I'm getting old and I think the earth's rotation is speeding up. The days go by too fast now that I'm not working. At work they dragged on forever, and Friday was a long way off even on Thursday.
That makes sense! That's why the ones with hollow bones were commonly found in the air!
Not only that, but gravity is getting stronger every year!
I don’t buy that either. Doesn’t pass the sniff test for me.
I haven't been able find out whether that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
It seems obvious that energy would be required to slow Earth's rotation, and that energy would also have to come from somewhere.
Doesn't matter. Science is about a process of experimentation and peer review, not personal credentials. Some absolute idiots have doctorates, like Jordan Peterson and Phil McGraw.
There's overlap between the terms "stable" and "reactive", but they aren't used the same way. Sulfuric acid is stable- we keep it for years. It is also quite reactive. Likewise, I keep sodium metal for years in a kerosene bath and it is very stable that way, but it is very reactive, too. Hydrogen peroxide is both unstable and reactive- I only get it as I need it because it doesn't keep. Nitrate esters tend to be unstable, but not necessarily reactive- cellulose nitrate is a good example. Billiard balls made from the stuff made for exciting pool games.Yup, reactive is a less ambiguous term. But if you are an active chemist then you are well aware that stable is also used and you are just being pedantic. So, you win, I guess.
See the response below:
Even China has recently noticed they will have a contraction of population. Most (all?) European countries are seeing population decline. The USA is seeing population increases only due to immigration.
First, that one-child rule didn't apply everywhere. I know many Chinese in the People's republic in their 30's and 40's who have brothers and sisters near their age. I realize that's contrary to what we "know" here, but given a direct visual observation, I'll take that over what people tell me. It is possible that the rule wasn't applied rigorously, or it wasn't applied everywhere, or I happen to know a lot of children of party officials. China is facing a population crash.
Please explain the people I've met in the PROC with brothers and sisters. I realize this is something we've all been told, but the reality seems otherwise. I've read the same sort of thing, but reality needs to Trump what people write.
Yeah. We took the opportunity while the moderator was out of the room...
Is it possible he is wrong because the world adapted? I don't think that anyone then realized that improved economic status would lead to lowered birthrates. Things like "the pill" and other birth control weren't as widespread as now.
I agree, although there's a lot of bad information floating around now from people who choose other "news" sources because they don't trust the media (and with reason, I might add).
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Doesn't matter. I know what I saw and with whom I spoke. Something is wrong someplace. It would be helpful to explain the discrepancy. I doubt the Chinese government is telling lots of people to lie to a single American.
It's a bit more complex than that. China has plenty of coal, but the power industries won't pay the price increases. They are contracted to sell electricity at a particular price, but they don't have price controls on the coal.
He wrote the book "The Population Bomb" and made definitive statements in it. They were going to happen as predicted. They didn't, partly because the population growth slowed significantly, and partly because agricultural output increased with better technology and because of fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Ehrlich made the classic mistake of extrapolating statistics to come up with a prediction, except that the tapering off of the Baby Boom (shortly before he wrote his book) wrecked his prophecies.
I think we are saying the same thing from different points of view. It's very easy to say, with 20/20 hindsight, that his assumptions were wrong due to the items you list above, but he didn't have that knowledge prior to 1968. Predicting the future is hard, because we don't know what can affect our predictions. OTOH, don't entirely discount more recent, modern models that incorporate the possibility of improved assumptions, but also keep a healthy skepticism. I don't think he made a "statistical mistake" which seems to imply a math error. His models simply couldn't account for the changes you list because they were only starting to be felt in 1968.
