| | Forum participants,
Let's do the same science in reverse. I want you (yeah ... all of you) to answer the questions below BEFORE reading the relevant excerpts (at bottom of this post) -- and then again AFTER reading the relevant excerpts:
1. Burying nuclear waste
a) is safe and scientists agree on that
b) is safe and scientists are divided on that
c) is unsafe and scientists agree on that
d) is unsafe and scientists are divided on that
2) The theory of Anthropogenic (man caused) Global Warming (AGW)
a) is sound and scientists agree on that
b) is sound and scientists are divided on that
c) is unsound and scientists agree on that
d) is unsound and scientists are divided on that
3) Permits to carry guns
a) reduce crime and scientists agree on that
b) reduce crime and scientists are divided on that
c) don't reduce crime and scientists agree on that
d) don't reduce crime and scientist are divided on that
Don't look below here! You should be jotting down your answers to the above 3 questions first. Then I want you to look down here and go back and answer these 3 questions again. Did your answers change? What were your answers?
Relevant Excerpts:
Safety of geologic isolation of nuclear wastes (SGINW)
http://www.nwtrb.gov/facts/BoreholeFactSheet.pdf
... Sandia National Laboratories estimate the peak dose from a hypothetical borehole containing 150 [metric tons of spent nuclear fuel] to be approximately [0.000000001] mrem/yr, more than a billion times below current regulatory limits for releases from geologic repositories (1).
If 70,000 [metric tons of nuclear waste] could be placed in 700 boreholes drilled for $20M each, the drilling costs would be approximately $14B, about 14 percent of the disposal cost estimates for an equivalent amount at Yucca Mountain.
AGW
http://www.nolanchart.com/article8572.html
Back in 950 AD, Eric Thorvalssen (better known as Eric the Red) was born a Viking, in Norway. After exile, he convinced many to visit his personal islandaccurately called Greenland. For the next 300 years, Greenland became a whaling, fishing, and farming community coinciding with the MWP (Medieval Warming Period). But now, numerous sites in Greenland have been uncovered, suggesting temperatures were as much as 7oF warmer than today (F. Donald Logan/ The Vikings In History). Today most of Greenland is not green, and has permanently frozen soil and ice.
A major factor effecting earths climate is earth-sun geometry. Milutin Milankovitch gets most of the credit for relating the Milankovitch cycles to ice ages and to climate. Its three cycles: 1) Precession (earth rotates on its polar axis, and wobbles [26,000 years]); 2) Eccentricity (when earth's orbit around the sun[100,000 years] is at its maximum distance(9%), the difference in solar energy received by earth is (-20%)); and 3) Axial Tilt/Obliquity [41,000 years], all provide variations in solar radiation received.
Milankovitch cycles exert their greatest influence when the troughs and peaks of all three cycles coincide with each other. But with sunspot activity, everything gets expanded.
With a cycle time of 2241 yrs, the Landsheidt cycle resulted in earth's cooling in 1400 AD; with a cycle time of 208 yrs, the Suess cycle cooled in 1898 AD; with cycle time of 232 yrs, a conglomeration of several cycles cooled the earth in 1922 AD; and with a cycle time of 88 years, the Gleissburg cycle cooled in 1986 AD.
...
Based on evidence from sunspot counts, there have been 18 periods of sunspot minima in the last 8,000 years. Studies indicate the sun currently spends up to a quarter of its time in these minima. The lack of sunspots means elevated cosmic rays, which means additional cloud formation, resulting in possible reflection of 20% of the sun's rays, therefore earth cooling.
However, the Solar Variation in emissions of high energy X-rays and UV radiation is far more dramatic over the course of a sunspot cycle. UV emissions increase by factors of 2-10, while some X-ray emissions increase over a hundred-fold with differences in sunspot activity.
Gun Control
John Lott Interviewed by Reason Magazine
http://reason.com/archives/2000/01/01/cold-comfort-an-interview-with
Lott:
No one had tried to account for things like arrest rates or conviction rates or prison sentence lengths. And the studies were all very limited in the sense that they were purely cross-sectional, where you look at the crime rates across jurisdictions in one year, or [purely longitudinal], where you pick one city or one county and look at it over time.It was basically because of that class that I saw the benefit to going out and trying to do it right. So I put together what I think is by far the largest study that's ever been done on crime. The book has data on all 3,000-plus counties in the U.S. over an 18-year period.
Reason:
You often say, based on surveys, that Americans use guns to fend off criminals more than 2 million times a year. But in the book, you note that people who report incidents of armed self-defense could be mistaken or lying. How big a problem is that, and how confident can we be that the true number is more than 2 million?
Lott:
Well, 2 million is the average of the various surveys. Different problems may plague different surveys, and the problems can go in both directions. You may have questions that weed out people who shouldn't be weeded out.
Lott:
You hear claims from time to time that people should behave passively when they're confronted by a criminal. And if you push people on that, they'll refer to something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, a government project that surveys about 50,000 households each year. If you compare passive behavior to all forms of active resistance lumped together, passive behavior is indeed slightly safer than active resistance. But that's very misleading, because under the heading of active resistance you're lumping together things like using your fist, yelling and screaming, running away, using Mace, a baseball bat, a knife, or a gun. Some of those actions are indeed much more dangerous than passive behavior. But some are much safer.
For a woman, for example, by far the most dangerous course of action to take when she's confronted by a criminal is to use her fists. The reason is pretty simple: You're almost always talking about a male criminal doing the attacking, so in the case of a female victim there's a large strength differential. And for a woman to use her fists is very likely to result in a physical response from the attacker and a high probability of serious injury or death to the woman. For women, by far the safest course of action is to have a gun. A woman who behaves passively is 2.5 times as likely to end up being seriously injured as a woman who has a gun.
Lott:
One example is gun deaths involving children. My guess is that if you go out and ask people, how many gun deaths involve children under age 5, or under age 10, in the United States, they're going to say thousands. When you tell them that in 1996 there were 17 gun deaths for children under age 5 in the United States and 44 for children under age 10, they're just astounded. There's a reason why they believe these deaths occur much more frequently: If you have a gun death in the home involving a child under age 5, you're going to get national news coverage. Five times more children drown in bathtubs; more than twice as many drown in five-gallon water buckets around the home. But those deaths do not get national news coverage.
Recap:
-Studies done before Lott's magnum opus pale in comparison, and should be viewed with more skepticism than should Lott's study.
-2 million crimes a year are averted by gun carrying victims.
-Passive women without guns are 2.5 times as likely to get seriously injured by attackers.
-Aggressive women without guns are much more than 2.5 times as likely to get seriously injured by attackers.
-Kids don't kill themselves with guns very often. Bathtubs are 5 times as dangerous to kids as are guns.
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 4/28, 5:13am)
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