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
This is so completely off-topic that I shouldn’t even respond, but I don’t know whether to be appalled or incredulous. No doubt there are such people (sometimes I wonder if George Soros might not be one), but it is hard to believe that if someone murdered 8 people, at least by his own hand, that he would be still walking the streets.
/Mr Lynn
@ur momisugly Oh, bother (14:21:21) : Don’t know about that, but here’s a fun little web page to calculate impact effects based on your inputs. http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
Michael (08:01:36) :
“More alarmism. Come on, Anthony. You’re better than this. Don’t stoop to the level of the AGWers.”
Being worried about something as likely as being hit by a meteorite/asteroid is OK. Being worried by ‘science’ fiction, like AGW, is irrational.
“…but it is hard to believe that if someone murdered 8 people, at least by his own hand, that he would be still walking the streets….”
Simple: Old relatives taken from hospitals or nursing homes to live with him. They then died 2-3 days after signing new wills leaving him everything (I checked). Dad was given 6 months by the doctor and lasted three weeks under his tender care… It wasn’t until much later that I compared notes with other relatives and I saw the pattern so testing for a drug overdose could not be done without cause.
And sorry about the off topic but it is an excellent example of how money and power can corrupt absolutely.
Assuming that the axis of rotation is not aimed at a rendezvous with our Earth, you could mount rockets or mass drivers at one of the poles.
The gravity tractor is fine, but big asteroids would require big (or very dense) (at)tractors.
If the body were spinning, I wonder if the rotational energy could be used to advantage. . . Attach a steel cable and let the asteroid wrap it around for a while, then apply a large electromagnet?
Well, if we could get the governments of Europe and the United States off this cockamamie ‘carbon’ nonsense, maybe we could get them busy working on deep-space observational and interventional capabilities. Write your Congressmen, MP, and educate him!
/Mr Lynn
Just finished the mid-60’s version of “Lucifer’s Hammer” – certainly couldn’t be written that way, with those stereotypes – in today’s politically corrupt environment.
Covers the people and environment of the survivors, and the victims, of a massive comet whose fragments land across the world.
And, an amatuer Australian astrophotographer, Anthony Wesley, discovered this impact site on Jupiter. Power to the (amatuer) people…
Re Near Earth Object VK 184 refrred to above, with year 2054 a rough date for concern.
This object orbits quite close to the plane of the main planets and so its orbit is affected by planets. This makes prediction of its line of flight difficult. If you are going to expend huge $ to divert it, then you have to wait until you are certain of the probability of impact. Then you do the maths to find the keyhole as esplained in http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/pdc_paper.html If the keyhole cannot be pinned down, then you can’t rendezvous with it at the most effective time.
In any case, there is a possibility that the object will be travelling in the direction of Erath at this time. So, you have to send up “tractors” that appraoch it at its velocity of 15 kps, then reverse your interceptor, then speed it up again to catch up with the object, then slow it down again to run next door. This can take years. If, on the other hand, the object is travelling in its orbit away from earth at keyhole time, then you need a pretty fast set of rockets to catch it just at the right moment. These rockets would probably be needed to be fuelled and launched from space platforms, because if launched from earth, so much fuel is used up in escaping gravitation that little is left over to turn it into a greyhound.
Another complication is that even if you can define a keyhole, it might be found before the orbit is influenced again by whatever planetary configuration there is at the time and how much each planet changes the orbit.
Another complication is that for close work, the object needs rotational as well as positional data so there are a dozen or so parameters needed to define its movement in a Cartesian framework. More if it is losing weight like comets do, though this one looks like high density.
If it passes close to earth it has a possibility of affecting weather, so it’s probably wise to include it in GCMs which are supposed to be wise in matters like this. The science is settled.
In short, the problem for 2054 is beyond current capability. So there’s no point in getting alarmed about it. Just use it as a counter example to the “useful” precautionary principle. If you have more advanced science to add to this post, I’d be delighted to hear.
I have not done the orbit calculations myself but I’m a bit familiar with methods and complications, always willing to learn more. It might all be incorrect, & I’d like to hear also if that is the case.
How ironic it is that we humans are only here because of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. The evolutionary fallout of this event was that the age of giant reptiles ended, and mammals were able to proliferate into the many branches that exist today. At the apex stands Homo Sapiens, omnivorous, adaptable, self-aware, master of mathematics, who looks up into the night sky with the knowledge that what the universe gives, it also takes away.
If we are considering global scale natural disasters, perhaps first on the list is a ‘Carrington’ event super solar flare that may destroy our unprotected electric power grid to such an extent that several years would be required to repair the damage. At each 11-year solar maximum, it appears we could be playing a game of solar-roulette with a one chance in 45 of being hit.
Next on the list would be a super-volcano eruption. I understand the Yellowstone Super-Volcano is now overdue for its next eruption — the USGS reports no real evidence of new activity.
Perhaps on par with this would be a sub-extinction, minor asteroid impact.
The operative word is ‘current’. If we put our minds to it, we could develop the capability.
Spector (04:39:08) is right, too: We should also be working on plans and techniques for dealing with other probably catastrophes, though in the case of super-volcanoes and super solar flares, ‘dealing with’ means ‘detecting and reacting to’, not ‘preventing’.
Again, the obsession with ‘climate change’ and ‘carbon’ is blinkering not only our politicians, but our scientists.
/Mr Lynn
Erratum: ‘Probably’ should be ‘probable’. Sure would be nice to be able to edit our comments. /Mr L
I think the threat of terrorist attacks on food, water, and air are a much greater, probable, and immediate threat than either space debris or CO2. Plus the aftermath is far more devastating psychologically. Many tragedies (such as hurricanes and rocks falling from above) are dismissed as acts of God, or are so far removed from and not injurious to our day to day existence (IE CO2) that we pay them little mind. But terrorists are constantly probing for weaknesses in the infrastructure of human life in search for a satisfyingly messy and indiscriminately injurious route. Somewhere, every day, there is a terrorist attack taking place. We should be spending money (if we had any) on securing our food supply, water systems, and air space from terrorist access. We have not done so. Remember when the Rashneshes sprayed Salmonella poison on the salad bar in Oregon? Or the poison in pill bottles? That was such an easy act to do. Now think how easy it would be to put something bad for human consumption in a staple food item we all use across the US. I am not a terrorist and can think of dozens of ways. Who is to say that it has not already been done lately? And more than once? Remember the spinach thing? Peanut butter? Chips? But the report we get to read in the paper says nothing about a terrorist possibility. This is the real environmental threat and simply buries all else.
In the case of super solar flares, it may be possible to gradually install extra protective measures to prevent severe damage to our electrical distribution systems.
On another issue — major earthquakes — it has occurred to me that if we could reliably detect these events building up in advance, we might be able to mitigate the toll due to the element of surprise by pre-triggering them to occur at a time and date of our choice. This might be accomplished by setting off a huge explosion at a point of maximum tectonic stress. I think we would need to know a lot more than we do now for this to ever be attempted.
Pamela Gray (13:47:26) :
“I think the threat of terrorist attacks on food, water, and air are a much greater, probable, and immediate threat than either space debris or CO2. ”
I’m with you there Pamela. I would put the two most pressing matters which should concern us today are religous extremism/terrorism) and overpopulation. A common theme of the AGW crowd is that we are damaging the planet for our children’s children. How about we take care of the real issues which affect us now as a priority?
As my dear old Mum used to say: “take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves”. Or, to put it another way: take care of the present and the future will take care of itself.
Biggest threat, humm? a community organizer with strong marxist inclinations as POTUS.
ok to snip, but I am sincere
Meanwhile, something curious on Venus….
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8179067.stm
If we include anthropogenic (man-made) as well as physiogenic (natural) disasters, I would consider a general thermo-nuclear exchange and an accidental or intentionally bioengineered “Perfect Plague” — fast-spreading, incurable and always fatal — to be the two top threats.
I believe the next Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and 100 ft high tsunami along the U. S. Pacific Northwest coast could result in a death toll that would dwarf any natural disaster of recent memory. Primarily, this would be due to the element of surprise.
Depend on it, if our luck were to run out in 2012 or 2023 and we were all served up with another ‘Carrington Event’ Super Flare, the two most common things that people faced with living several years without electrical power would be saying would be “I never imagined anything like this could ever happen.” and “What do we do now?” But most likely, our luck will hold up, just as it has 13 times since 1859.
NoAstronomer:
Oh, bother:
You are both right, of course. I certainly didn’t mean to detract anything from the fine work of Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy. As a team they were remarkable.
Back to Victor Kilo 184 and year 2054, it’s pointless to opine that other acts are more frightening. It’s not always “either/or” with preparation. In some cases, the event will occur, it’s just a matter of time when and where. With a probability of 1, it’s a bit hard to raise precautionary funds for problems with a lower probability. There WILL be another severe earthquake in the lifetime that remains for most adults. There is a significant probability, increasing as more obs come in, that a NEO will impact Earth. There is no great probability that Global Warming will cause a tipping point and global disaster. So we have here examples of 3 stages of certainty.
The problem is that we are putting most money towards the least likely.
According to the data on the Current Impact Risks table of the NASA Near Earth Object Program, we have a 99.966 percent chance that 2007 VK184 will miss the Earth on all four potential impacts from 2048 to 2057. I also calculate that we have a 98.5 percent net probability that all 243 objects listed on that table will miss the earth.
The Yellowstone Super-Volcano “has produced three exceedingly large volcanic eruptions in the past 2.1 million years. In each of these cataclysmic events, enormous volumes of magma erupted at the surface and into the atmosphere…” These events have been characterized as equivalent to 1000 Mt. St. Helens type eruptions. I am sure that any such event will far exceed the worst case capacity of man to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere (AGW). The last Yellowstone super-eruption was, I understand, about 640,000 years ago, and the last asteroid extinction impact was 65,000,000 years ago. The last Super-Volcano to erupt was Toba, 74,000 years ago. I think we should set a high priority on detailed monitoring of these Super-Volcano hazards and estimating when they are next likely to erupt.
As far as I can tell, there is no hard evidence that anthropogenic atmosphere change has seriously affected the climate. If the threat of a run-away greenhouse effect is real, they say, and we do not take action right now, we will see the world, as we know it, destroyed. And if we act and they were wrong, then all do is waste a few dollars. I do not think the issue is that cut and dried. The next few years should give us a clear signal of any such problem.
I would say neither of those two mentioned hypotheticals is a threat. We can’t do anything about either one of them; so why should we waste time and money and other resources on either one.
Statistically speaking; neither of those things is likely to happen; but I might get killed in a car crash going home tonight.
I do think it is appropriate to take reasonable steps to monitor these known cataclysmic hazards and perhaps initiate some long-term measures to mitigate our vulnerability to them such as *gradually* building a network of interconnected, multipurpose underground shelters and setting up a revolving multi-year food reserve.
Re Spector,
Have another look at the ending of “Dr Strangelove”. It’s funnily pertinent. A genius of a film.
I am not concerned with NEO VK 184 because I will be dead by then. Some inside information suggests that it’s looking like a closer encounter each time more data comes in. In rough terms, there is about a 1% probability that the separation will be closer than the moon, but I cannot support this contention with evidence except to say that it is from a usually reliable but non-public source. I will gladly corect this if given more evidence. I’m not accustomed to dealing in rumours.
Governments are too busy scaring the natives with other matters and a Govenrment functions best when the voting populace runs scared. No room yet for a double feature.
According to a BBC report, one or another supervolcano erupts about every 100,000 years. This is five to ten times more frequent than equivalent asteroid impacts.
The Yellowstone Supervolcano has a caldera larger than twice the size of the island of Oahu. Beneath this, there is a huge magma chamber that has been accumulating a charge of subterranean gas for the last 640,000 years. If that process continues, as it most likely will, so much gas will accumulate that the frothy magma will punch through to the surface in a deadly cataclysm. As far as I know, this is not expected to happen any time soon.
I think our fascination with asteroids is due to the fact that we can see these current low-probability hazards going by and the well known KT extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.