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What he said...

For an extensive review of Dyson's desire to scrap 'reductionist biology', read Jon Richfield at http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Dyson-respon se.htm. Dyson and Hoyle both have added little to biology, despite their eminence in other fields.

which reminds me of this Dilbert one

http://www.cms.livjm.ac.uk/wiganramblers/Gallery/i mg_Meetings.html

A critical fact in Al Gore's film: after compiling the results of 1,100 serious scientific papers about GW not one suggests that it is anything but man's fault. The percentage of journalistic articles suggesting that it may not be man's fault: 53%. This is an extremely important point

Dr. Benny Peiser at Cambridge College in England has been running the Cambridge-Conference mailing list ("CCNet"--see http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/CCNet-homepa ge.htm) for several years. Over the last few years, the forum's focus on neocatastrophism (large, cataclysmic events disrupting the "steady state" average of geology, climatology, etc.) has shifted to covering the global climate-change debate. Dr. Peiser has submitted his share of work & letters to the peer-reviewed journals questioning the idea of consensus in scientific investigation--see "The Letter that SCIENCE Would Not Publish" http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm.

Dr. Benny Peiser at Cambridge College in England has been running the Cambridge-Conference mailing list ("CCNet"--see http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/CCNet-homepa ge.htm) for several years. Over the last few years, the forum's focus on neocatastrophism (large, cataclysmic events disrupting the "steady state" average of geology, climatology, etc.) has shifted to covering the global climate-change debate. Dr. Peiser has submitted his share of work & letters to the peer-reviewed journals questioning the idea of consensus in scientific investigation--see "The Letter that SCIENCE Would Not Publish" http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm.

...of Global Salvationism

Before we go do a really stupid thing and imperil everyone on the planet, perhaps we should do a little checking? Just to make sure that we haven't been misled?

Hey...I tend to agree. The myth that the "majority of scientists say global warming is real and directly tied into carbon emissions" seems to be based on a single study comparing a large group of abstracts listed on the ISI databank for 1993 to 2003.

There was an attempt to refute that study - but it appears to have been rejected for publication -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html

Now while the Telegrpah may be a right-leaning publication, I think a bit of skepticism may be needed here, it's interesting to read the study and all the correspondence around it:

http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm

Cheers.

K

It's just not true - the belief that the majority of climate researchers agree that humanity is to blame for the rise in global temperatures is also 'hotly' debated. Check out this - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ ixworld.html And then the actual letter stating that oft quoted study is quite flawed: http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Sciencelette r.htm "RESULTS The results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study: Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the 'consensus view'." Global warming may be occurring, but is it humanities fault?

The guy isn't even a climatologist. Benny Peiser is expertise is "Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology".

"Note that we only have this guy's word for why he was rejected. "

No, we have copies of the actual messages sent back and forth between Reiser and Science, which have been validated by the Telegraph (among others) for their news story on the topic of journal censorship of similar views.

Peiser's work was not previously disseminated. Science just made that up. See Peiser's web page about this.

And Nature has always allowed--indeed, supported--preprint archives.

Moderators: please note that I've provided links to back up what I say; the parent seems to be a troll or similar.

(Peiser's submission to Science is available on his web page. It's short and easy to read. If it's right, then the original Oreskes paper was fraudulent.)

From Peiser's bio:

"Dr Benny Peiser is a social anthropologist with particular research interest in human and cultural evolution. His resesarch focuses on the effects and repercussions of catastrophic events on societal evolution and human behaviour, the rise and fall of civilisations, the evolution of ancient sports and combat rituals and their association with sanctioned violence and human aggression. He is an expert on the environmental and socio-economic consequences of cosmic impacts on the Earth and current attempts to mitigate future impacts by Near Earth Objects."

And that would explain how he is qualified to comment on climate change how, exactly? Maybe that's a reason his paper was turned down?

Secondly, why should I care what a right-wing website reports about the views of a sociologist, a lawyer and an MBA about global warming, none of whom has any relevent scientific expertise?

Having just written a paper on BitTorrent (which should be presented at PGNET 2004 if anyone cares), a couple of points:

1. About 20% of people upload at least as much as they download. Which isn't a staggering number (I expected a lot higher), but that's still a reasonable number of people.
2. eDonkey - don't know about you, but I get about 24kbit/s on eDonkey. On BitTorrent, average bandwidth available per user comes out at around 200kbit/s, although I've seen up to 8mbit/s on high-demand torrents.

Oh, and there's another interesting paper at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/pam2004 /papers/148.pdf that covers things like user-count dropoff.

I don't think I ever had 720Kb 5.25's. I had 1.2MB and 360KB drives. Before that on my trusty Radio Shack Trash-80, I had a cassette tape drive and a stringy floppy. How many of you have heard of a stringy floppy before? It was a business card sized tape that was endless loop IIRC. About 1/8" thick, the tape was 1/16" thick. See TechWeb for definition, the cool manual here, an old Creative Computing article, and great scans of an old review here.

I was so l337 with my trs-80, expansion board, and stringy floppy. I was so sad when my space invaders game (galactic something?) got eaten by that damn drive.

For those of you who would like to read more about this, a copy of the research paper is here, and the project home page is here. Enjoy!