Slashdot Mirror

The sun is the primary source of the far strongest greenhouse gas.. water vapor.

The sun does not emit water vapour. You probably meant to repeat Climate myths: CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas and Climate myths: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans.

The nature article to the news story seems very interesting. As retroviruses have to integrate themselves into the cells genome to replicate, if the retrovirus infects a germline cell the virus can become incorporated into the animals genome and passed to their offspring. This seems to be already happening with this virus and it gives a chance to study the process in action.

About 8% of our genome is probably from ancient viruses which "invaded" our genome millions of years ago. Generally they become deactivated by mutation but they have been implicated in the growth of mammal embryos and the placenta. It would be pretty cool if the placenta, a defining feature of most of the mammals is due to a virus!

Or a magnet-powered natural gesture interface.

that's b/c they're putting the "mirrors" in the wrong place. :) (not that i really find the idea practicable, but if one had to...)

Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change".

The shift was a result of people not understanding that the term "global warming" referred to the mean global termperature. The media, and Joe Sixpack, did not understand that this meant some regions could still cool, and hence the meme that any cooling disproves global warming was born.

The recent cooling is just weather.

By recent cooling, do you mean Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998? Or is this another "they can't predict the weather so how can they predict the climate" post? Regardless, these arguments have already been debunked: What's the Difference Between Weather and Climate? and Climate myths: Chaotic systems are not predictable.

Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change".

The shift was a result of people not understanding that the term "global warming" referred to the mean global termperature. The media, and Joe Sixpack, did not understand that this meant some regions could still cool, and hence the meme that any cooling disproves global warming was born.

The recent cooling is just weather.

By recent cooling, do you mean Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998? Or is this another "they can't predict the weather so how can they predict the climate" post? Regardless, these arguments have already been debunked: What's the Difference Between Weather and Climate? and Climate myths: Chaotic systems are not predictable.

Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change".

The shift was a result of people not understanding that the term "global warming" referred to the mean global termperature. The media, and Joe Sixpack, did not understand that this meant some regions could still cool, and hence the meme that any cooling disproves global warming was born.

The recent cooling is just weather.

By recent cooling, do you mean Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998? Or is this another "they can't predict the weather so how can they predict the climate" post? Regardless, these arguments have already been debunked: What's the Difference Between Weather and Climate? and Climate myths: Chaotic systems are not predictable.

They already figured this out nearly a hundred years ago.

In fact, erosion by interstellar matter (both hydrogen and dust) was a major plot element in Arthur C. Clarke's 1986 novel The Songs of Distant Earth.

A while back, at the old 1994 Planetary Society conference on Interstellar Flight, I had a paper proposing a plasma erosion shield to protect an interstellar spacecraft-- I ought to dig that one up and put it on the web somewhere, but New Scientist ought to know about it, since they mentioned it in an article back in 1995.

To clarify on the growth of Antarctic ice in some areas while receding in others. The overall ice growth in some areas exceeded ice loss in other areas although this is starting to change. Climate models win again.

So, let's see if I understand.
If your first post, you basically said:

AGW predicts increasing Antarctic ice. We see increasing Antarctic ice, so the AGW models are correct. Therefor the earth is warming and it is man made.

Then in your second post, you said:

Oh, wait, I just learned something. It appears that Antarctic ice is increasing in some places, but receding in others. This was predicted in AGW models so the AGW models are correct. Therefor the earth is warming and it is man made.

Did I get that right?

Ever stop to consider that there is a reason we don't believe this shit? And I don't mean to rag on you, but this is the kind of crap that we hear all the time from what are supposed to be scientists. It's hot, so it proves AGW. It's cold, so it proves AGW. If there are more hurricanes, its AGW. If there are no hurricanes, its AGW. There is no snow at the Olympics because of AGW. There is too much snow in Washington because of AGW. Warmer temperatures mean AGW. Colder temps mean AGW.... and so on and so on and so on!

See, when you change historical data to make your model match current conditions, it's fraud. (AGW climatologists tend to throw out data that doesn't make sense to their models) You change the outcome of your model to match current conditions, it's fraud. (You see this one A LOT! Remember all the predictions that said hurricanes would increase and then we had a year with virtually no hurricanes? Remember the scramble to claim that the LACK of hurricanes was due to AGW?)

To clarify on the growth of Antarctic ice in some areas while receding in others. The overall ice growth in some areas exceeded ice loss in other areas although this is starting to change. Climate models win again.

The amount of algae growth required for powering America's fleet of vehicles would cover every ocean and kill every single fish on the planet.

You sure about that? The US Dept. of Energy says:

...the Energy Department estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles, which is a few thousand miles larger than Maryland.

And then there is The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory:

The fundamental problem, explains Al Darzins, who coordinates alga research at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, is that although algae grow very quickly, most of their biomass is usually carbohydrate. To trigger a higher proportion of oil, you have to stress the algae in some way - starve them of nutrients such as nitrogen, say - which in turn limits their growth rate. As a result, Darzins thinks 42 tonnes per hectare is a more realistic target.

Unless my math is wrong, that is about 3600 gal/acre. The US uses almost 400 million gallons per day, so that's about 41 million acres to make a year's worth of gasoline... 64,000 square miles. For scale, the Gulf of Mexico is about 600,000 square miles.

So while you'd be talking about a lot of ocean, you certainly aren't using all of it.

And don't tell me that Nature regularly collides gold nuclei together in this fashion; they're not cosmic rays!

Consider the particle collisions near the event horizon of a black hole; they're likely to occur at much higher energies.

"Energies at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to peak at 14 teraelectronvolts. In contrast, the energies around a black hole would theoretically be limitless, says West. However, you needn't go beyond the so-called "Planck energy" - the point at which our mathematical understanding of particle interactions, in particular gravity, breaks down at the quantum level. This energy is in the order of 1018 gigaelectronvolts - 100 trillion times more energetic than the LHC." - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327253.800-black-holes-are-the-ultimate-particle-smashers.html

the climatologist nonsense you link stating that solar output is constant and has been since the 1970s is laughable.

The data on solar output comes from solar physicists, not climatologists. Are solar physicists not "real scientists" now that their data disagrees with your opinion?

CO2 is a minor contributor to atmospheric greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor.

Water vapour! I wonder why the scientists didn't think of that? Oh - they already did - "A simplified summary is that about 50% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour, 25% due to clouds, 20% to CO2, with other gases accounting for the remainder."

"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.

Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that, which is why they actually say things like:

The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Scientists are also smart enough to understand that there will be regional differences in climate change effects ("Prediction of the detailed regional distribution of climatic anomalies, where and when it will be wetter and drier, how many more floods might occur in the spring in California or forest fires in Siberia in August, is simply highly speculative."), which is why regional cooling does not disprove global warming.

Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.

The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".

"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.

Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that, which is why they actually say things like:

The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Scientists are also smart enough to understand that there will be regional differences in climate change effects ("Prediction of the detailed regional distribution of climatic anomalies, where and when it will be wetter and drier, how many more floods might occur in the spring in California or forest fires in Siberia in August, is simply highly speculative."), which is why regional cooling does not disprove global warming.

Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.

The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".

"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.

Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that, which is why they actually say things like:

The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Scientists are also smart enough to understand that there will be regional differences in climate change effects ("Prediction of the detailed regional distribution of climatic anomalies, where and when it will be wetter and drier, how many more floods might occur in the spring in California or forest fires in Siberia in August, is simply highly speculative."), which is why regional cooling does not disprove global warming.

Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.

The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".

"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.

Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that, which is why they actually say things like:

The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).

Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.

Scientists are also smart enough to understand that there will be regional differences in climate change effects ("Prediction of the detailed regional distribution of climatic anomalies, where and when it will be wetter and drier, how many more floods might occur in the spring in California or forest fires in Siberia in August, is simply highly speculative."), which is why regional cooling does not disprove global warming.

Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.

The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".

they think it will, but they haven’t observed it yet.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html

Observable and repeatable. It just takes tens of thousands of generations for a major change in a simple bacteria. Who knows, maybe in 20,000 generations humans will be able to digest cellulose.

Experimental Procedure: We put the laboratory mice in a microwave oven and cooked on "High" for five minutes, exposing them to radiation of similar frequency to that emitted by common cellular phones.

Results: The mice appear to be done approximately "medium."

Conclusion: Microwave radiation is quickly fatal at doses two orders of magnitude beyond cellphone level (meta-conclusion: effects were found).

This is the problem with statistical analyses such as sociologists like to perform: aggregating papers, attributing some binary conclusion to every paper, and then producing nearly meaningless percentages. This one was compiled by a biologist, but that's the next thing to sociology anyway ;p. Even if actual cellphones, etc. produce effects in rats, that still doesn't mean that the same effects would be observed in humans: rats are a lot smaller. You might as well throw humans in microwaves and call it a valid model.

One of the scary references in the article is to a early 2000s study purporting that cellphone EM caused Alzheimer's in mice. But wait...Cellphones reduce mouse Alzheimer's (2009). (meta-conclusion: effects were found). Now, you might say that researcher is working for The Man, but he claims he was expecting the opposite result when he began. Someone else could write a meta-study "Microwave study results rarely replicated: are biologists bad at designing and properly controlling physics experiments?"

Yea, some plants grow more with more CO2 in the air, like poison ivy which becomes even more poinsonous, but other plants grow slower. Here's an article from "New Scientist" on it, Climate myths: Higher CO2 levels will boost plant growth and food production.

Falcon

But we have had more than 10 years of cooling.

No we haven't - we've simply had 11 years since the warmest year on record. Incidentally, if your statement is true then this one must be too: "we've had more than 9 years of warming".

These graphs show why some are so keen to use 1998 as a starting point to demonstrate (incorrectly) that global temperatures are decreasing: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn14527/dn14527-4_629.jpg

oh right so the linked article which shows that they used a geography students dissertation and an anecdotal story from a climbing magazine is a nonsense? it's been in many papers, on the BBC news and also on a few other programs too

It is not based on a student's dissertation, it is based on a comment made by the leading Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain to an author for the New Scientist in 1999.

Get your facts straight.

Falcon

Sounds like you don't know shit about this issue.

Get some inforamtion.
A) It has nothing to do with whether or not there is global warming. Only a specif effect of it. Learn the difference.

B) The Indian paper claiming the glaciers aren't melting faster then expecting is not peer reviewed.

C) Know the shouldn't have quoted New scientist as a source for the science part of the paper...and they didn't.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18363-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html

1) Publishing is usually the beginning of peer review. SO finding a discrepency isn't uncommon
2) The person who made that statement was an Indian Scientist. SO the irony of thise story is rich.
3) is doesn't invalidate the peer reviewed papers, or the overall conclusion.

Here is a good write up:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527434.300-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html

Be sure to follow the read more link.

Yes, yes, most people want some sort of black and white answer. There isn't one, and if you are truly interested you will
read about this is reputable journal. That way you have a chance to see all the facts that lead up to this.

Somewhere on the way this story changed from telling this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18463-draw-the-neuroscience-behind-hollywood-shootouts.html

to saying the opposite. Perhaps people didn't read it closely enough?

From New Scientist:

In everyday terms, this energy isn't so great – a flying mosquito has about 1 TeV of kinetic energy. What makes the LHC so special is that this energy is concentrated in a region a thousand billion times smaller than a speck of dust.

... I'll remember that next time I squat a mosquito!

It's no one's fault really. It's just the Higgs Boson once again making sure that cern never uncovers its Cthulhu like existence.

Still when your child starts acting weird, and stops talking within days after getting a shot it is easy to draw a conclusion.

Yes, the old "post hoc ergo procter hoc" logical fallacy

Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced. These should be easy to redo if the data is still available.

Like the study of 30 000 Japanese children that showed no correlation between autism and MMR (more specifically, withdrawing the MMR vaccine had no effect on autism rates).

That being said, his bit about loans is only a half measure, if he was really serious he'd rescind Carter's dumbass executive order and get us down the path of recycling to deal with the "nuclear waste" issue.

Minor correction, President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981.

Apparently the ban is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, so it couldn't have been overturned by an executive order. There's a very interesting discussion of it here. According to this article from 2008, there is still a ban in place.

The computer itself is the simulation and so there is no need for an additional 'outside our universe' computer, but rather a platform of rules for the computer to operate. Also, keep in mind that a computer doesn't need hardware, just 1's and 0's.

The human mind cannot comprehend infinite time or space and so we should inherently know that much of the reason and functionality of our existence is incomprehensible and even unfathomable to our small human minds.

Everyone should read God's Debris by Scott Adams.

I've studied AI stuff for a few years now and my view on reality is constantly evolving the more I learn...

I am under the impression that everything in our existence, broken down to its simplest form, is nothing but a series of facts (observed or otherwise unknown to us) in specific patterns. These patterns of facts, glued together to form data trees, comprise all of reality.

Its like all of matter is one giant glob of putty, constantly churning, forming new random facts and data patterns. Much like how matter is neither destroyed or created; it is recycled.

Reminds me of a recent article about Horizontal Gene Transfer.

We are all just subsystems of a bigger dataset and there is no real individualism.

A somewhat more in-depth account of the increased research output of China can be found here.

there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.

Fail. New Scientist Climate Myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming

The oceans are not acidifying.

Fail. Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104 (a change of 0.075).

The reported change in the average pH of 0.1 is below the measurement error of even well calibrated instruments.

Fail. The very best (very expensive!) meters have an accuracy of ±0.002 pH units. (and besides, multiple replicates and statistical analysis is used to increase accuracy and reduce individual variance - or did you seriously think that scientists only sample a single point in the sea with a single meter to determine temperature change?!)

The Maldives had a sea level fall in the 1970s followed by stasis since. Tuvalu's sea levels have remained stable during that time.

The CIA disagree with you: "Maldives: Environment - current issues: depletion of freshwater aquifers threatens water supplies; global warming and sea level rise; coral reef bleaching" How sea level rise has affected the Maldives Tuvalu is concerned about global increases in greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on rising sea levels, which threaten the country's underground water table

But after the climate gate emails came out I started looking at stuff a little closer. The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it.

How many times will the "Hockey stick was wrong" meme get modded up? New Scientist have an interesting analysis of the hockey stick: Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quotes:

The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.

And:

Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.

The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.

"The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it.

Are you accusing the US National Academy of Science of being part of a conspiracy? Or of being incompetent? Because the report they wrote, at the request the U.S. Congress, endorses the hockey stick.

Or indeed oil, which was similarly demonstrated to possess "intelligence", as it can solve a maze due to a pH gradient. Interestingly, that work debunked the claims of intelligence made for this same mold 10 years ago - for solving mazes and finding shortest paths.

No one is predicting a complete melting of Greenland as a result of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. The IPCC report puts the estimate at under a meter. There has been some controversy since then, but none of the predictions are drastic. If you have heard predictions of New York being under water, or all of Greenland melting, this is from some propaganda source, not from a scientific source.

That New Scientist article is from 2007. Here is one from July 2009: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.300-sea-level-rise-its-worse-than-we-thought.html?page=1 .

In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100, but this excluded "future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow".

...

If this trend continues, Rignot thinks sea level rise will exceed 1 metre by 2100. So understanding why Greenland and Antarctica are already losing ice faster than predicted is crucial to improving our predictions. The main reason for the increase is the speeding up of glaciers that drain the ice sheets into the sea.

From this article (by a unabashed pro-global warming person), the estimate is 3 feet by 2100.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0323_060323_global_warming.html
"By the end of this century the seas may be three feet (one meter) higher than they are today, according to a pair of studies that appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science."

This other pro global warming site has a different figure (backed up by several other sites)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11049-major-climate-change-report-looks-set-to-alarm.html
"the new report is believed to predict that sea-levels will rise by between 28 centimetres and 43 cm by 2100" (16 inches).

Personally, I think building properties on the edge of the ocean and subsidence from pumping groundwater are more significant to the problem.

In 99% of the globe, raising sea levels 16" is not going to significantly change the coastline.

"I am a doctor,..."

Which only proves that doctors and science don't have to mix. Or as the old joke says, what do you call a medical student who graduates at the bottom of their class...

"But the vaccine itself has also been more aggressive, and normal safety checks and clinical studies were bypassed.."

Wrong. The side effects, or lack thereof, were also tracked very closely. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3029#more-3029

"Ok, the H1N1 strain might be a bit more aggressive."

Yes. Killing people with healthy immune systems would be considered "aggressive". About 1% of people who get H1N1 have to be hospitalized and 15 to 33% of those ended up in the ICU (when it's bad, it's bad). http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17753-dont-be-fooled-swine-flu-still-poses-a-deadly-threat.html It's not normal to have ICU's full of people from the flu.

"And many have been put under pressure to get vaccinated, even if we did not want to ("you don't get vaccinated for yourself, you get vaccinated to protect those around you..."). I am fortunate that I have been able to resist."

Vaccines are one of medicines greatest contributions to world health. The fact that you would refuse a safe vaccine and put patients at risk pretty much says it all.

"Another core issue is that we must manage risk objectively, and focus our resources (which are always limited) in the areas where are going to provide the best return, to the best of our knowledge at that point."

Which is why we vaccinate people. High reward for virtually no risk.

"Because of pressure from pharma lobbies, ... precious health funds were squandered in a way that only benefited to the pharma industry."

Nice strawman. Pharma does not get rich on vaccines. If they did not receive subsidies they would probably stop producing them. It's the reason they haven't modernized production-it's not cost effective.

Actually, according to one article, the developer has specifically said it's not a time of flight camera. In the comments for http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527426.800-microsofts-bodysensing-buttonbusting-controller.html the author quotes Kipman (the lead Natal developer) as saying: ""Our IR does not pulse and it is not based on a TOF system (which usually pulses). Our light source is constant much like you would expect a projection system to work in a conference room."

The Rickets versus Skin cancer theory for the distribution of skin shades is just one theory.

from http://www.wonderquest.com/evolution-skin-color.htm:

'
Jared Diamond (1999 winner of the Medal of Science award and UCLA evolutionary biologist) points out flaws in these theories.

"Among tropical peoples," he writes "anthropologists love to stress the dark skins of African blacks, people of the southern Indian peninsula, and New Guineans and love to forget the pale skins of Amazonian Indians and Southeast Asians living at the same latitudes." [Emphasis mine.]

He notes that dark peoples of equatorial West Africa and the New Guinea mountains get no more UV radiation than the light-skinned folk in Switzerland, if you take cloud cover into account. ...
Charles E. Taylor, UCLA evolutionary biologist, thinks so, too. "Diamond argues for sexual selection because nothing else seems to fit," Taylor says. "This is a cop-out, of course, but it makes sense to me." ...
"It is not impossible that white skin color originated in Northern Africa," says Taylor.
'

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327222.500-where-does-white-skin-come-from.html

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Evolution-3839/white-skin.htm

Chemical reactions have a sort of random-ness to them that electricity through a wire can't duplicate.

I think the word you might be actually looking for is "chaos". Apparently, disorder is essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

As alluded in the article, Chinese science remains far behind, especially because of rampant cronyism in academia as well as government

This article from New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527426.900-get-ready-for-chinas-domination-of-science.html

doesn't agree. Chinese science is in fact well up there with the rest of the world, and will overtake us soon. There is nothing strange in this - while we in the West have grown rather complacent about education, which is necessary for science, the Chinese have been ramping up their investments in education and science. This, by the way, is something their government have decided, so this jibe about ".. as well as government" seems particularly misplaced in this context.

When China was a closed country not long ago, you Americans couldn't shut up about how everything would be so much better if China would open up and become part of the global world. Now they have done that, and you whine because they turned out to be bloody clever; and all you have left is yesterday's cold-war rhetoric. The competition from China is good for us - it will make realise that we have to get our act together and sharpen up.

New Scientist ran a really good article on this, a couple of months ago. It can be found here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427311.300-timewarp-how-your-brain-creates-the-fourth-dimension.html
A 2006 experiment has put the rate of human vision at about 13 fps. People can see the wagon wheel effect in real life, without the aid of Strobing lights, television etc. After I read this article I did manage to observe this effect outside in sunlight, while travelling parallel to a car travelling at about 50km/h. Very surreal

Just starting your career eh? No it's not unique to your industry, it's common across hierarchys. Newscientist had a couple of good articles recently about bureaucracy/heirarchy/cube-life etc:

• Peter principle etc.
• Five laws of human nature

Or you could watch Office Space, or better yet, do what you are doing now: live it.

Just starting your career eh? No it's not unique to your industry, it's common across hierarchys. Newscientist had a couple of good articles recently about bureaucracy/heirarchy/cube-life etc:

• Peter principle etc.
• Five laws of human nature

Or you could watch Office Space, or better yet, do what you are doing now: live it.

Does that include using Van Eck phreaking to duplicate your computer display? Or wifi snooping? What about monitoring the reflections of the sun off your windows and filtering for the minute vibrations in the glass caused by speech? Some of us prefer to live in homes rather than windowless faraday cages.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16585-gallery-the-next-generation-of-mirrors.html

That seems an unnecessary piece of anti-science paranoia. The people doing the experiment are not the white coated demons of science fiction. Even if they were as amoral as you suggest, it would sdtill be practical of them to get the patient's permission before starting an experiment that took over three years to set up.

On the radio recently, I heard about the difficulties the doctors had with an even more extreme 'locked-in' case that had no eye movement. They got the patient to communicate one bit at a time by imagining tasting milk or lemon juice for minutes at a time. This caused the patient's saliva to change pH. This was not simply "think lemons if it is ok to operate", followed by "oh, bother, best of three?" - they had to establish that the intelligence was present, understanding what was being said, and replying in a reliable manner.

There is a bit about milk-or-lemons and other attempts to communicate in... http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526171.500-humans-can-adapt-to-almost-anything-even-paralysis.html?full=true

The first time I clicked the link...
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2009/12/amanda-gefter-books-arts.php
... I got a bogus system scan web page and then it tried to get me to run an EXE file. I tried the link a few minutes later and it seemed okay. I'm perplexed as to what happened. From my browser history, the bad link was...
h t t p : / / n i s s a n - r e n t . c n / g o . p h p ? i d = 2 0 0 6 - 5 1 & k e y = 0 5 2 2 c 7 0 6 6 & d = 1

I'm using Opera 10.10 (latest) and haven't been anywhere other than major news sites today. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else sees the same.

Navigate to the link in the article: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2009/12/amanda-gefter-books-arts.php

It was serving up fake anti-virus malware.