strainer

> A is natural, and B is not, therefore A is better

I'll just add since my reply was a bit short - that if not for the danger of losing sight of the point here, I could continue your deductive argument with a list of examples which seem to support the rule and could criticize your chosen examples, but the important point is that statements of these kinds are not philosophically known to be false in most given contexts. The naturalistic fallacy is actually a strong case that they are false in philosophy of ethics, and this has been ideologically amplified to teach that they are false in all contexts. Its terrible education, not fallacious at all to say: "my cats natural diet is small mammals, so its probably better if I dont feed it too much bread and mayo." etc.

Also I notice Cr-Steel's elastic yield strength at 400C is about 87% of its strength at room temp and I don't think it does alter significantly over these timescales at that temperature. It will be interesting to see how high it can be routinely cycled without losing its temper, but it seems to certainly provide much more overhead for safety margins as well as routine operation.

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/young-modulus-d_773.html

> You argue for sustainability as an axiomatic value (and I agree) - but sustainability is not an automatic consequence of something being natural

Yes but that simply means it is not a deductive argument [1]. This is very far from being fallacious. It would be quite disastrous to regard all deductive arguments as false at least in everyday life. "the weather report is for snow - wrap up well"

[1] https://www.iep.utm.edu/ded-ind/

I've never found it well argued that appeals to nature are inherently fallacious to any good philosophical or logical standard. The common advice that they are fallacious has always struck me as ideological with explanations relying on tainted examples and suggestion that a common persons idea of nature is just too unique and incomprehensible to be useful.

In our time of increasing environmental tragedy, yet with some hope springing that we shall be able to make changes en mass to redeem the future, some appeals to nature seem very valid and perhaps essential to culturally appreciating our technologically precarious situation. For instance that which is more natural is more sustainable to nature. Microplastics are less natural than sand. A possible caveat - electric cars are somewhat more sustainable than combustion. But the presence of caveats does not make the appeal a fallacy - if by fallacy we mean something with no merit for consideration.

Natural processes are studied - and need to be studied to be of use and be used sustainably. They are numerous, interconnected, complex, mature, essential to human life and all the life which humans value. The concept of biophilia itself appeals to nature.

Appeals to nature should simply not be listed as an inherently wrong pattern of thought, fair to rule out of bounds. That message is a bad, hopefully retreating ideological position.

I thought I felt deja vu :)

From the sounds of it steel structure can basically handle much greater temperatures routinely and also even more in rare situations that might mean retiring the ship afterward but not losing everything. In his presentation Elon says that aluminum alloy or carbon fiber structure is basically done for at 300 to 400 Celsius, well that's the temperature at which stainless steel can just begin to get conditioned by heat, it doesn't structurally 'melt' until over 1000 Celsius.

Although its a curious topic, I would have no doubt that whatever temperature cycling they design parts of the structure to go through in their "rapidly reusable" regime, the effects of "heat fatigue" or whatever to call it will have been rigorously assessed .

I do find this to be actually legendary. At a target rate of about one per month, he is set to produce stainless steel, rapidly reusable, 150-ton-capable Mars transports. And is doing this using currently "about 5%" of the resources of his own commercially built satellite launch company, grown from scratch in a decade or so and out-performing every other nations satellite launch programs - by a large margin.

His presentation is noticeably a little self-concious, but not so much as to obscure his enjoyment to be standing in front of the first massive shimmering yet wielded and dented together rocket ship, which is due to demonstrate lift off and landing in a month or so.

It might be rather intangible, but I expect there must be a strong tendency for businesses to benefit overall when their shares are bought or kept rather than sold.

Does this case extend to general advice though - that people should stay invested in fossil fuel companies in order to regulate them a bit? It should follow that if we invest more in fossil fuel extraction we can regulate them more. It seems to confound reasonable expectations of what results from investment.

It demonstrates a not insignificant risk but it would be from taking the most contaminated batch of the product for 4 years. If a patient took the most contaminated sample found for 4 years there would be a 1/8000 chance of cancer from it. It illustrates this level of contamination should be a concern but it seems unlikely anyone could be exposed continuously to this highest detected level.

I dont know if it would take ten thousand years or ten billion years for all the free oxygen in atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere to be depleted. But all of it is here and maintained by the sum total of interconnected living things and it would all go without it.

But its not a falsehood to call the Amazon "lungs of the Earth" - its an illustration of the fact that the Amazon, until perhaps recently has been the "largest residual terrestrial carbon sink on the planet"[1]

The article opens with this headline which is false: "Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply."

If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes. It would take millennia to complete but its not an outcome which is valid to describe in an educational or truth straightening context as "not a dent".

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 "Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink"

Please I have not attacked the professor at all. I have "attacked" an article which has you calling a statement which in all likelihood originates from the advice of an earth scientist > "bad science" and "mis-information" and has you defending the claim that the amazon ecosystems contribution to atmospheric oxygen "effectively zero" And that practically extends to co2 - any caveats are in fact in contradiction to the professors advice that fires and organisms use up all the produced oxygen. But we've already gone through that and are talking past each other now.

> Why are you still conflating O2 and CO2?

That should be obvious. Any evidence of amazon sequestering carbon is evidence of amazon liberating oxygen. If you cant bear that in mind you have been distracted by the artificial separation proposed here, between "a strong carbon sink" sinking carbon and the respiring of O2, they are very effectively both expressions of the same process.

> one of that authors of that paper, is the same "YADVINDER MALHI" who wrote this blog post

Correct and it puts into stark contrast the co-authors private blog advice that "the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (authors emphasis) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero". That misjudged statement which is even highlighted in the article now, is in plain contradiction to that paper he took part in, which is also about the Amazon ECOSYSTEM and the Amazon can not physically be "a strong carbon sink" and at the same time have zero contribution to the worlds atmospheric oxygen system.

The claim is wrong, and hangs only on the ambiguities of what "effectively zero" could be argued to mean that is in reality documented to be very far from zero indeed.

The Amazon has been known for decades as great "lung" of the planet, SINKING Carbon and RELEASING O2. Malhi has himself taken part in work which describes it "greatly" doing so. If its personal credentials you put faith in you could regard Sir David Attenboroughs describing it the same, for many years, in finished and award winning works, as opposed to a professors conversational web article.

Malhi's advisory 9% figure (that is then subsequently reduced to zero?!) is not even necessarily more final or uncontestable as the supposedly terrible global media outbreak of 20% reports. And since (even that work Mahli took part in reveals) that the amazon is recently in serious flux, such figures are technically speaking conditional.

The point of publicity figure is to be defensible and educate the fact that the Amazon has had and can have major effects on the atmospheres important constituents. That whether it is currently in equilibrium or a great carbon sink or grave carbon emitter - is a very grave matter because by its size and history it is capable of all those things.

Into the amazon river and out to sea basically. Rain will wash a lot of matter that way.

The problem is I feel that he has confused understanding of the subject here rather than clarifying it, which is an easy thing for anybody to do in a conversational article.

Here is a recent work[1] which substantiates matters that Amazons practical involvement in the planets atmospheric oxygen/carbon levels is really not as the professor felt like putting it as "effectively zero".

> Abstract: The response of the Earth’s land surface to increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and a changing climate provide important feedbacks on future greenhouse warming6,7. One of the largest ecosystem carbon pools on Earth is the Amazon forest, storing around 150–200 Pg C in living biomass and soils8. Earlier studies based on forest inventories in the Amazon Basin showed the tropical forest here to be acting as a strong carbon sink with an estimated annual uptake of 0.42–0.65 Pg C yr−1 for 1990–2007, around 25% of the residual terrestrial carbon sink3,4. There is, however, substantial uncertainty as to how the Amazon forest will respond to future climatic and atmospheric composition changes. .... Here we analyse the longest and largest spatially distributed time series of forest dynamics for tropical South America. .... Our data show that mature forests continued to act as a biomass sink from 1983 to 2011.5, but also reveal a long-term decline in the net rate of biomass increase throughout the census period. The decline in net biomass change is due to a strong long-term increase in mortality rates, and occurred despite a long-term increase in productivity. While mortality increased throughout the period, productivity increases have recently stalled showing no significant trend since 2000. ....

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283

Published in Nature: 18 March 2015 : "Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink"

Burning the amazon down is something to worry about. Not afforesting widely and extracting timber from the amazon ecologically so it sequesters carbon and supplies materials replacing demand for carbon intense alternatives - is tragedy.

The advice that amazons contribution is "zero", hedged under this safety-net word "effectively" is false to the understanding of geophysics and natural history. I hope the professor will clarify his language after consideration.

So that's where he is getting the context for his rant >>

"So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero."

Practically, the reason why we have oxygen in the atmosphere is plant photosynthesis over long terms. We can quibble over the net annual product of every forest and ecosystem as he has - but over geological timeframes, the plant life they contain is the reason we have any oxygen to breath. And if the amazon currently amounts to about 20% of the plant life on earth now, its not wrong to teach that it is doing 20% of the oxygen maintaining.

The fact that long term maintenance is obscured by shorter term dynamics including our modern industrial activity, does not make a lie of the understanding and respect that forests are lungs of the planet.

> my own team's research suggests this is more like 60%

My point was he hasn't cited that research - if it is concluded ? published? reviewed?

He seems to be just having a technical rant about a contextual phrase while giving the impression that forests in general, or at least the amazon or equatorial forests do not help maintain the atmospheres oxygen content. That would certainly be a maveric proposition at this stage in Earth sciences.

If forests did not then some other body of plant mass would have to - erosion and weathering of rocks takes a lot of oxygen out of the atmosphere, and this needs replaced by biology by photosynthesis. In the long term this is the reason the Earth needs to "breathe", and plants are how it has done so. Plants die and are eaten by ranging animals, dispersing their material, creating soils and eventually sediments. This is a long cycle through which carbon is returned to ground, sometimes to metamorphic rock.

It takes place at a lower intensity than our burning of fossil material and forests in recent history. Regrowing forest, usefully captures carbon and releases oxygen more rapidly than mature forest, but of course not rapidly enough to make up for burning them down.

It would seem to be a well kept secret branch if so

The blogged claim that Amazon "consumes about as much oxygen as it produces" is not sourced and the piece seems to fly in the face of professional work on the subject. eg: "The global oxygen budget and its future projection" [1]

> Fig. 4 summarizes the annual averaged global O2 budget from year 1990 to 2005, with the mass of O2 in gigatonnes (Gt) listed in each sink and for each process mentioned above (see Section 2.5). The inputs of O2 to the atmosphere by land and outgassing from oceans are quantified as 16.01 and 1.74 Gt/a, respectively. ....

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731...

Consider the title of this famous Great work wrote later : "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"

It has a graceful theme which is perhaps not accidental for mathematical inspiration. The same symbolic methods, being symbolic could have been painted as "domination and sacrificing" but that might not temper a mindset as mathematically conducive as notions of "completion and balancing".

A cultures achievements in different areas could owe substantially to the spectrum of mindsets which it hosts and celebrates.

The authors of the 2010 paper did follow up with another in 2014[1] so "heard nothing since disputed in 2011 - its just wrong" is at least, inaccurate.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007966111...

>This work builds upon an earlier analysis (Boyce et al., 2010) by taking published criticisms into account, and by using recalibrated data, and novel analysis methods.

This common outlook of pre-industrial farming is actually contested, eg. [1]

> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false...

[1]https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

"is based on a single study with 12 cows."

Its not - most often "skeptical science remarks" although popular, are poorly informed and misleading.

A quick scholar search shows numerous studies broadly agreeing with the one featured here, including the seaweeds effects on sheep digestion and microbial and metabolic details:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=asparagopsis+methane

There is no requirement for a panacea or super neat developments that allow individual households to store seasons worth of privately generated electricity.

For seasonal and sporadic production shortfalls in solar and wind generation, biofuels and electrically synthesized fuels can fill in. On the occasions where carbon-neutral fuel resources are insufficient - gas generation can remain as fallback (increasingly rarely) until sufficient carbon neutral fuel production is developed.

Admittedly I was thinking along the lines of gin and other drinks herbal contents. But while Buckfast Abbey is guarded about "the recipe" they say it is essentially the same as it was 120 years ago. It is said to be made from "fortified wine" (which besides alcohol and sugar, is loaded with plant based tannins, some reservatrol, and any number of extra ingredients), a couple of preservatives, vanilla extract... and it has caffeine in it.

It seems like a liability for the traditional branding if they do not make it as they claim "along the same lines and according to the same basic recipe as used in the very early days" They could be just mixing in highly refined caffeine like an "alcho-pop" manufacturer but I'm not so cynical to expect that.

Buckfast doesn't deserve to be lumped with glue sniffing. It is more an icon of revelry than alcoholism with it costing about twice as much as cheap wine. Its herbal stimulants give it an immediate effect similar to doing shots of a spirit but with half the alcohol load.

I think its a dubious comparison - like comparing the physiological effects of a drug, with a physical altercation.

Hoeing (chopping and mixing the soil) has a radical effect on its biology, which the researchers mention as "the inevitable indirect effects caused by the destruction of live vegetation". The effects of rare pollutants tend to be more subtle, yet they only look for glyphosates effects in hoed soil, which is already very disturbed.