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According to a study published today in Nature Plants, by the end of this century, increasing temperatures could [emphasis mine -mi] make it impossible to grow coffee in about half of Ethiopia's coffee-growing regions.

Once again, a "scientific" article carefully avoids making a scientific statement... Because such statements need to be falsifiable (among other requirements).

And I don't blame the authors — in the 4 decades of the "global warming" hysteria, plenty of predictions have been made. Those among them, that were falsifiable, ended up getting falsified indeed (any attempt to rebut this post must cite counter-examples or be returned unopened) — hence the switch from the firm "will" to the evasive "could". It still mongers the fears just as well, but without quite as much embarrassment, when the prediction fails...

The fear of commitment is like that of the insurance lizard: "15 minutes call could save you 15% or more".

Does this mean she's willing to listen to people who are climate scientists?

Probably. They are just awfully hard to find. Forget individual scientists, we can't even identify successful scientific theories about climate...

And by "successful" I mean a) verifiable; b) falsifiable; c) verified; d) not falsified.

Try to list any successful climate predictions publicized before they came true within 80% of predicted values (if quantifiable)...

There is an open-source like movement for scientific discovery. http://www.openscience.org/blog/

If you're talking on the order of a 6 month embargo, I could see that. If you're talking two years, I'd have to say that's too long.

I may be biased on the matter, as one of my duties is to distribute some public research data. The data that we generate is released immediately, except for new missions, which have had embargos until they could finish testing the instruments. The data we get from other locations may be embargoed for a few months.

For those who are new to the topic, I'd suggest you take a look at the OpenScience Project, the Science Commons, the NSF's 2003 Cyberinfrastructure Report, the NSB's Government Funding of Scientific Research and the Astronomer's Data Manifesto for a bit of background (specifically, see Ray Norris's Can Astronomy Manage its Data?).

You are looking for The Flo Control Project. A photograph of a silhouette of the cat entering the device is taken and compared to images of the cat with and without an object (usually a dead rodent or bird) in its mouth. If the photograph matches approximately with the image of the cat without any extra baggage, it is allowed to enter.

There's also the OpenScience.org site that isn't biology specific: http://openscience.org/

I'm working on a project to promote "open source" in the academic field of Artificial Life. You can find our (preliminary) web site at http://open.alife.org. We also have a mailing list, open@alife.org, in which we discuss possibilities for introducing and promoting open source in academia.

An excerpt from our mission: "We all know that good science must be verifiable (or falsifiable or testable). Science in Artificial Life is mainly based on computational experiments that were executed to find the results for scientific publication. If the source code of these experiments are not available for the public, the experiments are not verifiable. Therefore, source code of the experiments should be made publicly available, and that's what the "Open ALife community" wants to achieve."

Currently, our main goal is to influence the peer-reviewing process of conference proceedings. If peer reviewers see a paper in which software has been used, the peer reviewer has to ask the author to include a reference to his source code along with his paper.

We have been thinking of using GPL for these publications but we're not sure whether the GPL offers us the things we need (for example - if someone uses your software in his own publication - does he have to refer to the GPL'ed software?)