Sunspot Minimum or "Is the sun going to sleep?"

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by EricH

I just so happen to be one of those that likes a good jab at the folks that say global warming is happening. (And the best way to cool the earth? Have said folks be quiet and stop talking, because talking produces hot air!)

And I seem to recall that certain animals produce lots of greenhouse gasses (whatever those are). As in, close to as much as humans do. (And there are some other things, but that would start getting way way way off-topic, so I'll leave it at that.)

Here is a little helpful hint for anyone who engages in a debate. Make sure that you don't just recall something you have read but that you know for a fact. I know what animals you are referring to. They are cows and they don't exist in the wild. Humanity is still responsible. Little jab meet right cross.

Originally Posted by IndySam

Global warming, or now what they call climate change because the earth has stopped warming in the 21st century, has become too much of a religion and not a science. Until experts like the Prince of Wails stops predicting that the earth will be ruined in ten years or the Chief High Priests of the Church like Al Gore stop calling non-believers Nazis I won't take them seriously.

Again???? Your citing the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales is a moron. He thinks that a homeopathy is a good ideas. It defies the laws of physics.

Engineering is a prime example of this. 100 years ago they had no such thing as CAD, computer simulations, or even a sort of mechanical calculators. Back then math was done by hand, and if they wanted a really precise answer, then that took loads of math. The more accurate they wanted, the more math. So they approximated a lot more back then. The Brooklyn Bridge was over-engineered by many orders of magnitude because the designers of the late 1800s did not possess a means of efficiently processing the vast amounts of equations necessary to build it just right. So they wasted a lot of money in extra materials as they erred on the safe side. Nowadays we have the computing power to do full bridge simulations on a computer, and engineers use that data to design a bridge that meets the safety requirements without being over-engineered. This saves time, money, and resources.

Actually didn't that also have to do with the variability of manufacturing processes? It also interestingly enough was a good move by the bridge makers as they did discover that some of the steel was bad.

Originally Posted by EricH

Or, as I pointed out earlier, spontaneous generation, once accepted as pretty much law and now you can hardly find a supporter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

To put it bluntly: Scientific knowledge can be wrong, even when the majority of scientists accept the same thing.

Then it wouldn't be science. Scientists at one point knew there was a problem with Newton's laws of gravity and Maxwell's equations. They didn't just think that there was a problem with those laws they knew there was a problem. They both worked and neither law could be fudged to solve the problem until Einstein.