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I was in Moscow in August and it was cool and cloudy. But a really long time ago I was the mountaintop research technician in the Bridger Mountains to the north of Bozeman, Montana. A research project had been funded in the winter of 1969-70 to inject silver iodide into a large propane burner on a ridgetop upwind of the Bridger Bowl ski area near the hometown of Montana State University. As the technician, it was my job to keep the silver iodide solution flowing from a huge central tank, plus connect the 1,000 gallon propane tanks as needed to keep the burner into which the silver iodide solution was injected flaming away robustly. The propane was delivered to the ridge top as needed by a helicopter that strained every mechanical muscle to inch up slowly through the clouds to reach my post, a small A-frame cabin at almost 10,000 ft elevation. I never did fine out how much snow I "made" but the ski business was good over at Bridger bowl so I must have not hurt anything. I also had to trudge up to a weather station right at the peak of the ridge every four hours day or night to take instrument readings manually, which was a drag, especially in white-out and 40 below.

EricIQ-2 you are certainly correct. The next three winters are going to drive into oblivion the proposition that the trace gas carbon dioxide matters in the dynamics of real climate factor interactions in any degree whatsoever. Yes, it will get colder. Yes, everywhere. Yes, for the next century or more, no matter how many coal power plants the Chinese or Indians decide to build, nor how many SUV's their newly-propsperous peoples decide to build to place on newly-built roadways. The reason that rising economies will get away with environmental blasphemy is that the intellecutal elites of the West were, well, fools and liars would be about the kindest thing you can save of them, but I can think of really far worse descriptors.

My goodness, I guess I have to count myself a fundie and a creationist despite the fact that I believe the universe is 13.7 million years old and that humans are certainly primates which arose in a common line with today's chimps. But what I don't accept is the idea that chance or probability are anything other than queer artifacts of human conscience. As mathematician Rudy Rucker notes in his 1982 book INFINITY AND THE MIND, space-time is fundamental, not isolated space that evolves as time passes, and he states: "on the basis of modern physical theory we have every reason to think of the passage of time as an illusion. Past, present, and future all exist together in space-time." So in other words the concept of evolution as change over time is cut off at the pass. Nothing changes, and certainly nothing changes in either a probabilistic or a free will way that would create branching universes. Physics is greatly simplified, as viewing space-time properly eliminates not only headaches like branching universes, but Schroedinger's mysterious cat, the riddles of the two-slit experiment, time-reversed light, and so on. We are left appreciating the universe as we should, a perfectly marvelous always-existing, unchanging infinite mural or tableu in which everything is timelessly frozen, including the next thoughts we are about to think. What kind of universe is this? It is a "given" universe in the most profound and thorough sense, suggesting a profound and thorough giver.

Both these rovers have had remarkable careers, but it is worth mentioning that the insistence on making them solar powered has really limited the amount of terrain they could cover, the science they could do, and the rate at which they could transmit information back to Earth. In fact, a great number of highly-paid people have had to nurse these rovers along for years on the tiny trickle of solar energy their limited (and dust-covered) solar panels produce. The sheer lack of juice has limited the number and quality of photos sent back to our planet. In Martian winter the rovers have been virtually parked. In bad dust storms they are parked, because not enough solar energy gets through to run your TV remote. If, in place of the solar panels and attendant batteries, small nuclear fission piles had been developed, the rovers could have been much more robust--traveling further, faster, and not having to worry about being in the shadows of hills or storing up enough energy to navigate through a dark canyon with enough energy left in the batteries to actually do some observations or experiments. Both the Russians and ourselves used nuclear power in the past and are facing the near-absolute necessity of using it when going beyond Jupiter, but it seems like the technology gets under-utilized in a lot of applications where it would make a great deal of sense, such as on Mars surface vehicles. Nuclear "batteries" eventually run out too, but while active they put out an enormous amount of power that can do an enormous amount of research, leaving program scientists free to think about Mars itself instead of daily trying to solve the severe problems that rovers handicapped by a serious lack of power have constantly got themselves into.

Methane hydrates also in Gulf of Mexico. Without too much trouble and no new technology needed methane can be converted to gasoline. The only real objection--the idea that fossil fuel combustion is "changing the climate." Well, if you can contort your brain to believe that global warming actually causes global cooling, glaciers growing everywhere there is more snowfall and more snowfall a lot of places, including Mt. Blanc., etc I believe the idea that carbon dioxide is the 800lb gorilla when it comes to climate change is seriously flawed. It is more like the 8 lb chimpanzee. The sun is the 800 lb gorilla.