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If we're going to include damages caused by solar thermal plants, shouldn't we also include the damages we learned about from studying the effects of rapid CO2 emissions during the end-Permian, PETM, etc.?

Since the authors themselves don't come to any real conclusions, and only suggest, again there is no way to estimate. Do hydro dams cause ocean acidification? Does an increase of 50PPM CO2 in the atmosphere cause significant ocean acidification? ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-04]

Jane completely ignores the PETM paper, which has nothing to do with ocean acidification. Hydro dams (which don't and can't contribute most of the power in the USA or in the world) cause ocean acidification only to the limited extent that they rapidly increase CO2 in the atmosphere. So once again it's meaningless to ask if an increase of 50PPM CO2 in the atmosphere causes significant ocean acidification. If that 50 ppm increase occurs over centuries or millenia, it's less likely to cause significant ocean acidification than if it occurs over decades because of the higher rate of increase.

... You have pretty much implied what your answer would be, but the truth is that these are unknowns. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-04]

No, I've already told you that your second question is meaningless because paleoclimate evidence shows that ocean acidification depends on the rate of CO2 emissions, not the amount in the atmosphere.

There's a difference between "unknown" and "unknown to Jane".

... Be afraid if you like, but I won't join you. While the paper rather vaguely and timidly suggests that there may be danger in rapid changes of pH, the fact remains that corals, many shellfish, and giant ammonoids evolved in the Cambrian Period when CO2 concentration was many times -- in some cases over a hundred times -- what it is today. Correction: CO2 levels in the Cambrian are estimated to be well over 10 times what they are now. Not a hundred or hundreds. Still, we've had only a rise in recent times of roughly 14%... nowhere near 1250% (from 400 to 5000 ppm). [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-04]

Once again, you're mistakenly calculating the absolute value of atmospheric CO2 ("400 to 5000 ppm") rather than calculating its rate of change. Once again, if atmospheric CO2 increases slowly, ocean pH doesn't change significantly because it's buffered by carbonates and land weathering on long time scales. See Fig. 2 in Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF):

"When CO2 dissolves in seawater, it reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which then dissociates to bicarbonate, carbonate, and hydrogen ions. The higher concentration of hydrogen ions makes seawater acidic, but this process is buffered on long time scales by the interplay of seawater, seafloor carbonate sediments, and weathering on land."

It's incredibly ironic that Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus both p

If we're going to include damages caused by solar thermal plants, shouldn't we also include the damages we learned about from studying the effects of rapid CO2 emissions during the end-Permian, PETM, etc.?

Since the authors themselves don't come to any real conclusions, and only suggest, again there is no way to estimate. Do hydro dams cause ocean acidification? Does an increase of 50PPM CO2 in the atmosphere cause significant ocean acidification? ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-04]

Jane completely ignores the PETM paper, which has nothing to do with ocean acidification. Hydro dams (which don't and can't contribute most of the power in the USA or in the world) cause ocean acidification only to the limited extent that they rapidly increase CO2 in the atmosphere. So once again it's meaningless to ask if an increase of 50PPM CO2 in the atmosphere causes significant ocean acidification. If that 50 ppm increase occurs over centuries or millenia, it's less likely to cause significant ocean acidification than if it occurs over decades because of the higher rate of increase.

... You have pretty much implied what your answer would be, but the truth is that these are unknowns. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-04]

No, I've already told you that your second question is meaningless because paleoclimate evidence shows that ocean acidification depends on the rate of CO2 emissions, not the amount in the atmosphere.

There's a difference between "unknown" and "unknown to Jane".

... Be afraid if you like, but I won't join you. While the paper rather vaguely and timidly suggests that there may be danger in rapid changes of pH, the fact remains that corals, many shellfish, and giant ammonoids evolved in the Cambrian Period when CO2 concentration was many times -- in some cases over a hundred times -- what it is today. Correction: CO2 levels in the Cambrian are estimated to be well over 10 times what they are now. Not a hundred or hundreds. Still, we've had only a rise in recent times of roughly 14%... nowhere near 1250% (from 400 to 5000 ppm). [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-04]

Once again, you're mistakenly calculating the absolute value of atmospheric CO2 ("400 to 5000 ppm") rather than calculating its rate of change. Once again, if atmospheric CO2 increases slowly, ocean pH doesn't change significantly because it's buffered by carbonates and land weathering on long time scales. See Fig. 2 in Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF):

"When CO2 dissolves in seawater, it reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which then dissociates to bicarbonate, carbonate, and hydrogen ions. The higher concentration of hydrogen ions makes seawater acidic, but this process is buffered on long time scales by the interplay of seawater, seafloor carbonate sediments, and weathering on land."

It's incredibly ironic that Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus both p

It's more than that though.

It's also about making sure that when non white men apply they're actually evaluated on merit rather than on their perceived race and/or gender.

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

But yes, the entire thing is actually about making sure the best people get the job.

Solar farms are already observed to fry birds and blind pilots. Not to mention the huge amount of landscape they consume. And in high latitudes, not only to they take up even more (and more ecologically sensitive) area, they aren't even usable a good part of the year.

Concentrated solar thermal plants can fry birds or blind pilots, but solar PV panels don't. They don't take up ecologically sensitive landscapes when they're mounted on roofs, and that distributed nature can be more resilient than putting all our eggs in a large centralized power plant. We need to build more nuclear power plants, but we also need more renewables like solar, wind/wave, tidal, geothermal, and maybe even osmotic power.

In my area, they don't even come close to competing with other sources for cost.

Does that cost include the damages caused by the CO2 emissions of those other sources? If we're going to include damages caused by solar thermal plants, shouldn't we also include the damages we learned about from studying the effects of rapid CO2 emissions during the end-Permian, PETM, etc.?

We don't need to use proxies to estimate the termperatures when we have actual temperature records. It seems like you're trying to make something sinister out of using the best available data.

You kind of do need to if you want to make claims like the one made by the GP that I was responding to. Specifically saying:Never before in history has the temperature changed with more then 1 degree over 100 years.
According to the proxy data that shows that historic stability, the temperature hasn't changed by that much since 1900 either. That is a very important observation to make as it shows the claim is lacking in substance.

In addition to the availability of actual direct measurements since the 1900s, which greatly reduces the value of more recent proxy values, there are also some problems with getting recent data from some of the proxies. For instance, there is the divergence problem in dendroclimatology which seems to show that pollution (or other factors) may be inhibiting tree growth since the industrial revolution. I imagine there's probably some difficulty with ice cores as well, since it may be difficult to get recent temperature measurements from glaciers that are shrinking.

Yes, Mann's paper from 2007 notes the same problem you mention. The calibration phase has a consistent problem with early calibration late verification. If you calibrate to the instrumental record from 1900-1950 and then verify the resulting proxy data from 1950 onwards you get observed evidence for a systematic bias in the underestimation of recent warming. Mann's words, not mine. The proxy data isn't registering the recent warming that we see in the instrumental record. I suppose that's no reason not to continue assuming that the same proxy data would have picked up similar warming in the past in your opinion. I'm less convinced. If you look closer at Mann's paper, he also observes the EIV methodology is least susceptible to the bias, and is thus the best method, again in Mann's opinion, not mine. If you check the reconstruction graphs though the EIV goes higher than the 1850-2006 average in 600AD, 1000AD and 1400AD. Mann doesn't graph the EIV from 1900 onwards, but in the calibration problem discussion he shows some portions of it, and it sits no higher than the 1000AD records for EIV from 1950 through 2000. It's all there in Mann's paper and please correct me if I'm in any way misrepresenting things. I've been trying to follow and understand this correctly for a long time now.

Of course, there are actually people studying these problems and even the quality of the calibration period which is used to match instrumental records to proxy values, you might want to try searching with the "proxy calibration" keyword, or reading up on the divergence problem in dendroclimatology.

As I noted above, I've done searches on that and come up with the observations above. The literature basically agrees that the proxy data, for reasons unknown, has a systematic bias in the underestimation of recent warming.

Forgive me for pointing that out when people make the claim that the historic record shows the last century is an anomaly. The instrumental record is anomalous compared to the proxy data. Attributing that entirely to climate change and not the fact those are entirely different data sets and methodologies is dishonest in the extreme. There's a reason the scientists writing the papers have a lot of caveats on the results regarding this, dropping those to make a blanket statement to scare folks is misrepresenting the facts.

Plus of course, few individual minerals are absolutely essential anyway.

Sure because we can grow food by hand and live in mud huts.

Computers contain about 60+ different elements.

The infographic won't be far wrong because we are using rare minerals at an ever increasing rate, and look at it, there's hardly anything forecast to last until the end of the century.

This paper gives an idea of what the loss of various minerals will mean to us:
On the materials basis of modern society

And while you are at it, tell me how the data was collected that provided an apples to apples comparison.

No problem. There's a link to the paper right there in the summary.

No, he did not present a single per capita comparison.

Ummm... How does, "The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste," not count as a per-capita comparison? Of course, you then blindly dismiss it by saying, "And who cares about Kolkata, that was probably chosen because it is uniquely low." The 14 million people who live there certainly care. And no, it was not chosen for being uniquely low. Take a look at the graphs in the paper. You'll see there is only one outlier in the whole set of cities, and that is New York. And yes, I did follow the link to check the paper before I posted. Because I actually believe in doing my research before posting. (See my signature quote, which in case you hadn't realized is meant ironically, and is appropriate to a distressing fraction of posts on Slashdot.)

It's hard to take seriously an article claiming New York is the most wasteful megacity when they don't even mention Los Angeles. New York metro is 20 million. Los Angeles metro is 18 million.

The PNAS paper to which the article attempts to refer (with a file: link, so the link is completely worthless) does mention LA, and, if you see Figure 1[1], LA is behind NY for total energy use, water use including line losses, and total solid waste production. The caption says "Values shown are for the megacity populations scaled on a per capita basis from recorded data for the study area population"; I don't know whether that means "we scaled the values based on the population sizes", so that they represent per capita consumption, or whether they represent total consumption.

[1]Yes, you did see what I did there. :-)

Here's the PNAS article, although it's behind a paywall.

The question that comes to mind is "how many ergs were wasted by people clicking the link to the paper that Brian Merchant, senior editor at Motherboard, put in his article, with a file: URL so that it was COMPLETELY FUCKING USELESS unless either 1) you were logged into his machine or 2) you happened to have downloaded the article and stored it in /Users/brianmerchant/Downloads/pnas201504315_7vpr25%20embargoed.pdf on your UN*X box.

Very cute trick you used there, going from a study proving women have an advantage in hiring commensurate with their phenomenal institutionalized advantages in education to claiming that said recorded facts don't exist. Very cute indeed.

Then again when your entire worldview and ideology, to say nothing of millions of dollars for massive lobbying efforts, is hinged on the idea that women are oppressed it is of course necessary to do everything possible to ensure that nobody ever admits women are not in fact oppressed and actually doing very well.

By the way going by your own link my study is both newer and more methodologically sound than yours since it's a randomized study with an N of nearly 1000 that actually controls its variables properly.

We studied the effect of such stereotypes in an experimental market, where subjects were hired to perform an arithmetic task that, on average, both genders perform equally well. We find that without any information other than a candidate’s appearance (which makes sex clear), both male and female subjects are twice more likely to hire a man than a woman.

keeping in mind none of us have read the paper and that we do not know the background of the reviewer.

When it comes to social sciences, potential is a loaded word. You can have similar studies and conclude completely different results. Does hiring in science favor men or women? Which of those studies represent the 39/100 studies that have not been reproduced and possibly wrong (poor methods, biases, justifications, etc)?

Is a shirt keeping women out of stem and is that shirt evidence of misogyny and/or discrimination or is it a complex issues that is hard to study because it's hard for a microscope to look at itself?

Was the underlying idea behind the reviewer legitimate? He may have said it wrong, but was his premise grounded in scientific inquiry? Is it ok to ask about gender bias in a gender biased research paper?

keeping in mind none of us have read the paper and that we do not know the background of the reviewer.

When it comes to social sciences, potential is a loaded word. You can have similar studies and conclude completely different results. Does hiring in science favor men or women? Which of those studies represent the 39/100 studies that have not been reproduced and possibly wrong (poor methods, biases, justifications, etc)?

Is a shirt keeping women out of stem and is that shirt evidence of misogyny and/or discrimination or is it a complex issues that is hard to study because it's hard for a microscope to look at itself?

Was the underlying idea behind the reviewer legitimate? He may have said it wrong, but was his premise grounded in scientific inquiry? Is it ok to ask about gender bias in a gender biased research paper?

Your comment has nothing to do with the original claim, that rapid changes does not happen. They do - and the cause is completely irrelevant when it comes to how those changes affect vegetation, animal life or humans. Neither is the paper limited to volcanic cooling events, which you claim, which makes me wonder if you've read it. If you didn't read it - then what is the point in writing a reply?

Additionally, if you claim that there's newer research the last 20 years which disproves the paper then please cite that research.

Sorry, I have read all of it now and poked around a bit. A recent RealClimate summary notes that there is a "well-known tipping point" in the North Atlantic overturning, which is consistent with the findings in the summary paper you linked, but published in 2008. So it looks like we still aren't any less screwed...

Men also get offered lower salaries.

Not in this case.

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

"Driving a more expensive car makes you more reckless."
Right there in the summary.

no one was really targeting the civilian population as a matter of intent

Yeah right, tell that to the people of London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Manchester, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, etc, etc, the only reason Paris was spared was because Hitler valued the architecture and wanted to keep it intact.

Even the most bloody wars (such as the English civil war) kill less than 5% of the population, OTOH the black plague regularly killed ~50% or more of the people in the cities/regions it infected. People who survived the plague had a brief period of high living standards due to all the abandon property lying around.

There are a lot of environmentalist who think the world is over populated

As a science based "greenie" my "agenda" is to be a part of a sustainable, peaceful, disease free species. Wars, plagues, and mass starvation are what I want to avoid. Science and common sense tell me that the main factor in obtaining what I want (for my 3 grandkids) is population. There's plenty of evidence we can achieve humane population control by educating and allowing women to control their bodies, and providing security of living standards in old age.

Or we can continue to behave like fermenting yeast, expanding to consume our available resources and killing each other for access to untapped/unguarded resources (territory, water, food). AGW is the #1 mid (and long) term threat on the pentagon's list of threats to global stability and it has been that way for almost a decade. The reason is that AGW will dramatically change the current (territory, water, food) map, and it will do so this century - even if we all stop emitting GHGs today.

Syrian civil war - Canary in the coal mine? - "There is evidence that the 20072010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 20072010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict."

The original paper http://www.pnas.org/content/ea... does not seem to make a big deal about Winter so TFA may be adding that owing to this Winter's weather which has had record warmth this Winter. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/...

If marijuana were harmless then it'd be cool. Unfortunately, recent research has shown that regular marijuana use reduces IQ. In the case of adolescents with still-developing brains the IQ loss is permanent. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is the state of the science at present. Here's a popularized reference for you (from a Left-leaning source):
http://www.pnas.org/content/11...
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11...

Like I said, if marijuana was harmless then it'd be cool with me- I'm not here to start a flamewar. I'm just here to point folks in the direction of the most recent medical studies. Rather than mod me down, if you disagree then please give me a link to a study that is as good as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and we can all learn (ie. "High Times" is neither an impartial nor scientific source, so I'm looking for something better than that).

I wouldn't be so sure... http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

http://www.pnas.org/content/99...

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

http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

http://www.esajournals.org/doi...

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

I wouldn't be so sure... http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

http://www.pnas.org/content/99...

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

http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

http://www.esajournals.org/doi...

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife

Couple things...

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projec...

From around 150,000 to 130,000 years ago, North America experienced colder and generally more arid than present conditions. About 130,000 years ago, a warm phase slightly moister than the present began, and conditions at least as warm as the present lasted until about 115,000 years ago. Subsequent cooling and drying of the climate led to a cold, arid maximum about 70,000 years ago, followed by a slight moderation of climate with a second aridity maximum around 22,000-13,000 14C years ago. Conditions then quickly became warmer and moister, though with an interruption by cold and aridity in many areas around 11,000 14C years ago.

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...
Here's your citation for the 300 year drought from a respectable source (hard to filter out from all the anti climate warming sites quoting it).

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
We are exiting an ice age. It's going to get warmer. The average temperature of the planet for hundreds of millions of years at a time was about 12 degrees higher. We may be exiting it quicker due to human intervention- but it's going to warm up as we exist the last ice age. It just might take it 10,000 to 25,000 years instead of 1,000 years.

While I respect masses of scientists saying there is warming (97%ish)... I really don't respect their models yet. Over the last 15 years, their predictions have been hysterically wrong. Predictions of super storms and repeated severe hurricane seasons after Ike, Sandy and Rita were also terribly wrong.

That warming is occurring is a measured, observable, testable fact. That the earth will be a given temperature in 100 years may be more reasonable than any prediction 20 years from now. But it may also be wildly off.

Given how badly they did with their prediction, I'm all for using LED's, CO2 scrubbers, etc. But I'm not willing to destroy the world economy by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on ill thought out actions which may be simply wrong or even actually harmful.

Eh my bad, claim with no evidence. There's a fairly well known article in PNAS. Can't search and provide link because on phone. Fortunately someone else in the thread dug the article out for me. So, there you go. Scan the sub thread for it if you care.

Scratch that, Slashdot wants me to wait Five minutes. Guess I can dig out the link. So, here you go:

http://m.pnas.org/content/109/...

My bad. This is the one I wanted to link, but it was equally easy to find: Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students

Tell me how they obtained the "why"?

Define why in this case. Why they thought women were less competent or why people rated them as less competent? The former is covered in the paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

Basically, hireability was coupled to competence. And gender was coupled to competence. Which makes gender coupled to hireability. The methodology is explained quite well in the paper, and I'm sure they can better explain their own method than I can.

The latter has no bearing on the results.

I'm going to focus on that issue exclusively since... ...since it's a red herring and otherwise you'll have to admit you were mistaken that institutional sexism does not exist.

You have failed to provide any reasoning beyond red herrings and appeal to emotion as to why you need to know the underlying reasons in order to demonstrate the bias exists.

Anything that can seriously help people control their weight isn't a gimmick, it's a fix

This is closer to a gimmick. And a dangerous one at that.
From TFA:

In a 12-month clinical trial considered by the FDA, 38.3% of subjects who received the active Maestro device lost at least a quarter of their excess weight, and 52.5% of subjects lost at least 20% of their excess weight. On average, weight loss in those subjects with an active device was about 8.5% greater than that seen in subjects who received a Maestro electrical pulse generator that was not activated.
  ...
 
While the cost of the device has not yet been set, Lea said that getting the device implanted and activated will likely cost "somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000"--an amount that is more than gastric banding but less some of the most complex gastric bypass surgery.

Over a year, on average, it increases the weight loss by "about 8.5%" compared to an implant which was turned off.
And, it works for about half the people.

I.e. For the people who have been losing weight through other means, 92.2% of the weight loss is attributable to FACTORS OTHER THAN THE IMPLANT.
"About 8.5%" increase is about 7.8% of the new total.

All that at the yet unknown cost of MAYBE $20-30k, invasive surgery and most importantly - randomly fucking about with one's nervous system.
They are patching-in this implant to jam that same network which we KNOW to be a major neurological pathway and of huge importance "in the bidirectional communication of the gut-brain axis and...useful therapeutic adjuncts in stress-related disorders such as anxiety and depression".

That thing severing of which causes mice to give up and surrender in stressful situations?
They are flooding that with jamming signals during the hours when one is awake.
What could possibly go wrong, right?

And to achieve what? A sense of satiety.
Because as we all know, we eat ONLY when we are hungry and we intake food by volume, regardless of the calories.
100 grams of Nutella and 100 grams of cucumbers is the same to us.
We just need to get our stomach to think it is stuffed with SOMETHING - and then we will stop gaining weight.

At least according to the logic behind this "50-50 chance for 8.5% increase in the effectiveness of dieting" gimmick which works by jamming one's nervous system.

That $30000 spent would be better invested into healthier food and exercise.
Heck... it's TWO annual federal minimum wages in the USA.
One could literally spend a year on that money doing nothing but working on their health.

There is no institutional sexism. No one has been able to find it.

Yes they have. There's a nice article in PNAS about a technical job in biosciences. They randomly assigned a gendered name to CVs. CVs with female names got fewer job offers and a lower salary offer than male ones.

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

TL;DR: people were biased against applicants they believed to be female. That is pretty much the dictionary definition of sexism. And that paper is pretty much out right proof of sexism at an institutional level.

I look forwards to you rationalising it because I find your twitching and squirming quite hilarious. So is it because women are more nurturing or perhaps nerds get bad rep in the press? Maybe it's some cod-evoloution explanation about hunting wooly mammoths versus looking after babies.

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

I'm quite familiar with that repeatedly-posted link. Let me quote from my previous post which you have appeared to only lightly skimmed:

there is no evidence that there is more discrimination in IT at this point in time than there was in the past in fields that were overwhelmingly male but are now female-dominated (such as Vetinary Science).

In the sciences, unlike the religions, it is customary to present data with a fitment test; a frame of reference, if you will. That paper does not present any evidence that the so-called burden for women in IT today is any more or any less than the other fields in which women have persevered and dominated. As of writing, there is no evidence (well, not any science evidence) that women in IT face more discrimination than past women in Medicine, Law, Accounting and the Vetinary Sciences. FCOL, the paper you link to does not even examine IT subjects, only Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

Even worse (for your argument), the study appears to be of discrimination against women in a field that they are currently close to parity in - Biology is the one I'm looking at.

So perhaps you want to explain how, if discrimination is the reason for a lack of women in IT, that Biology with actual studied and reported gender discrimination as per your very own reference, manages to have so many women compared to IT? If women are discriminated against in Biology, then why aren't their numbers the same as IT? Your very own reference points to the fact that discrimination cannot be the sole, or even largely part of, the reason for a lack of women in IT.

I don't understand your reasoning:

Let's say something is done to increase the number of women. It could be either some sort of affermative action, or it could just be a natural end to descrimination.

In either case the number of women increases thereby making it harder for men. I don't see with the reasoning you gave how the precise mechanism matters. The law of unintended consequences would still apply regardless of the mechanism. As a result, an end to descrimination under that reasoning would lead to less equality.

You may have a point, but as you've described it so far, I don't buy it.

I also pointed out that by giving women an easier ride than the men get is going to result in getting only those women who are looking for an easy ride.

Except you're not giving women an easier ride. The default ride for women appears to be harder than for men. With an appropriate amount of prodding it could simply even it out so women only need the SAME qualifications as men to get the same job and salary, not higher ones.

Evidence of skewness is not evidence of discrimination.

No the evidence of descrimination was in that PNAS article I linked to earlier in the discussion. TL;DR: they faked a bunch of CVs and randomised the gender of the fake applicant. Female applicants were routinely rates as worse given the same qualifications as male ones. That is pretty solid evidence of descrimination.

looking back over the posts that you

Then you haven't looked very hard, frankly. I've posted the same link at least 3 times in the comments to this thread, including once in this particular chain. There's a link in one of the ancestors of your post!

So here it is again once more, but this time with feeling:

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

Here you go:

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

The AC has given you a couple of good references. One of the associated papers is particularly good:

http://www.pnas.org/content/11... - this is freely available from PNAS. They looked at genetic variations in European and Roma populations. The Roma are a genetically distinct group originating in India who migrated to Europe but have not mixed extensively with Europeans. The authors found several examples of apparent convergent evolution, including several immune modulating genes. Some of these turned out to provide resistance to Y. pestis and related infection.

The evolution of completely new traits is generally believed to take many generations, but changes in the environment, particularly ones that kill 40% of the population, can very rapidly change the balance of existing traits in a population. Europeans and the Roma almost certainly didn't evolve protective genes from scratch in response to the plague, but it's quite plausible (and indicated by the evidence) that those genes evolved in response to a long history of Y. pestis and related infection (see the AC's second link) and were present in the general population. The particularly virulent strain that caused the black death certainly caused a shift in the population in favour of people who had the resistance genes simply because it killed more of the people who didn't have them. The data in the paper I linked (summarized in both the AC's links) suggests that shift was not only significant, but also persists to today.

The long term fix is control of human population growth.

The "easier" fix is to massively cut back on irrigation, especially from deep aqifer wells, in California. Farmers there have, understandably, switched to more profitable crops. But it's depleted the available aquifers to historic lows, and they'll take decades if not centuries to recover. There are many good references on the problem, including http://www.pnas.org/content/10....

There are ecological measures that can reduce the consumption, but without restrictions on irrigation, the residents and industries along the relevant fertile regions and industrial areas will not take those measures. Technologies such as sewage recycling and breeding less water consuming crops may help, but the fundamental problem is a political and economic one, not a technological one.

Linky with higher res PDF than website...

http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame. And it's not even paywalled, you can download it from anywhere. You're welcome.

Here it is... http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/11/1410931111.full.pdf

1: I am a scientist, and while I admit I don't know everything ( who does ? ) about climate change I have seen enough data to be concerned, not panicked mind you, but concerned; especially so since anything on a global scale has so many variables as to be be possible to accurately model.

I think the problem is that concern is too often turned into political advantage by panicking people. Some of the original scientists came along with political motivations like James Hansen and his support for Jubilee2000 which dispersed with the creation of the Kyoto accords (too long of a connection to make in this short post to why that is suspect).

2: While those people you linked may be ranked high in their fields, the pages you linked to don't cite papers published in a reputable journal for peer review... probably because they are not reproducible as science demands.

Actually, they do cite sources. It's those underlined strings of words that look like those annoying popover ads but are actually links. For instance, the mother jones article says the change was from a paper published here http://www.pnas.org/content/11...

The New scientists article actually cites at the bottom of the page. It links to an article called climate dynamics The increasing efficiency of tornado days in the United States.

3: your third link is just braindead political bashing.

Did you think you were pointing out something I didn't already know? Or were you answering my challenge to which link was a conservative site? Anyways, I think you completely missed the point even though I spelled it out. It doesn't surprise me seeing how you missed the citations in the articles too. But the point was that political entities have been claiming Climate change does make predictions about tornadoes. So this idea that it is unheard of for claims if climate change or global warming and tornadoes being linked is fabricated. That was the only point, that the claims have been made.

If you don't get the booster, you run the risk of getting the disease and dying.

Nice way to fall for the lies. Everything is just soo dangerous and trying to kill you. The terrorists are full of these diseases and we must let the TSA inject shit into everybody who walks down the sidewalk.

So you are saying, what, because some vaccines Are not permanent, why bother getting it?

According to the CDC's site: Even though children who haven't received DTaP vaccines are at least 8 times more likely to get pertussis than children who received all 5 recommended doses of DTaP, they are not the driving force behind the large scale outbreaks or epidemics. However, their parents are putting them at greater risk of getting a serious pertussis infection and then possibly spreading it to other family or community members. So it isn't the unvaccinated that are the problem.

In a study done by Oxford University for all pertussis outbreaks in San Rafael California between March and October 2010, 81% were completely up to date on their vaccinations, 8% were unvaccinated, and 11% were partially vaccinated. So people are hyping up the fear for something that isn't even the problem. If you want a prevention, then you need to focus on making a better vaccine, not forcing more people to take risks for something that is ineffective.

That is not how viruses work. If you are immunized the virus gets killed by your immune system and you do not become a "carrier".

And here we have a completely ignorant statement from someone who wants to tell me what to put into my body. Here are some links to the evidence that you do become an unknown carrier after getting the pertussis vaccine. Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model and Whooping Cough Study May Offer Clue on Surge

You claim to be hyper rational, but I see what sexism does to women first hand. In fact, your supposedly hyper rational view is provably pathetic nonsense. Women are discriminated against in STEM fields. Your argument is a typical horns of a dilemma, "if not this, then clearly that". You can't see any other reasons than 'choice'? Either you are knowingly posting a misleading argument, or you have shit for brains. Those seem to be the only choices.

Try searching for 'discrimination against women in STEM' for more information. In case you can't figure out how to use google, here is one.

With everyone from the federal government to corporate America working to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields, you would think the doors would be wide open to women of all backgrounds. A new study shows that this could not be further from the truth and that gender bias among hiring managers in STEM fields is extraordinarily prevalent.

Here is another one:

Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

Concerning indians, here is another reference.

Direct link to PNAS abstract.

Why, why, why is it that Slashdot always reports on new scientific discoveries with a link to a lay press summary or a press release, and never gives us the useful link to the actual papers with the real words by actual scientists? Aaaargh.

Hey, at least it wasn't Bennet Haselton telling us about it.

"it was absent from the literature". A simple Google search shows many articles discussing the "vertical occipital fasciculus" - 265,000 for me:

The article referenced here: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

Some other references:
2012: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.nan.upol.cz/neuro/c...
1943 reference: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.c...

There were a lot more. Something seems fishy here.

Direct link to PNAS abstract.

Why, why, why is it that Slashdot always reports on new scientific discoveries with a link to a lay press summary or a press release, and never gives us the useful link to the actual papers with the real words by actual scientists? Aaaargh.

http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

It explains that they measured the cognitive differences between infected and non-infected people, and how, which wasn't addressed in the clickbait summary.

the end of this one sounds kind of cool:
http://www.pnas.org/content/su...

"A hermit thrush song type classified as harmonic (slowed down 6Ã--)."

from: http://www.pnas.org/content/su...

the end of this one sounds kind of cool:
http://www.pnas.org/content/su...

"A hermit thrush song type classified as harmonic (slowed down 6Ã--)."

from: http://www.pnas.org/content/su...

I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.

Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?

I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;

Gore doesn't have a private jet.

both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.

How does a jet consume energy without existing?

In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.

That's not true for any of the past 420 million years

IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.

plant life, or land animals either

Bullshit

as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.

Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.

Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around

Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750.
Temp, from about 1900.

As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.

Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.

It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.

No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels.

And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.

Bullshit

We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.

Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP

Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless

The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!


Why did /. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it. .

Dear, I don't have a source, that the sky is blue. Are you going to deny it until I find one?

No, I find it quite plausible that the sky is blue, so I'm prepared to take that on your word, and my impression of its prior plausibility.

The problem is that you claimed that "Since "climate scientists" produce nothing tangibly useful," which despite your attempt to cast this as plausible as "the sky is blue", sets off my bullshit detector. So I wonder if you dreamed it up yourself, or if you have some plausible basis, or data.

There are no privately-owned employers for "climate scientists" studying "global warming"

What about Remote Sensing Systems.?

Florida is a very large portion of the Atlantic coast, that gets hurricanes at all.

The Atlantic has two sides, and stretches two hemispheres. Florida is not that large.

That link of yours is remarkably lacking in actual data (as in numbers, rather than words). If that's the best you could find, you should start asking yourself some questions...

Okay, that statement is from the AR4, but if you're big into actual data, you're claim is that the data shows that "Ten years ago it was in-vogue to predict nor just the sea-water rising by an inch, but also increased hurricane activity [...] — but real life demonstrated the exact opposite [weather.com] to the prediction.

As sea level is rising , I assume that you mean that hurricane activity has been demonstrated to be decreasing. However, I can't find any confidence calculations in your link. What statistical significance do you claim can be attributed to this decrease in activity?

The people, who — 10 years ago — predicted the rise of hurricane activity need to be fired from their tax-funded jobs. They failed us and we don't want to keep paying them.

Okay, show me the proof that they were wrong, and to what confidence. And give me the names of these researchers that you want fired. And show me who was doing better at the time that we can replace them with.

Plants love CO2.

Yes, but not equally. Poison ivy loves it more than woody plants. And coral reefs, and so ocean productivity hate it.

Maybe, the problem — if it is a problem — is not in burning too much fuel, but in not having enough forests to process it?

Carbon in the biosphere is a cycle dear. How are you going to keep animals from eating the plants, and how are you going to keep the plants from rotting once they die?

It is even better "proven", that by jumping, I push the rest of Earth in the opposite direction. Is there any danger in our planet changing its orbit from humanity's jumping up and down?

No. Momentum is conserved during the jump.

The CO2 did keep increasing for the last 10 years.

Yes. It accelerated.

Yet, no growth in hurricanes materialized and the entire "global warming" is now considered "on hold"

Show me the statistical signficance of the first claim.

The second claim is one that you're happy to hang your hat on? How was it received in the scientific literature?

For instance, SB11 [8] fail to provide any meaningful error analysis in their recent paper and fail to explore even rudimentary questions regarding the robustness of their derived ENSO-regression in the context of natural variability.
Addressing these questions in even a cursory manner would have avoided some of the study’s major mistakes. Moreover, the

That's okay. Since you can't be bothered to google it yourself, I'll help GP a bit and show you one.

It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article) It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.

Bad social norms?

This from a country on the cusp of electing a woman to lead the most powerful country and military on the planet.

Inversely, where is all the screaming and yelling from the nursing or day-care industry that is traditionally dominated by women?

What, no class-action lawsuits against the construction industry for blatant favoritism towards the male gender?

Either the women need to start standing up and using vehicles to enact change or enforce laws that prevent sexism, or the rest of us need to shut the fuck up already.

It's a problem because it's clearly fucking systemic, and caused by social factors.

It's not just "fewer women that men" enter the career.

It's that "fewer women than used to, where every other intensely technical field has had the opposite trend"(this article)
It's that People are more likely to pick men for mathematical tests that both genders are proven to do equally well on, even when in the test cases where the specific women are known to outperform the specific men
It's that sexism is actually cited by women leaving the field
It's that gender based social norms enforced on children clearly influence their likliehood to enter a sex-typical field

These aren't just whatever, "it's just people making choices". It's clearly social and political influence.