing the density of a given volume of air.”
There is a major problem with a PHA.
The issue is that the solar system is a web of gravitational attractors. When a PHA has a near miss with a gravity sink (think Jupiter), the orbit of the PHA is shifted. Multi-body problems do not have closed solutions; one must depend upon iteration. Furthermore, one PHA may interact with another PHA, changing orbits of both objects. This is unlikely but not impossible.
Gathering precision data on PHA objects requires both telescope time and computer time. Small objects are dim, so large optics are needed. We get only two (of three) components of location from telescopes, so Gaussian techniques must be used to infer an orbit, requiring multiple observations.
The recent collision of a PHA with Jupiter was apparently not predicted in advance.
As for AGW, I think that by now the celebrated James Hansen model of 1980 has been rather thoroughly contradicted. A model which fails to make predictions which can be verified is a failed model.
Deflecting a NEO is actually easy — the technique is known as a “gravity tractor”. All you need is to get it out there and match velocities several years out. Perfectly feasible if you launch say 3 for redundancy 20 years before anticipated impact. Gives 15 years to match orbits. At that point, 5 years to drag it into a clear miss orbit. Problem solved.
OF COURSE if you fail to identify the NEO until only a year or so before impact then you are up the creek without the paddle.
~snip~
I think that trying to re-direct a NEO with our present technology is as much or more of a waste of time and money as trying to control the weather with CO2 level. At best we might be able to blow up an asteroid into a shotgun blast of smaller asteroids so we can impact a larger area of our planet.
Thanks for the link, Geoff. The problem, though, is that it was an aficionado the one who saw the impact on Jupiter. (who, btw, was a he, not a she, in roman mythology) That worries me a bit. There was another big piece of news on science magazines last month or a couple of months ago. The discovery of the soap bubble nebula, also made by an aficionado. If NASA, ESA, the Russian, the Chinese, Indian or Japanese space agencies don’t pick those things before amateurs do, chances are that a big object approaching Earth will remain unnoticed until it is too late, That is my impression. I am not an expert, though.
On the other hand, if this VK184 object is coming home on 2054, maybe we can deviate its trajectory enough for the Earth to capture it and then build a space station on it. We may have the technology by that time, if we don’t spend our time and effort fighting against CO2.
To me, there are threats that are much worse, most of which we can do nothing about. Critical deductive reasoning skills have been abandoned for the difficult choice of ‘paper or plastic’.
So what do we do about the asteroid we find tomorrow that is coming towards earth? Probably trigger a rash of ‘science’ papers about the CO2 that will be released from the rocks and ocean and how bad that would be for earth’s greenhouse gas and the planet in general.
Extinction of all life on earth is not an option, it’s a very real possibility.
“It would even be more ironic if we did spend a bunch of money on asteroid defense and got wiped out by something anyway. You can spend money on something that *might* happen or you can spend money on what *is* happening.”
As to your silly comment about defending against what is happening, if an asteroid or comet is on it’s way to us then it is happening now even if we don’t know about it!!!
If you mean AGW by your comment about what is happening, that’s just at best climate mythology turned into theology… the science is inconclusive at this time and shakey at best due to bad data sources and statistical games and closed source political policies not to mention the outright politics of it.
Well it’s not that hard really to defend against most asteroids and comets, just some basic physics and lots of engineering both of which we are actually quite good at given enough time. To save time and to be prepared in the event of a suddenly detected collision approach we need to get ready now.
We know that a variety of asteroids consisting of loose gravel to hard iron exist in a range of sizes have us in their sights and could appear with days warning to years warning. Each of these might need a different solution or a combination of solutions to deflect or destroy. So let’s get defenses for all of these scenarios ready.
It would be prudent to have nukes ready for those sudden approaches where a last ditch defense of blowing the thing(s) to pieces or off course might save us.
Sure other methods too, including those innovative ones of gravity assist towing or landing on the thing and either detonating it or redirecting it with rockets (potentially fueled from the asteroid/comet itself).
Heck if it’s made of any of the carbon rich gases or liquids such as methane then let’s put it in orbit of the moon or crash it into the moon so we can harvest it’s fuel and other resource potential on the moon for bases there or for import to Earth. (See the movie Moon or 2001 or Space 1999 for examples of moon bases).
Be prepared as the motto goes.
Speaking of predictions of catastrophe, there’s an interesting interview in Spiegel about Swine flu. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,637119,00.html . Same scare tactics, different apocalypse.