Slashdot Mirror

Human-induced climate change is real... but this article is alarmism.

A hint: please don't use Mother Jones as a source for science information.

Ignoring that the article is originally from The Telegraph - here, fetch: https://www.nature.com/article...

Climate change can increase the risk of conditions that exceed human thermoregulatory capacity 1–6 . Although numerous stud- ies report increased mortality associated with extreme heat events 1–7 , quantifying the global risk of heat-related mortality remains challenging due to a lack of comparable data on heat-related deaths 2–5 . Here we conducted a global analysis of documented lethal heat events to identify the climatic conditions associated with human death and then quantified the current and projected occurrence of such deadly climatic conditions worldwide. We reviewed papers published between 1980 and 2014, and found 783 cases of excess human mortality associated with heat from 164 cities in 36 countries. Based on the climatic conditions of those lethal heat events, we identified a global threshold beyond which daily mean surface air temperature and relative humidity become deadly. Around 30% of the world’s population is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year. By 2100, this percentage is projected to increase to 48% under a scenario with drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and 74% under a scenario of growing emissions. An increasing threat to human life from excess heat now seems almost inevitable, but will be greatly aggravated if greenhouse gases are not considerably reduced.

If you want shade, wear a hat. And humidity on top of temperature is definitely more dangerous.

Based on information from death certificates, 10,649 deaths were attributed to weather-related causes in the United States during 2006â"2010. Nearly one-third of the deaths were attributed to excessive natural heat, and almost two-thirds were attributed to excessive natural cold.

That said, here's a link to the original paper in Nature rather than some spin piece in Mother Jones. The 2100 prediction is outright extrapolation, and there's not quite enough history for me to feel confident about the trendline. But there is enough of a historical trend not to dismiss this as mere alarmism as some have posted.

Then you will be happy to know that scientists are now studying why the models for global temperature are greatly overestimating the amount of warming that is expected to occur. Models for temperature increase are as much as 9% higher when compared to actual temperatures measured from satellite measurements over the last 15 years.

The study implies that models of historical temperature are undervaluing historical warmth, and the models over-estimate recent years' warmth, in order to create a linearly increasing warming trend; when in reality, historical temperatures are showing that the actual warming trends over the last decades are not significantly higher.

This is the root of the political debate -- how much is it actually warming given sparse historical data, how much has the source data been manipulated to show warming, how much time is there to correct the "problem", and how much money has to be redistributed to politically connected parties to correct the "problem".

Here's a pro tip: look up the result in other sources using google, find a more useful source that tells you things like the name of the journal the research was published in.

In this case it was Nature Climate Change, a relatively new offshoot of the prestigious journal Nature. Nature Climate Change was established in 2011, but by last year ut gad achieved an impact factor of over 19, making it the most cited journal in its field. This doesn't mean it's infallible, but it means it doesn't have to scrape the bottom of the research barrel to fill its pages. This paper may be right or it may be wrong, but it's pretty much guaranteed not to be garbage.

Knowing the journal name makes it trivial to find the original paper, or at least the abstract.

Still it is never possible to know the significance of a paper or a study in the short term. You have to wait until it is cited in a review paper, which will summarize all the supporting and conflicting results that followed any particular piece of research. You should never make a life decision (change what you eat) or policy decision based on any single paper until it has been cited and characterized as sound in a review paper published in a high impact factor journal.

Here's a pro tip: look up the result in other sources using google, find a more useful source that tells you things like the name of the journal the research was published in.

In this case it was Nature Climate Change, a relatively new offshoot of the prestigious journal Nature. Nature Climate Change was established in 2011, but by last year ut gad achieved an impact factor of over 19, making it the most cited journal in its field. This doesn't mean it's infallible, but it means it doesn't have to scrape the bottom of the research barrel to fill its pages. This paper may be right or it may be wrong, but it's pretty much guaranteed not to be garbage.

Knowing the journal name makes it trivial to find the original paper, or at least the abstract.

Still it is never possible to know the significance of a paper or a study in the short term. You have to wait until it is cited in a review paper, which will summarize all the supporting and conflicting results that followed any particular piece of research. You should never make a life decision (change what you eat) or policy decision based on any single paper until it has been cited and characterized as sound in a review paper published in a high impact factor journal.

Abstract of the original article: https://www.nature.com/nclimat...
Press release from Nature East Asia: http://www.natureasia.com/en/r...
Press release from U. Hawaii Manoa (the institution of the lead authors): http://www.hawaii.edu/news/201...
Article at phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-...
Article at Science Daily: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

Interactive map of number of deadly heat days: https://maps.esri.com/globalri...

(If you don't like waiting years, then let's look at previous testable predictions and see how well they held up. Anyone have a list of testable predictions?)

Here's one. I cribbed the following from PowerLine.

Nature Geoscience ponders the problem of why observed temperatures in the troposphere are not matching up with what the climate models have predicted. The lead author, Ben Santer, is one of the leading climatistas, so this article can’t be written off as “denier” distortions. (One of the co-authors is Michael Mann.)

Link to the paper is here.
I'm willing to bet there will not be a /. story about this one.

Causes of differences in model and satellite tropospheric warming rates

Abstract

In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble. Because observations and coupled model simulations do not have the same phasing of natural internal variability, such decadal differences in simulated and observed warming rates invariably occur. Here we analyse global-mean tropospheric temperatures from satellites and climate model simulations to examine whether warming rate differences over the satellite era can be explained by internal climate variability alone. We find that in the last two decades of the twentieth century, differences between modelled and observed tropospheric temperature trends are broadly consistent with internal variability. Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed; warming rate differences are generally outside the range of trends arising from internal variability. The probability that multi-decadal internal variability fully explains the asymmetry between the late twentieth and early twenty-first century results is low (between zero and about 9%). It is also unlikely that this asymmetry is due to the combined effects of internal variability and a model error in climate sensitivity. We conclude that model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.

No shit, Sherlock.

Where's that "97% consensus" now?

You WANTED mankind to be "destroying the planet" so you could make yourself feel superior "because you cared". So you POLITICIZED climate science.

So now you reap what you sowed - every damn thing that doesn't align with alarmist Chicken Fucking Little screaming about how "AGW is destroying things!" is going to get tossed in your fucking face.

It wasn't? This paper says the "widely" believed age is 2-3 million years and the paper argues for much older origins, 7-10 million years old. The fossils we are discussing here are on the order of 300,000 years old which is well within both ranges. Yes, there have been some periods where it received more rain than it currently does but it has been a very dry place for a long time.

It make the process cheaper, not more expensive (by reducing the number of masks)

You are so dating yourself. Just ten seconds on Wikipedia concerning EUV lithography would shave a decade off your musty knowledge.

The whole point of the post-2009 lithographic era is that nothing traditionally used as a benchmark of progress comes for free.

Advantage: fewer masks
Disadvantage: vastly longer step time

Moore's law is still hobbling along, but it definitely lost a testicle circa 2004–2009. You can see it in any honest graph.

Even this article lies a bit.

The chips are down for Moore's law — 9 February 2016

Transistors per chip still kinda going up on the same trend, as always.

But what they don't tell you is that there's an entire CPU inside your CPU devoted to turning those nice transistors off if they work too hard.

Welcome to union rules.

It's just like the gig economy where you only get twenty hours per week on average, but they won't tell which hours ahead of time, so you can't actually get yourself another 20-hour gig to achieve full-time gainful employment.

Official unemployment down; hours and hours of Counter-Strike alone at home (waiting for the phone to ring) way way up.

FWIW as you noted, the cones in our eyes have "band-pass" filters in order form them so to accurate receive colors is not really that important the for the RGB spectra of the pixels match the LMS (long medium short) band-pass filters of the cones in your eye, only that the relative response is maintained.

Having said that the way you sense colors is not at all how your eye receives the stimulus from the cones in your eyes. First of all, the colors are not sensed as relative responses, but opponent color responses: L-M (aka R-G), L+M-S (aka Y-B) and intensity. This makes for some interesting colors that are not sensed (e.g., reddish-green and yellowish-blue) and even some "impossible" colors. This amplifies any mismatch in your "filters" so unless they are *exact*, you will sense the difference.

Fortunately (unfortunately?) the way we perceive colors is different than the way we sense colors. Your brain is really painting the colors for your perception in your visual cortex after it's done some "white-balancing" too so what color you remember is a significantly influence by your setting and context. Remember the blue/black dress that broke the internet (or was it gold)?

Long story short, what you think of as perceiving color is really only "hinted" at by the cone response in your eyes. Any ability to distinguish "shades" of color is really a contrast response, not a color frequency response.

Back to this new technology, of course if you are a "traditionalist" and still believe in absolute color and frequency responses and gamuts, probably won't like this new technology at all given these pathetic gamut tracings, but if you follow a bit down the rabbit hole of your visual cortex, and look at what was once possible with Kinemacolor a (simple two-color) processes and realize that what most people think of as color, really isn't how you perceive color at all, it is really all in your head.

Except destroying the habitat we live in and need for survival is jumping off a cliff, and everyone else is smart enough to see it and take appropriate measures.

I don't get who this We everybody keeps talking about is. It certainly can't be the United States, our GHG emissions are trending down, our transportation fleet has had significant emissions controls for the last 50 years and our country has more trees than it did in the 1850's. Our world is getting greener, not just the US and it's due primarily to CO2 fertilization.

We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models show that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend Zhu, Z., et al., 2016. Greening of the Earth and its drivers

Most of the habitat destruction is done by poor brown people trying to law their way out of energy poverty; environmentalism is a middle-class luxury.

Looking at the graphs, the models seem to reproduce the overall features pretty well. Heres the comparison graph from the paper you cite: http://www.pnas.org/content/11...

There are still some variances in the details, but overall, it's the way science works-- you start with getting the overall shape right, and then progressively refine details.

I should point out that it's hard to match the details of the Holocene thermal max because the details aren't really known. It's not even really clear if it was a global effect, or local-- looks like the arctic and northern Europe had a thermal max, but southern Europe cooling, and it looks like the warming was in summer, but not winter. Check out, for example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou... http://www.medeltid.su.se/Nedl...

Yep, that is a peer-reviewed paper published by actual climatologists. So much for that "consensus", eh?

It's very tempting to say "here's one paper by one group that shows a discrepancy, and thus that overturns everything we thought we knew!" -- but that's only the way science works in the movies. In the real world, science really is a cooperative endeavor. Don't focus on any one paper-- that part about scientific consensus is actually important. You have many eyes looking at every paper, and many papers looking at different aspects of the problem.

But, in this case, the paper you're looking at merely says "here are some places where we need more details" (in the measurements, not just the models-- keep in mind that we know a lot more about contemporary climate than we do about the climate 10,000 years ago-- we directly measure the solar irradiance, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the global cloud cover, and the downwelling infrared, for example; all things that have to be inferred from proxies for the climate 10,000 years ago.

There's no real order: Hearts and kidney efforts are well underway. Liver might be a bigger priority than kidneys actually. Dialysis is terrible compared to where we need to be with kidney function, but IIRC it's much further than where we are with liver dysfunction. Plus livers seem to have a better ability to organize and repair itself. The kidney would need a lot higher architectural precision, so it's a more distant goal unfortunately.

http://www.nature.com/news/hum...

A human nose has around 400 types of scent receptors. When the smell of coffee wafts through a room, for example, specific receptors in the nose detect molecular components of the odour, eliciting a series of neural responses that draw oneâ(TM)s attention to the coffee pot. But many details of that sequence are still unknown.

âoeThe relationship between the number of odorants that we can discriminate and the number of receptors that we have is unclear,â says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Some scientists assume that having more types of scent receptors indicates a more-sensitive sniffer.

2004 study

http://journals.plos.org/plosb...

However, some recent behavioral studies suggest that primates, including humans, have relatively good senses of smell. Resolution of this paradox may come from a larger perspective on the biology of smell. Here we begin by reassessing several overlooked factors: the structure of the nasal cavity, retronasal smell, olfactory brain areas, and language. In these arenas, humans may have advantages which outweigh their lower numbers of receptors. It appears that in the olfactory system, olfactory receptor genes do not map directly onto behavior; rather, behavior is the outcome of multiple factors. If human smell perception is better than we thought, it may have played a more important role in human evolution than is usually acknowledged.

Comparing the data on smell detection thresholds shows that humans not only perform as well or better than other primates, they also perform as well or better than other mammals. When tested for thresholds to the odors of a series of straight-chain (aliphatic) aldehydes, dogs do better on the short chain compounds, but humans perform as well or slightly better than dogs on the longer chain compounds, and humans perform significantly better than rats (Laska et al. 2000). Similar results have been obtained with other types of odors.

A third type of study demonstrating human olfactory abilities shows that in tests of odor detection, humans outperform the most sensitive measuring instruments such as the gas chromatograph.

2006 study
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

A surprising new study suggests that people can track a scent across a grassy field--at least if they're willing to get down on their hands and knees and put their noses to the ground. The findings are unlikely to put hunting hounds and drug sniffing dogs out of work, but they may earn a little respect for the poorly regarded human sense of smell.

Humans are widely believed to be poor at tracking scents, especially when compared to other mammals such as dogs and rodents. But few had ever put that idea to the test. A research team led by Jess Porter and Noam Sobel at the University of California, Berkeley, dipped 10 meters of twine in chocolate essence and laid it in a field to form two straight lines connected at a 135Â angle. Then they blindfolded 32 undergraduate students and had them don earmuffs, thick gloves and kneepads to prevent them from using sensory cues other than smell. When set loose in the field, two-thirds of the subjects successfully followed the scent, zigzagging back and forth across the path like a dog tracking a pheasant, the researchers report online 17 December in Nature Neuroscience.

Nearly all the subjects reported that the task was challenging, Porter says, but four of them got a chance to improve with practice. Over the course of several days, they learned to follow the trail faster and deviate less. Even so, their performance remained well below what other researchers have reported in dogs.

And this ignores the not uncommon case of people who have more sensitive sense of smell than average.

This reminds me of a field-test, ten years ago, where researchers had volunteers follow a scent trail on all fours. It turns out that most did surprisingly well, even getting better at it with repetition. So we, humans, are actually pretty good at this. It’s just that we’re no longer quite comfortable putting (and keeping) our noses smack against the ground to take a really good whiff of whatever was down there.

See this article (from 2006) in Nature: People track scents in same way as dogs.

In the end, they do say that “dogs are still better at picking up the whiff of a particular person from a discarded item of clothing”. Still, I bet that with some serious training and dedication to the job, gifted people (perhaps like those employed as “noses” in the perfume industry) would probably do better than expected.

As reference see here.

Also, slashdot had a great posting maybe a year ago that I've lost track of and dont have time to look up about a huge Israeli study in regards to nutrition that was showing some interesting results in regards to how relative to the individual how the body processes food is.

Yes, this is also an area of research I am very interested in. I think I know the study you are referring to.
https://genie.weizmann.ac.il/p...

Here is another nice review,
https://genomemedicine.biomedc...

And this one was on Slashdot a few months ago,
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Nope, I mean to the scientific paper in Nature Photonics, not press-release...

Like this: http://www.nature.com/nphoton/...

Paul B.

Paper here http://nature.com/articles/doi... [nature.com] also,

here, if you don't have access to Nature (which I don't).

Paper here http://nature.com/articles/doi... also, would not be surprised if humanoids made it to North America several times prior to 130,000 years considering they've been around since about a million years - that's a lot of time to find your way out of Africa to a different continent by one means or another.

the data has always been public

That's laughably wrong. See, e.g., here.

The reference "12" refers to this citation: Roe, G. H., Baker, M. B. & Herla, F. Centennial glacier retreat as categorical evidence of regional climate change. Nat. Geosci. 10, 95–99 (2017).

That citation refers to this paper: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou...

With full copy available here: https://www.google.com/url?q=h...

Read it if you can, and weep.

Yes, in fact you can know that. You really should read the report and the supplement.

Specifically notice "Kaskawulsh Glacier began to retreat in the nineteenth century, with retreat accelerating in the late twent ieth and early twenty-first centuries. Between 1956 and 2007, for example, the glacier retreated 655 m (ref. 9). Roe et al. 12 recently developed a method to test a glacier’s retreat against the null hypothesis that retre at was due to natural climate variability. Applying this analysis to the Kaskawulsh Glacier (see Methods and Supplementary Fig. 1), we f ind there is only a 0.5% chance that retreat over the past century—and by extension, the observed piracy—could have happened under a constant climate. We therefore conclude that retreat of Kaskawulsh Glacier is attributable to observed warming over t he industrial era."

If you have enough background to understand the contents then review the supplement with which shows conclusively the exact opposite of what you say, and in fact supports the fact that anthropogenic global warming (human-caused) is the trigger mechanism for the melting of the ice wall bounding the source lake for this river; the destruction of that caused the re-routing and all fallout damages.

Yes, in fact you can know that. You really should read the report and the supplement.

Specifically notice "Kaskawulsh Glacier began to retreat in the nineteenth century, with retreat accelerating in the late twent ieth and early twenty-first centuries. Between 1956 and 2007, for example, the glacier retreated 655 m (ref. 9). Roe et al. 12 recently developed a method to test a glacier’s retreat against the null hypothesis that retre at was due to natural climate variability. Applying this analysis to the Kaskawulsh Glacier (see Methods and Supplementary Fig. 1), we f ind there is only a 0.5% chance that retreat over the past century—and by extension, the observed piracy—could have happened under a constant climate. We therefore conclude that retreat of Kaskawulsh Glacier is attributable to observed warming over t he industrial era."

If you have enough background to understand the contents then review the supplement with which shows conclusively the exact opposite of what you say, and in fact supports the fact that anthropogenic global warming (human-caused) is the trigger mechanism for the melting of the ice wall bounding the source lake for this river; the destruction of that caused the re-routing and all fallout damages.

What makes you think that they haven't produced reports stating what proportion of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from what source.

The oceans and terrestrial biosphere are net carbon sinks. They have sunk 55-60% of the carbon emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels and land use change.
All the increase is due to human activity. Natural systems are balancing some of it. (Hence ocean acidification and CO2 fertilization).

In the past 50 years, the fraction of CO2 emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO2 by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability.

They hunted food, now here's another piece of easy prey, why not eat it? Why the assumption (the article doesn't point to evidence) that it was ritualistic? This is a very poorly written article for a "Science" site. We eat all kinds of animals that have fewer calories, WTF does that have to do with it?

The submitter should have linked to the original article that Science linked to at http://www.nature.com/articles...
Recent studies of Palaeolithic cannibalism6,9,11,12,13,14,53 have done much to illustrate that the motivations and social contexts behind episodes of cannibalism go beyond the simplistic ‘nutritional’ or ‘ritual’ label

And the Conclusion of the Nature article doesn't agree either...
Undoubtedly, each episode of Palaeolithic cannibalism would have had its own specific cultural context and reason for consumption. In some instances, this may represent a more practical or opportunistic approach to food procurement, for example, the consumption of individuals who die of natural causes within the social group. Such an interpretation cannot be entirely dismissed given that the nutritional value of the human body is not particularly high, and hominins regularly exploited faunal remains that were lower in calories with no cultural influence.

The original source is Nature http://www.nature.com/articles...

I can't find anything this side of the paywall that says that they controlled for economic factors that lead to or were caused by the shutdown of these plants. Ordinarily poor economic conditions is the prime cause of low birth weights.

i want nuclear to win out on its actual merits. Save the coal for distributed micro-energy needs.

For those who'd like a link to the paper: Preventing intrusive memories after trauma via a brief intervention involving Tetris computer game play in the emergency department: a proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial

Um, the point is, dare I say this, that there's very hard science and there's soft science. There's findings which are highly testable, repeatedly, and there's findings which are verging on the non-reproduceable.

No. "Soft sciences" refers to fields which arrogant scientists feel are less deserving due to subject matter, not reproducibility. Social sciences are described as soft science.

Your opinion on social science as a "real" science is up to you, but reproducibility is an issue no matter how "hard" the science is.

I used to believe global warming 100% and assume it was all correct, because I normally trust science, but then started to wonder why people were touting consensus and virtual certainty.

Because obviously scientific findings don't change society by themselves. At a bare minimum, you must publish your results or the scientific findings may as well have never been made. With even non-controversial findings, scientists need to do more, results simply don't speak for themselves, you need to write review articles placing the findings in context, issue press statements in journals, present it at a conference. And that's just to get it known within the scientific community in the absence of opposed nefarious interests.

With climate change specifically, you have powerful industries and motivated ideologues trying to cast FUD on the findings. There's an effort to convince the public that it's far from certain. This approach is having it's intended effects. Scientists and people who realize climate change is happening would be idiots to merely keep presenting dry papers when the public is convinced by scumbags in suits saying "Well, they don't REALLY know do they?"

They are easily detectable on earth - for example see here (picture here). They've also been detected in the atmosphere of Venus, which has winds over 200 miles per hour.

Here's an article from Nature that goes into some light detail on the role of mosquitoes in the ecosystem and the possible consequences of their eradication.

http://www.nature.com/news/201...

Short story: eradicating just the Aedes Aegypti and suchlike human bloodsuckers would be a good thing with little to no consequence.
Killing all the mosquitoes would probably have little noticeable effect except in the Artic tundra where they exist is vast numbers. No one knows what effect killing off all the Aedes in the Artic would have - maybe excellent news, maybe bad up there.

Here is the actual study, in case anyone wants to read it. TFA is not so informative. I am interested in reading it and figuring out how exactly they came to the 50% measurement.

This is not the paper described in the summary, but rather an older paper with some of the same authors. The paper referenced in the summary was published online yesterday in Nature Climate Change. I'm sorry that I can't give a direct link to a .pdf (yay for paywalls keeping all of the non-ivory tower plebs out! huzzah!), but for those with access, the paper can be found at Influence of high-latitude atmospheric circulation changes on summertime Arctic sea ice. For those without access to an academic library, the first author provides an email contact. One presumes that a polite request would yield the full text of the paper.

Years ago I was gifted a book by some very nice people after I gave a talk. The book was How to Develop a Super Power Memory by Harry Lorayne. It was full of practical mnemonics and methods to remember numbers, peoples' names etc. etc. It also delved into the history of the use of memory. The take away? The brain is like a muscle. Use it or lose it. I never became obsessed on the subject, but twenty years later I still use many of the tools outlined in the book to remember things. Mindfullness is a big fad these days. But really it is just watching what you are doing, paying attention, remembering what you need to remember. Like anything else it is a skill that can be sharpened using a set of tried and true tools.

Now permit me to digress onto a related topic. A lot of sturm und drang these days about the dangers of AI. I for one am not too panicked by the prospect of Skynet and its ilk. But to my mind one of the very real downsides of AI is the offloading of memory tasks and degradation of important human abilities. The brain is energy efficient (read: lazy ass) if it knows something is recorded elsewhere or readily available elsewhere it will be more likely to forget it. Look at how our geographic sense deteriorates with GPS.

These days I make an effort not to always Google something the moment I can't summon it into memory. I will give it time and the name of the actress or politician or writer will often percolate up. And if I am returning to a place for a second time I try to visualize my route beforehand and leave my navigation system out of it. Sure. If I am tormented endlessly, or in a heated conversation, or lost, or pressed for time, it makes sense to resort to the computational oxygen around me. But I try to avoid over dependency on it all.

Not in the vagina, but there are taste buds in your colon ... and in your stomach... and pancreas ... and lungs ... and on sperm. You don't perceive taste from them, fortunately, but they do trigger other responses in your body.

The problem is "race" is such a nebulous term. It has no scientific underpinning

Bullshit. The differences between races, such as susceptibility to certain diseases and ability to digest certain foods is scientifically established. The physical features (round vs. narrow eyes, skin color, hair) are even more self-evident.

None of it is a "social construct"...

One field after another is showing serious replication problems. You can continue to dismiss those fields as "not real science" for only so long. Eventually, there won't be anything left to call 'science'.

Physics isn't immune to this either, you know. After all, physicists seem to think there's a problem, so you might want to rethink your position before the next big study comes out and kicks your sacred cow. Rather than hold to that silly 'not real science' defensive line, you might want to start thinking about why this problem is so widespread, and what can be done to fix it.

Sticking your head in the sand is probably the most harmful thing you could do to science. I know, you're terrified that people "won't believe in science" if they knew how it worked in practice. I say, that's a good thing. Science isn't a religion. If you continue to treat it like one, rejecting all criticisms, refusing to adapt and change in response to internal problems, then it ought to be dismissed. What would be the point in keeping it around in such a state?

1. "Adjective nouns" need to have similarity to "noun" but aren't necessarily a subset. Gummy bears aren't a subset of bears either.

Gummy bears are not a scientific term. Besides, the IAU itself already uses the word dwarf in this manner. Dwarf stars, dwarf galaxies... but carved out an inexplicable exception for dwarf planets.

I'd like to see a citation on this. I highly doubt that you can simulate the formation of a solar system where multiple Mars analogues can coexist in the same orbit

False equivalency. There's a difference between "two Mars sized planets existing in the same orbit" and "Mars' orbit having been cleared". And more to the point, the biggest problem with the concept of Mars clearing its orbit is that its orbit was already largely cleared when it formed. According to our best models, Jupiter reached all the way in to around where Mars' orbit is today, and had cleared almost everything to around 1 AU. Earth and Venus accreted from planetesimals between each other. Mars accreted from planetary embryos ejected to the space in-between Earth and Jupiter. Without Jupiter's migration, simulations produce an Earth-sized Mars and several planetary embryos in the asteroid belt on eccentric / high inclination orbits, something akin to the situation between Neptune and Pluto - except with the embryos nearly Mars-sized.

3. In a geological sense yes. But the current definition of planets is based on orbital mechanics, after which Earth is a lot closer to Jupiter than to Ceres/Pluto.

Huh? By what aspect of orbital mechanics? By semimajor axis and velocity, Earth is much closer to Ceres than Jupiter. Are you talking inclination and eccentricity? Then we should boot Mars in favour of low inclination / eccentricity asteroids.

4. Hydro-static equilibrium as a dividing line is way worse. There are roughly 100 TNOs where we don't really know whether they are elliptical.

Hydrostatic equilibrium can be very easily estimated based on mass, which can be approximately deduced within a range of feasible albedos and densities, and very accurately deduced if the body has a moon. By contrast, it's almost impossible to estimate neighborhood clearing to any distance beyond Neptune, or at all in the case of extrasolar planets. Which, to reiterate, the IAU definition says aren't planets, even though they have an extrasolar planet working group.

We'd have to visit each and every one of them with a probe just to put them in the proper category.

This is utter nonsense.

Meanwhile, it's completely clear which bodies qualify for the "clearing its orbit" rule.

No, it's not. We have virtually no clue what lies in the outer reach of our solar system. As we speak there's a search for a new planet that could be as big as an ice giant. It's a huge open question as to whether it would have cleared its neighborhood, and it will be very difficult to ascertain.

All currently qualifying planets have roughly 99% or more of the mass in their orbit in themselves. Ceres has 30%.

You seem to have some weird concept going on that "semimajor axis = orbit". Ceres has nothing of significance in its orbit. The asteroids are not all in the same orbit. They're certainly more likely to cross each others orbits, but that's not the same thing.

And again, since you apparently missed it: the reason that the inner solar system is largely cleared except for the asteroid belt (and the reason that the latter exists) is Jupiter. Mars did not clear its own neighborhood.

5. The definition should be mu

1. "Adjective nouns" need to have similarity to "noun" but aren't necessarily a subset. Gummy bears aren't a subset of bears either.

Gummy bears are not a scientific term. Besides, the IAU itself already uses the word dwarf in this manner. Dwarf stars, dwarf galaxies... but carved out an inexplicable exception for dwarf planets.

I'd like to see a citation on this. I highly doubt that you can simulate the formation of a solar system where multiple Mars analogues can coexist in the same orbit

False equivalency. There's a difference between "two Mars sized planets existing in the same orbit" and "Mars' orbit having been cleared". And more to the point, the biggest problem with the concept of Mars clearing its orbit is that its orbit was already largely cleared when it formed. According to our best models, Jupiter reached all the way in to around where Mars' orbit is today, and had cleared almost everything to around 1 AU. Earth and Venus accreted from planetesimals between each other. Mars accreted from planetary embryos ejected to the space in-between Earth and Jupiter. Without Jupiter's migration, simulations produce an Earth-sized Mars and several planetary embryos in the asteroid belt on eccentric / high inclination orbits, something akin to the situation between Neptune and Pluto - except with the embryos nearly Mars-sized.

3. In a geological sense yes. But the current definition of planets is based on orbital mechanics, after which Earth is a lot closer to Jupiter than to Ceres/Pluto.

Huh? By what aspect of orbital mechanics? By semimajor axis and velocity, Earth is much closer to Ceres than Jupiter. Are you talking inclination and eccentricity? Then we should boot Mars in favour of low inclination / eccentricity asteroids.

4. Hydro-static equilibrium as a dividing line is way worse. There are roughly 100 TNOs where we don't really know whether they are elliptical.

Hydrostatic equilibrium can be very easily estimated based on mass, which can be approximately deduced within a range of feasible albedos and densities, and very accurately deduced if the body has a moon. By contrast, it's almost impossible to estimate neighborhood clearing to any distance beyond Neptune, or at all in the case of extrasolar planets. Which, to reiterate, the IAU definition says aren't planets, even though they have an extrasolar planet working group.

We'd have to visit each and every one of them with a probe just to put them in the proper category.

This is utter nonsense.

Meanwhile, it's completely clear which bodies qualify for the "clearing its orbit" rule.

No, it's not. We have virtually no clue what lies in the outer reach of our solar system. As we speak there's a search for a new planet that could be as big as an ice giant. It's a huge open question as to whether it would have cleared its neighborhood, and it will be very difficult to ascertain.

All currently qualifying planets have roughly 99% or more of the mass in their orbit in themselves. Ceres has 30%.

You seem to have some weird concept going on that "semimajor axis = orbit". Ceres has nothing of significance in its orbit. The asteroids are not all in the same orbit. They're certainly more likely to cross each others orbits, but that's not the same thing.

And again, since you apparently missed it: the reason that the inner solar system is largely cleared except for the asteroid belt (and the reason that the latter exists) is Jupiter. Mars did not clear its own neighborhood.

5. The definition should be mu

Toxoplasmosis infection makes rats lose their fear of cats. Beneficial to both the toxo and the hungry cats:
http://www.nature.com/news/par...

Toxo in people is associated with traffic accidents... slow reflexes? Lack of fear? Distracted by cat? Probably not psychosis, though:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Dateline did a show about a missing woman who recklessly invited many dangerous men into her life, ignoring all the red flags her friends were trying to get her to see. She was a cat lady, too...

You can see the figures here for free --- and they provide much of the meat of the study.

http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Nature wrote a solid article on the dangers. IMO it's going to lead to some seriously damaged humans before it's closer to perfected. But IMO it will be improved until it's in common use, unless a different technique comes along. In the mean time there's little point to banning it.

Governments that fight markets never win. If Europe and the US ban this technology that just means progress will continue in other places. And there are other reasons than eliminating disease. I could argue the ethics, but that's not the point. Like it or not people are going to do it. We live in the last fully nature-made generation.

Just because Zhang won legally, it doesn't make it ethical. Zhang seems to have gamed the patent system. http://www.nature.com/news/tit...

How do we boost the strength far enough to eliminate cancer?

In short: you can't. Cosmic radiation is just a small part of the complex system that can trigger cancer. Other aspects include: genetic make-up, environment (carcinogens) and the inherent error rate in the DNA copying machinery (missense, frameshifts, slippage, etc) [to name a few off the top of my head - I don't treat cancer]. And before you go down there....those imperfect copies are what leads to genetic variation (important to fend off predators both macro and microscopic) and evolution. Cancer is just about inevitable in any DNA based system

I'm asking for citations where the predictions were way off.

These are a dime-a-dozen. The Internet is full of such lists assembled. But they don't necessarily disprove anything — it is normal for a scientific discipline to fail sometimes. This article even analyzes different ways of detecting and dealing with such failures.

Trouble is, successful ones are so hard to find...

With the pace of global warming increasing, some climate change experts predict that the Scottish ski industry will cease to exist within 20 years.

It is now 2017, but snow is still plentiful in Scotland. Indeed, the 2014 was the snowiest since 1945. Do you think, the 2004 prediction will come true by 2024?

“you can argue that may be our projection of [an ice-free Arctic by 2013] is already too conservative.”

Whether or not Arctic sea ice is at "record low" or not, the Arctic Ocean is decidedly not "ice-free" today.

Yet you've provided zero. Odd.

I made no claims requiring citations. I merely pointed out, that folks claiming "science is settled" typically disappear, when asked for successful prediction of their favorite science.

Nope. If you actually believe in science, I have to provide you with successful ones that survived peer review and replication

That may be too onerous a requirement in the case of Climate Science — the experiments take many years, so any replication is difficult.

They probably haven't even seen this:

https://soylentnews.org/articl...

http://www.nature.com/news/gen...

Lab experiments showed that the mutation increased in frequency as expected over several generations, but resistance to the gene drive also emerged, preventing some mosquitoes from inheriting the modified genome. ...

Resistance to gene drives is unavoidable, so researchers are hoping that they can blunt the effects long enough to spread a desired mutation throughout a population. Some have floated the idea of creating gene drives that target multiple genes, or several sites within the same gene, diminishing the speed with which resistance would develop. By surveying a species’ natural genetic diversity, researchers could target genes common to all individuals.

It's up for debate:

http://news.emory.edu/stories/...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

http://www.nature.com/news/wor...