Slashdot Mirror

Urban vs. rural trends, w/many refs: link
Windy vs. calm: link link2.
The use of jump-point analysis to detect station incongruities: link
The use of a closely monitored reference network as a control:
A general overview of calculations, detrending, etc: link.
Further studies on that: link link2

Now why the hell would you think yourself qualified to be involved in this discussion if you didn't already know this?

Don't you get it? The people raising these concerns are *not scientists*, *have no background in the field*, and *don't know what the hell they're talking about*.

Nature has a nice summary of the original research paper published in the same journal: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091216/full/news.2009.1143.html

well there's a big difference between not surviving several hundred years of history and being purposely deleted after a FOIA request.

Except that no data was deleted after the famous "FOIA request",

Some e-mails were deleted. Which was wrong. But maybe understandable when you learn that McIntyre made 58 FOAI requests in 5 days. 11 FOIA requests a day! http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2009/08/mcintyre_versus_jones_climate_1.html

And what does McIntyre want to do with the data? He's on record as saying he's not going to bother checking it if he gets it (unless someone pays him, he says). Was it done just to piss CRU off?

A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

Nature not allowing arXiv thing is a myth:

"Our guidelines for authors and potential authors in such circumstances are clear-cut in principle: communicate with other researchers as much as you wish, whether on a recognised community preprint server, on Nature Precedings, by discussion at scientific meetings (publication of abstracts in conference proceedings is allowed), in an academic thesis, or by online collaborative sites such as wikis; but do not encourage premature publication by discussion with the press (beyond a formal presentation, if at a conference)."

From :
http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/embargo.html

temperatures have gone up, and still trends that way. It isn't going up as dramatically. This is do to the sun.

The notion that the upward trend is due to the sun is wishful thinking. The evidence is unambiguous that solar output has not increased appreciably over this period. In addition, there is no evidence that the long-term warming trend predicted by climate models has slackened.

No climatologist is saying the only reason temperature changes is because of CO2. it's and increase on top of the normal rising and falling of temperature

What the climatologists are saying is that the normal rising and falling of temperature, which takes place on a typical time scale of a decade or so, is riding on top of on a long-term, multi-decadal rising trend of temperature that is due to CO2

"My personal point of view: "We can't stop the trend, and our money is better spent on adjusting than attempting to stop the inevitable."

And why is it that everyone who makes this statement fails to recognise that cutting emmission through a global treaty IS an adaption?

Politicians are becoming concerned because the scientific communtity is scared shitless. Is this not how it is supposed to work, if you are in an industrial boiler room and the fitters start running for the door in a panic, would it not be wise to follow them under the assumption that maybe they know what they are doing and have good reason to be scared?

Sorry about that, it was actually 58 FOIA requests over four days. Source: http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2009/08/mcintyre_versus_jones_climate_1.html (which is probably the one you found; odd that you don't cite it yourself)

As to whether or not the denials were legitimate: assume that the the denials were not legitimate. At that point, what would a claimant do? They would follow up on the FOI claim. There is no evidence that this happened. The argument from silence isn't the strongest, but when you're dealing with people who are normally as loud as these climate change denialists, silence can be deafening.

Do you, perhaps, mean the 50-ish FOIA requests that the CRU received over the course of two days, each one taking probably an hour or two of their legal counsel's time to process?

Cite please. I've heard about these claims, but haven't been able to locate any facts (aside from a Nature article which I can't read) on the matter even via Google. I did find a similar UK example where someone requested 15 FOIs from the West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive or "Centro" over a period of 11 months. The 15th request was denied because it was "vexatious" and disproportionately inconvenienced the public authority. It sounds to me like the same held for this alleged burst of FOIA requests and could be turned down for similar reasons.

One thing I'm unclear on is whether the CRU could require payment of a reasonable fee for service of legitimate FOIAs? That happens to be true in the US. If it is a burden to compile the request, then the requester can be asked to pay for the effort.

That were, in fact, legitimately denied? Sure, one of the scientists said that he'd rather delete the data than give it to the people who spammed them with "legitimate" FOIA requests - but those FOIA requests were not granted (and funnily enough, none of the people submitting those FOIA requests followed up on them through legal channels), and the data was not deleted.

So you claim. All I've been able to find on that is the summary of a Nature article which claims 50 such requests within a week not two days. I have no idea who or why. I'm too stingy to pay for the article and mention of it doesn't appear anywhere else.

Tree ring diverges from previous trends around 1960, so as a trending mechanism it is only good up to a certain point. It is unknown, afaik, why this happened, but up until that point it is still good, predictive data. So I had a misunderstanding as thought that there was an actual error in the collecting, which, perhaps, with this particular data set is possible, but I haven't read other papers showing differently. Thus it has not been used as a proxy for data past 1960 since 1998, when that paper was published, and the supposed "damning" email was warning of this in 1999. An explanation by CRU from Real Climate:

“Declines” in the MXD record. This decline was written up in Nature in 1998 where the authors suggested not using the post 1960 data. Their actual programs (in IDL script), unsurprisingly warn against using post 1960 data. Added: Note that the ‘hide the decline’ comment was made in 1999 – 10 years ago, and has no connection whatsoever to more recent instrumental records.

I also apologize for the tone of my previous message, I had not yet had my coffee :-)

You will have to give me a reference for Science or Nature where they said the debate was over. I can't seem to find it. However, some researchers publishing a paper calling for political action to prevent a problem doesn't "sound like the scientific method" because its not strictly science. They reviewed a bunch of other people's work and said "Things are happening, we should do something". That's not proposing a hypothesis, it's looking at many, many supported hypotheses and saying that they probably have real-world implications. (Without seeing the original paper, I'm guessing as to what they said.)

Now, if you read the Nature piece, which has been linked to several times on Slashdot before, you'd see that there is no violation in the scientific method there. They said, simply, "there does not appear to be any falsified data in these leaked emails." If you'd like to publish a paper to the contrary, you're more than welcome to replicate their methods (read the emails), draw your own conclusions, and submit it to Nature. Of course, you'll have to cite the actual emails where the researchers talked about falsifying data.

If they said, "the ends justify the means", even between the lines, I can't find it. In fact, they criticized the scientists for not releasing data in the last paragraph.

I agree with your last point 100%.

yes, the tree-ring data in this location diverges unexpectedly from the actual temps recorded. that is a problem to explain. but it has nothing to do with the fact that the temperatures really did continue to increase.

No, it's much worse than that. The tree-ring data diverges unexpectedly and nobody knows why.

Given that is the case, it is wrong to use this data for pre-1960 periods. On what basis can we assume that tree rings were ever an accurate predictor of temperature?

Until that question is answered, I think all studies based on tree-rings are suspect.

So it is fraudulent to use direct measurement of actual temperatures in place of an indirect temperature measurement when other factors impair the accuracy of the indirect measurement--and to document that choice and the scientific basis for it in great detail in the peer-reviewed scientific literature?

The climatologists weren't quacks. As respected a source as the journal Nature made that clear. They were called quacks by people like Limbaugh, who make their millions by stirring shit without any interest in the consequences, as long as they get high ratings, and by the mainstream press, who are too stupid to understand the science and were therefore influenced by the asshole pundits like Limbaugh who were the first to speak on the matter.

So the question now is: Are you an idiot who believes anything the scientifically illiterate press tells you, or are you an idiot who believes anything politically-motivated pundits tell you?

Several troubles with that idea. First, note that the Methane production rates quoted in the original article are much too small based on the observed Martian Methane plumes and their implications. Given that

- it's hard to see how serpentinization explains the observed intermittent methane plumes

- it doesn't explain at all the sink of the methane, which has to be very powerful (to explain the observed plumes)

- the production estimates by Lefèvre & Forget (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)) are large for this explanation :

This optimum quantitative agreement with the methane observations is obtained with 150,000 t of methane emitted by the sporadic source. This amount is comparable to the yearly geochemical production of methane by serpentinization (50,000–130,000 t yr-1) along the entire Mid-Atlantic Ridge on Earth.

Of course, there is lots of water along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Where is there a comparable amount of liquid water on Mars coming in contact with new olivine ? To me, this seems like a stretch.

By the way, 150,000 tonnes per year (as a rough guess of Martian production) is about 0.1% of terrestrial biological production, which does not seem outlandishly large or small for a hypothetical Martian biosphere.

Neither the source nor the sink of Martian methane is understood, as was discussed by Lefèvre & Forget in Observed variations of methane on Mars unexplained by known atmospheric chemistry and physics (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)). Unlike the statement in the spacefellowship.com writeup, the observed methane plumes require a very quick absorption of methane on the surface, which means that the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is not " a few hundred years" but months or less, maybe even hours or less. Since the shorter the lifetime, the larger the production required to match the observed plumes, we don't know the methane production on Mars to within even 3 orders of magnitude.

We don't know the source, we don't know the sink, and we don't know the production rate, so I personally don't see how biology can be ruled out, despite the editorializing in Lefèvre & Forget.

Back in March, there was an article in "Nature News"(the Nature News article is subscription, but a decent summary was posted by "The Free Republic") that the mineral Olivine when incorporated in a hydrothermal system may generate methane.

On Earth, the predominate source of methane is considered biological in origin, and the presence on Mars has been considered a possible indication of life on Mars. Recently, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, near Houston, Texas, researcher Bethany Ehlmann (a PhD student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island) proposed a geological process could be a potential source for methane. The article reports that under a hydrothermal process the mineral olivine can undergo conversion to serpentine, with methane and hydrogen as a by-product.

Not surprisingly, there are potential problems with the theory. Though the presence of the mineral could have been a source of methane, the surface mineral is ancient, 3.8BY. Too old to be the source of the methane currently detected. It may be though, that the conversion is active subsurface, and the generated methane reaches the surface via fissures, etc."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08619.html

notable physics papers in Nature. A short list. Perhaps Einstein preferred to write in German.

A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past.

Which is exactly what these guys did ten years ago. Answers: we don't know (trees are living beings, not thermometers), and yes it does.

Notice the "Briffa" name in the author list? And the "University of East Anglia" in the list of institutions? Reminds you of something?

I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.

Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:

1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .

2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).

3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.

Rinse. Repeat.

To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.

Conformists are the murderers of civilizations

Of course, non-conformity in one respect is often a signal that a person will have oppositional-defiant disorder in other locations as well. A person who refuses instruction in school will often be found to be intractable by religious leaders seeking to save their soul. An anti-authoritarian personality will disrupt the just and proper function of society everywhere they go; another example is insisting on a trial even when they know they're guilty. They should all be culled, but the tragic irony is that the intelligence required to maintain our institutions is the same intelligence that naturally grows in opposition to them.

"Every bit of data has to be re-validated."

Why?

"...they have a responsibility to be somber, formal, and utterly proper at all times."

Even when privacy is assumed?

"I have a Ph.D. for non-linear modeling in an industrial process."

Do you know of any credible FEA models from the "skeptics"? I've been waiting for well over a decade to see one.

You are quite right: this is pure politics, and has no impact on the actual science. People are making a big deal of this who do not understand that scientific theory rests on multiple, independent, reproducable lines of evidence and does not depend on the credibility of one particular institution. The laws of physics don't change because someone hacked someone's email.

This "scandal" is a tempest in a teapot, with much political but little scientific significance.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are warming, the last decade was the hottest on record, and the current warming is unprecedented for at least 1300 years. I am a big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide, so I don't think panic is ever an appropriate reaction, but there is plenty of cause for strong action to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change.

What suppression?

Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

Keep it up deniers, Im sure your corporate masters are laughing all the way to the bank while you cry all the way to the grave.

FALSE. All accusations of fraud have been addressed by the scientists in question, as well as outside sources. There is a reason this hasn't been getting much mainstream media coverage. For everyone's information: data was not manipulated, dissenting papers were not suppressed
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/cru-hack-more-context/

Well instead of brainless how about just painless.. knockout whatever the cow version is of the SCN9A gene.

No, 2007 was not the 'steepest drop' in arctic ice cover, it was the 'smallest minimum extent' recorded. The increase and decrease in arctic ice cover follows the seasonal cycle and the rate of the decrease and increase in the seasonal change is similar from year to year. It is the 'minimum' and 'maximum' extent of the ice cover during the year that are of interest as a monitor of climate warming or cooling.

Thanks for the lecture about seasons; it would've been informative if I were still in elementary school. If you'd clicked on the "steepest drop" link, you'd notice that the plot's title is "Sea ice area at summer minimum." A casual visual inspection will confirm the peer-reviewed conclusion that the summer minimum experienced its steepest drop from 2006-2007.

The increase in the 'minimum' extent in 2008 and 2009 indicate a cooling trend that cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases since the concentration of those has increased during that time period.

Well, first of all it's not that simple. Ice extent at the summer minimum is just one observable, others include duration of the melt season, and thickness of the ice.

More importantly, please recognize that climate models don't predict monotonic warming. This strawman you're attacking simply doesn't exist. Short-term variability is expected; long-term averages are what's important.

If you want to claim that cooling somehow validates the models (which it obviously does not)...

The models predicted drops in sea ice extent, but nothing like the drop observed in 2007. If the drop in 2007 had continued for (at least) several years, that would've been a genuine climatic signal rather than short-term variability due to weather. But since the models never predicted such an extreme drop, that would've indicated that the models were flawed.

... you need to explain where a significant amount of planetary heat is being stored since the 'greenhouse gas' theory of planetary warming requires that the amount of heat being radiated from the earth must continuously decrease.

Contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, modern dynamical climate models can't account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have no effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to st

"So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?"

No, he is saying that the question of whether AGW is real has been reasearched for over 100yrs, culimanating with two decades spent on what is probably the largest scientific effort ever undertaken by mankind. He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.

Giving money to the engineers to fix the mess and avoid pumping another half a trillion tons into the atmosphere over the next 40yrs is exactly what every respected scientific institution on the planet has been loudly advocating for at least a decade. Some institutions such as the US National Acedemy of Science (NAS) have been warning their government about the OBSERVED problem since the 1950's

But yes, this is science and they could all be wrong. No matter how unlikely that possibility is you can still use the philosophical point to engage in wishfull thinking and prey that an oppressed genius will emerge from his basement and demonstrate why every physicist since Fourier (circa 1824) has been mistaken about the physical properties of CO2. Regardless of philosophy that position is not rational, let alone scientific.

In short the only people calling for more reasearch on the basic question of whether humans are effecting the climate are vested interest who want to delay action and the ignorant who lap up thier anti-science propoganda.

I've already discussed this issue:

Surfacestations.org is saying that the surface temperature record is contaminated by the "urban heat island" effect-- that temperatures are only rising around cities because of economic growth. One example he shows is that exhaust vents have been placed closer and closer to the sensors over the years.

This is a superficially compelling argument, but it's also one that scientists have considered and rejected. One test is that the urban heat island effect should be less pronounced on windy days than calm days. That's because if this warming is just caused by local exhaust vents, wind should carry that heat away whereas calm weather won't. This doesn't happen: calm and windy days have the same warming trend. This conclusion is from an article published in Nature by Dr. Parker in 2004; here's a BBC article quoting it. Other studies have confirmed this result using different methods and data in 2003, 2006, and 2008.

NOAA recently published an answer to that specific website. They took the 70 stations that surfacestations.org designated "best" or "good" and created a time series based on them. Then they used all 1218 stations to create another time series. Both of those time series are plotted on page 3. They're practically identical.

Also, scientists don't have to blindly trust these sensors because surface temperature measurements are also confirmed by satellite measurements and proxies such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits.

Actually, the research was done on mice and cultured skin cells. Choice quotes from the NHS Choices article which discusses and links to the actual research:

• "While the newspaper suggests that the findings are directly relevant to children’s health, this was not investigated by the researchers, though they did suggest their results may have some application in the management of inflammatory skin disorders."
• "This laboratory study ... investigated whether chemicals produced by the bacteria Staphylococcus epidermidis could inhibit skin inflammation."
• "The researchers state that finding out how such bacteria exist on the skin without causing inflammatory responses could help them understand whether these bacteria have a role in immune responses in general"

So it looks like we can't really draw any conclusions based on this, though it sounds logical that exposure to all sorts of bacteria will keep your immune system focussed on the task in hand rather than (e.g.) psoriasis. As is so often the way, the Swedish are way ahead of us: "In a typical Danish Forest School, young children from 3 years are taken into the forest for 4 hours each day of the week."

Here, let me shine some light on the subject.

I'm pretty happy with this result: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v382/n6587/abs/382146a0.html

CO2 concentrations measured at the middle of the ocean, and changes in the yearly duration of photosynthesis, works for me.

Consider this result, and the data it references. A few rogue emails are just noise, not signal.

The result in the Nature letter, which I recall appearing in some other form a few years earlier, is the first information that made me go "oh shit" -- it's based on a long record of observations designed to minimize local effects, and it shows both CO2 increase, and evidence of warming. (And the whole crowd that's blathering on about water vapor and solar cycles and failure to measure X-rays and Mars and Jupiter -- sorry, that's been looked at, you guys are nuts and seriously in denial. Most of this shit can be checked with a few mouse clicks nowadays.)

Other e-mails routinely discuss efforts to manipulate and massage the data to account for various political difficulties the data are causing them. For example, one e-mail discusses using a particular modifier to minimize a warming "blip" in the 1940s

Yeah, because if there's one thing the Global Warming Scientific Conspiracy wants to do most, it's to minimize evidence of global warming.

In fact, the 1940s warming blip has been discussed in the literature for some time now, as part of a debate over whether it's real or a data artifact. One of the most recent discussions of this debate is in this paper, one of the authors of which is from the UK CRU group. Here they suggest that it is in fact a data artifact, and ought to be corrected so reflect less ocean warming than previously believed.

For some reason, skeptics froth at the mouth about how the surface temperature record ought to be revised downward due to supposed biases, but when climate scientists develop a downward revision due to actual biases, suddenly it's "damning evidence" from "fear mongerers".

More here.

Since you didn't bother to do any research before tossing around allegations of lying, nor bothering to figure out what exactly "Mike's Nature trick" actually was, let me.

A quick google search of "michael nature global temperature" points to : "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries" by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes from Nature 392, 779-787 (23 April 1998) | doi:10.1038/33859

This was a a seminal article in the climatetology community. Mann et al took tree core samples and estimated the global temperature by measuring the spacing between tree rings. (Big rings are caused by rapid growth, which is in turn caused by warmer temperatures. Small rings, slow growth, cooler temperatures.) The fact that tree ring sizes are dependent on temperature has been a long established fact.

Let me now quote the abstract of this article in full:

Spatially resolved global reconstructions of annual surface temperature patterns over the past six centuries are based on the multivariate calibration of widely distributed high-resolution proxy climate indicators. Time-dependent correlations of the reconstructions with time-series records representing changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations, solar irradiance, and volcanic aerosols suggest that each of these factors has contributed to the climate variability of the past 400 years, with greenhouse gases emerging as the dominant forcing during the twentieth century. Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperatures for three of the past eight years are warmer than any other year since (at least) ad 1400.

Mann et al tried to create an accurate record of the global temperature by augmenting the estimated temperatures from the tree ring data with actual measured temperatures from 1981 and 1961 since these are actual known temperatures. This is known as "the MBH98 reconstruction".

Now hang on. Here's where your allegation of "systematic suppression of data" falls all apart.

In 2003, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published (*gasp*) Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series, whose abstract reads:

The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998, "MBH98" hereafter) for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects. We detail these errors and defects. We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated source data. The major finding is that the values in the early 15th century exceed any values in the 20th century. The particular "hockey stick" shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature index that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 — is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.

So the worldwide conspiracy of climatetologists breaks down when they behave like scientists, and try to duplicate each others' work, fail to, and publish corrections, and warnings saying, "Hey! You this data set we've all been using? It might be wrong."

Thus begins The Hockey Stick Controversy, named after the shape of the curve at the very end of MBH98 reconstruction. Far from being suppressed, it's investigated quite thoroughly

Of course they built in a backdoor for their own personal uses. Is anyone stupid enough to imagine otherwise? Consider the recent CIA purchase of http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/ In-Q-Tel. Or the well-known fact that the CIA has its fingers all over Facebook. Do you suckers believe for one instant that everything you do and write isn't being scribbled into some Internal Security goon's harddrive somewhere? I have a friend who worked for Juniper, and he personally knew that AT&T was buying their equipment to route all its traffic through NSA spook territory before hitting the rest of the web. East Germany represent!

Every day the United States comes closer and closer to becoming the USSR. A disaster in Afghanistan, monitoring its citizens without a warrant, attacking Christianity, Islam, and other religions, use of secret prisons and torture, central economic planning, the list goes on and on and on and on.

And still the rabid conformists, http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090624/full/news.2009.593.html murderers of civilization, take out their Two Minutes Hate on the messenger.

If you subscribe to the RNA world hypothesis this isn't that much of hot news - at least to me. There was a paper in nature earlier this year where a group of scientists managed to produce uracil, but that wasn't the main point. They also managed to produce more molecules and gave some good arguments for a RNA world. This is not just a repetition of the Miller-Experiment, as some poster suggested. Saying that is basically saying that cars build on assembly lines today are just a repetition of the production of the T-Model...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/nature08013.html (abstract only, FA requires a subscription)

Verterons, as in ...bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth... ? That makes a verteron a fart particle.

Calories In vs. Calories out - at least at the level that any reasonable person can measure it - is worthless. I that it's easy to remember and even sounds kind of cool - but science doesn't support it. There are plenty of studies that show things eating the same number of calories and having dramatically different weight gain or loss.

Measuring what you eat and estimating how much you burn by your daily activities is clearly not enough to accurately determine if a person will gain or lose weight.

Here's two studies - you can find many, many, many more....

http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v17/n11/abs/oby2009264a.html
Here's a study where different groups of mice ate the same number of calories, but at different times of the day/night, and the different groups saw different levels of weight gain/loss.

http://www.reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/206775.html
Here's a study where different groups of mice ate the same number of calories, but one group had a low-gi diet and another group had a high-gi diet. The high-GI diet mice gained more weight than the low-GI diet mice.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, and I like the 'gist' of the Hacker Diet. But the entire premise of the diet doesn't hold up. Not in any way that a regular person can measure. Maybe, the habits like how much you sleep or when you eat or the GI index affect either how much you burn (even though your activities are no different) or how effective your digestion is - but until you've got a magic toilet that tells you how many calories you've just dumped off and a watch that will tell you exactly how many calories you are burning - it's not useful.

But yeah, the general idea of eating less, eating better, and exercising are all generally good things. Those things are hardly unique to the 'Hacker Diet' though. I don't know of anyone who eats healthy food, in moderation, and follows some sort of physical fitness routine who isn't in decent shape; but grossly oversimplifying what's going on doesn't benefit anyone.

It’s a surprise to have found the signature of positrons during a lightning storm, Briggs said.

No, it's not.

There is a long history of observations and theorizing about gamma ray flashes from lightning strikes and ball lightning, starting in the early 1970's :

Is Ball Lightning caused by Antimatter Meteorites?
D. E. T. F. ASHBY, C. WHITEHEAD, Nature 230, 180-182 (19 March 1971).

This has also been observed in connection with "sprites".

And from thunderclouds without lightning.

Oh, and it's also been observed from space before :

RHESSI Observations of Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes

Now, not all of these reports include a positron annihilation signature at 511 KeV. But, 511 KeV emissions were explicitly reported from lightning in the 1970's. And, considering that lightning / thunderstorm related gamma rays are routinely observed with energies up to 10 MeV, there is plenty of energy to create positrons, and so I wouldn't be surprised if all of these reports included the positron annihilation line (or, at least the ones with sensitivity in that energy range).
 

It’s a surprise to have found the signature of positrons during a lightning storm, Briggs said.

No, it's not.

There is a long history of observations and theorizing about gamma ray flashes from lightning strikes and ball lightning, starting in the early 1970's :

Is Ball Lightning caused by Antimatter Meteorites?
D. E. T. F. ASHBY, C. WHITEHEAD, Nature 230, 180-182 (19 March 1971).

This has also been observed in connection with "sprites".

And from thunderclouds without lightning.

Oh, and it's also been observed from space before :

RHESSI Observations of Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes

Now, not all of these reports include a positron annihilation signature at 511 KeV. But, 511 KeV emissions were explicitly reported from lightning in the 1970's. And, considering that lightning / thunderstorm related gamma rays are routinely observed with energies up to 10 MeV, there is plenty of energy to create positrons, and so I wouldn't be surprised if all of these reports included the positron annihilation line (or, at least the ones with sensitivity in that energy range).
 

If you're talking about the Missoula Floods, they couldn't have contributed "several meters" of sea level rise. Lake Missoula only had a volume of about 2200 cubic kilometers. The Greenland ice sheet (2.8 million cubic kilometers) is thought to hold an extra 7 meters worth of sea level. Using that scaling factor and ignoring density differences between water and ice, that works out to about 0.5 centimeters of potential sea level rise from Lake Missoula. And it's also contested whether the whole lake could have drained "in a matter of days", or in smaller bursts spread out over a century.

I know of other abrupt drainage events as the last glacial period ended, which ultimately released volumes of water similar to Missoula (e.g., from Lake Agassiz). But I've never heard of and can't imagine any drainage event that could release millions of cubic kilometers of water in a matter of days.

This paper (summarized here) is of interest. It's not talking about "abrupt" drainage, but "rapid" sea level rise. It goes back to the last interglacial, i.e., after the end of the next-to-last glacial period. This was about 115,000 years ago, too early to be related to global flood myths. The paper describes evidence for 5 centimeter/year sea level rise sustained for 50 years, amounting to at least 2.5 meters (8 feet) of sea level rise over half a century. That's the fastest multi-meter sea level rise event I know of. It's really rather tremendous if you think about it, equivalent to a third of the entire Greenland ice sheet disintegrating in a few decades. It will be interesting to see if this interpretation is confirmed by other researchers.

If you're talking about the Missoula Floods, they couldn't have contributed "several meters" of sea level rise. Lake Missoula only had a volume of about 2200 cubic kilometers. The Greenland ice sheet (2.8 million cubic kilometers) is thought to hold an extra 7 meters worth of sea level. Using that scaling factor and ignoring density differences between water and ice, that works out to about 0.5 centimeters of potential sea level rise from Lake Missoula. And it's also contested whether the whole lake could have drained "in a matter of days", or in smaller bursts spread out over a century.

I know of other abrupt drainage events as the last glacial period ended, which ultimately released volumes of water similar to Missoula (e.g., from Lake Agassiz). But I've never heard of and can't imagine any drainage event that could release millions of cubic kilometers of water in a matter of days.

This paper (summarized here) is of interest. It's not talking about "abrupt" drainage, but "rapid" sea level rise. It goes back to the last interglacial, i.e., after the end of the next-to-last glacial period. This was about 115,000 years ago, too early to be related to global flood myths. The paper describes evidence for 5 centimeter/year sea level rise sustained for 50 years, amounting to at least 2.5 meters (8 feet) of sea level rise over half a century. That's the fastest multi-meter sea level rise event I know of. It's really rather tremendous if you think about it, equivalent to a third of the entire Greenland ice sheet disintegrating in a few decades. It will be interesting to see if this interpretation is confirmed by other researchers.

There is also a theory, and evidence, that something similar happened in Europe, separating Britain from the continent and forming the Straits of Dover. Modern civilization would see something like this coming, as the article itself shows, but there is little chance our progeny will still be around when it happens.

For those of us who have a subscription to Nature but not to NYT for whatever reason: Here's the original article.

This was proposed by G. Amelino-Camelia et al. back in 1998; here is a review from 2004. Even though the wavelengths of even the most energetic gamma rays are much, much, longer than the Planck length, roughness in space time at the Planck length adds up over cosmological distances, and could be in principle detectable. (The Planck length can be thought of heuristically as the length at which the gravitational effects of virtual particles should be strong enough to create virtual black holes; general relativity cannot be ignored in quantum mechanics at that scale, and vice versa.) What this current test is ruling out is a particular violation of Lorentz invariance - a variation of photon speed with energy. There were similarly negative results using radiation from the Crab nebula in 2003.

It should be noted that this does not rule out quantum gravity - it seems pretty clear that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics cannot both apply at the Planck scale. What this work is doing is beginning to constrain models of quantum gravity (there is as yet no general theory that makes precise predictions). What would be really cool is to detect some effects, which would maybe help nudge the theorists along.

This was proposed by G. Amelino-Camelia et al. back in 1998; here is a review from 2004. Even though the wavelengths of even the most energetic gamma rays are much, much, longer than the Planck length, roughness in space time at the Planck length adds up over cosmological distances, and could be in principle detectable. (The Planck length can be thought of heuristically as the length at which the gravitational effects of virtual particles should be strong enough to create virtual black holes; general relativity cannot be ignored in quantum mechanics at that scale, and vice versa.) What this current test is ruling out is a particular violation of Lorentz invariance - a variation of photon speed with energy. There were similarly negative results using radiation from the Crab nebula in 2003.

It should be noted that this does not rule out quantum gravity - it seems pretty clear that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics cannot both apply at the Planck scale. What this work is doing is beginning to constrain models of quantum gravity (there is as yet no general theory that makes precise predictions). What would be really cool is to detect some effects, which would maybe help nudge the theorists along.

The Moon has highlands and Mares. The highlands are old (saturated by craters at all scales) and mostly made of a type of granite, while the Mare are relatively younger (not saturated by craters at the km scale) and made of basalt lava. This basalt lava is mostly thought to have come from the late heavy bombardment - a period of massive collisions on the Moon about 3.9 billion years ago which is now hypothesized to be from a disruption of the asteroid belt from the orbital migration of the outer planets.

That's what I'm thinking too. GCR intensity is highest when sunspot activity is lowest, generally modulating on an 11 year cycle. But solar irradiance also varies at the same frequency; the Sun is actually (~0.1%) brighter when more sunspots are present, contrary to intuition.

If tree growth between 1953-2006 really is highest when sunspot activity is lowest, that implies trees grow faster when the Sun is very slightly dimmer. Weird. Their diffusion explanation makes sense, but as they note this cloud condensation effect is supposed to be a very small effect. Perhaps it's just large enough to be noticed in these proxy data, though. I agree, however, that a link to solar irradiance is more intuitively appealing, and it's not immediately obvious how it could be ruled out.

I'd bet they've already considered this issue and ruled it out, possibly by using satellite measurements of solar irradiance and solar wind over the last few decades. They're supposed to be tightly correlated, but if the solar wind varies even slightly differently than solar irradiance it should be possible to see which is causing this variation in growth rates.