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New paper in PNAS: We see no evidence in the geological record from about 6000 years ago to 100-150 years that resembles the rise that we see in the last 100 years. Compared against this 'background' signal the recent rise of about 20 centimetres in 100 years recorded by tide gauges is anomalous, - http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

Yes...because that's all it takes to dismiss someone, not actually reading what was said, not checking out the source scientific paper, and just ignoring the guy's credentials. ya...cause thats the proper to evaluate statements: kneejerkage.

So yes, apparently that is all that passes for intellectual thought on your part. Namely, very little.

Since you're obviously too stupid or too lazy to check things out for yourself, here:

Philip Cary Plait (born September 30, 1964),[1] also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, writer and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions. He has written two books, Bad Astronomy and Death from the Skies. He has also appeared in several science documentaries, including Phil Plait's Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel. From August 2008 through 2009, he served as President of the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Basically a smaller scale Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

And here: here's the scientific paper in question: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
Not that it matters, since you probably dismiss any scientist out of hand based on who they voted for last election.

At the time the scientists were saying that a 5,000 year old ice shelf had broken off. Okay if it was 5,000 years old what broke it off the last time? the egyptians using slave labor to build the pyramids?

Really?

1) Larson B had been a stable ice shelf 200 metres thick with a surface area of 3,250 square kilometres for at least 10,000 years. (source)
2) Even if that wasn't the case you can still attribute climate change to a cause, and that cause doesn't have to be the same cause as previous climate change.
2 b) Climate change one to two orders of magnitude slower than the current climate change would not be expected to have the same mechanism.
3) It is not believed that Egyptians used slaves to construct the pyramids.

The weather changes it goes up and down and side to side.

Yes. And the current going up is primarily due to the enhanced greenhouse effect.

looking for a .01 degree change is like looking for a penny to pay a $1,000 bar tab. it matters yes but come on.

On the other hand a 0.8 degree rise has put a number of species at extinction risk, has displaced tens of millions of people per year, and kills about 150,000 people annually.

I know that RTFA is passe' here, but if we even take a look at the abstract (which shoudl be publicly available to all) we see a key point here:

Turning to a case study of scientific communication, another online sample of adults described public attitudes toward climate scientists specifically.

We already know that a large portion of our country is repeatedly fed biased misinformation on this topic and told to distrust anyone who represents an opposing viewpoint. If we tried this on something that is less of a political football, we would likely see very different results. I would doubt that anywhere near as many people would doubt scientists telling them about research on gravity or the spheroid shape of our planet.

Wall.... I ain't no pointy-headed intellectual. I'm just common folks, just like you. But any gol-darn Fool with a lick o' Common Sense can see that the Earth ain't no spherical-thingy. Why if it was, people on the bottom would fall right off! That's how gravity works!

Turning to a case study of scientific communication, another online sample of adults described public attitudes toward climate scientists specifically.

We already know that a large portion of our country is repeatedly fed biased misinformation on this topic and told to distrust anyone who represents an opposing viewpoint. If we tried this on something that is less of a political football, we would likely see very different results. I would doubt that anywhere near as many people would doubt scientists telling them about research on gravity or the spheroid shape of our planet.

You're right; feminists don't in general, push for only that, because legalistic bias isn't the only kind that's harming people. You can see object evidence of how systemic bias hurts women Or objective evidence that certain kinds of cultural media measurably cause those biases. Standing against that, in spite of having nothing to do with the law, is morally justified, and even necessary.

But I'm sure you meant that what they we want is some kinda imagined matriarchy, where special rights are reserved for one half the population. Which is dumb. And while people with all sorts of self-labels say all sorts of dumb things, it is not a suggestion made by anywhere near a large percentage of feminists.

From the original paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

We identify several common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach: we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment to generate a set of candidates, and then we estimate the association of these variants with cognitive performance. In older Americans, we find that these variants are jointly associated with cognitive health. Bioinformatics analyses implicate a set of genes that is associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory. In addition to the substantive contribution, this work also serves to show a proxy-phenotype approach to discovering common genetic variants that is likely to be useful for many phenotypes of interest to social scientists (such as personality traits).

How the hell does the article now writes that "The scientists first looked for differences in the genome that correlated with academic achievement"? No, they looked for "educational attainment". Then the abstract goes on "Three SNPs (rs1487441, rs7923609, and rs2721173) are significantly associated with cognitive performance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing." SNPs are different alleles of the same gene.

Then, "Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory." But the article states that " On top of that, the three gene locations that did seem to have a stronger correlation weren't involved in development of the nervous system."

What the hell??

There is no hiatus, but a slowing down of warming. The warming is still happening, but at a slightly slower rate than predicted. So yeah, it's deniers who point out the hiatus, as it doesn't exist.

So deniers like the authors and editors of peer reviewed journals like The National Academy of Sciences and Geophysical Research Letters and Nature. Nature in particular publishing an article with the 'denier' skewed title of "Strengthening of ocean heat uptake efficiency associated with the recent climate hiatus".

Nothing burns me more than somebody faking as though they are all for the scientific process and defending it's 'findings' while at the same time totally ignoring the actual science. The reality as pointed out in the 3 linked articles, and many, many, many more is that since 1998 the rate of warming has dropped off heavily enough it no longer matches most predictions or modelling very well. Something in the predictions and modelling was missed that is happening in the real world, and has caused an apparent 'hiatus' in the rate of warming that was expected. Tracking, identifying and understanding that is important science, and thankfully they haven't stopped to listen to people like you who would prefer to deny that reality.

Here is the abstract of the survery that NASA cited:

"Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" - http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

This is in very close agreement with more recent research that surveyed the literature rather than polling scientists:

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. ... Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus - http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...

Phantomfive sees hidden agendas and propaganda (from NASA no less), but it is really not clear why. Even the literature that he cited is in broad agreement.

obviously, because global warming may lead to something very bad and very $$; if it doesn't lead to these things, not a lot of people will care.
How do we know global warming might lead to something bad , at least in a quantitative sense ?
All (all) of our detailed knowledge is from computer programs (climate models) which simulate changes in the future

However, It is an observed fact (fyfe) that over the last ten years, the surface temp of the earth has not increased as much as predicted by models; the models fail.
The models also can't reconstruct the last few thousand years (Liu), where we Know what happened.

This anomaly is the main current argument of denialists (those who think global warming is not occurring, or is not manmade, or is not important) and cause for concern among climate scientists.

Several attempts have been made to find the missing heat without great acceptance, eg Cowtan (who are not, afaik, climatologists) say that the missing heat is in the Arctic, which is not well measured by instruments.
It appears that Chen and Tung have found the answer: the earth is warming, but the heat is going into the ocean instead of the atmosphere.

SO: the models are clearly not accurate even on a 10year time scale.
so why should we take seriously alarmist views about the future ?
I guess it is probability: if there is even a X% chance that something really bad could happen, is it worth spending ~ 0.5% of global GDP (~ 850 billion dollars a year) to prevent this possible catastrophre ?

Me personally, my house is about 5 miles and 200 feet up from the Atlantic Ocean, so global warming is good for me: I get beachfront property......

Fyfe
http://hypergeometric.wordpres...

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

cowtan
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

chen and tung
http://www.washington.edu/news...

If the PC-crowd doesn't like it, then they need to encourage more minorities to get the required education and get qualified.

First - replace "the PC-crowd" with "people who are struggling to get a job as a minority." It is demonstrably true that people are more inclined to hire people of their same gender / color (one such source: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...). Cook is recognizing that his company may be guilty of this and is looking to correct it.

Second - what better way to encourage more minorities to get the required education than to show that there are jobs waiting for them and they won't be unduly discriminated against? Cook would be providing the demand for these students need to begin with. Or did you expect a bunch of minorities and women to enter college on a prayer and dream?

The bullshit is strong with this one. Maybe link to some actual research instead of talking out of your ass about things you don't understand. Like, for instance, this article which debunks the idea that men naturally have a higher variance in intelligence: http://www.pnas.org/content/10.... It turns out that whole idea was based on one flawed study from the 80s, but since it matched so well with the world view of a bunch of privileged white guys on the internet it spread like wildfire. Do some of your own thinking for once maybe.

I tend to ignore the text in any Huff post articles and go to any source if mentioned. The same applies to /. as well.
For this one, here you go:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

It's not an experiment, it's several. and the loose ethics of the wealthy have been noted throughout history.
We don't have to accuse people of lying about their social status because hardly anyone knows what they are except at the extremes.
So, generally the participants weren't directly asked their social status, it was inferred from a tool used in other social studies designed to discover social status without directly asking for it.

Also, two of the studies didn't involve game mechanics - they involved actual theft.

One study was observing behavior in traffic and status (real or imagined) was inferred from the class of automobile.

On the other hand, continuing your theme of poor methodology some studies were done on amazon's mechanical turk using people answering adds on craigslist, an environment not known to me for attracting the wealthy. It's not only a self- selected group, but a particular subset of a self selected group.

If nothing else it violates PNAS' own policies, because it's in clear breach of both the Declaration of Helsinki and ICMJE requirements on informed consent.

http://www.pnas.org/site/autho...

You don't seem to actually understand the study. The manipulation was of the News Feed not the content itself. The posts of your friend were analyze to determine whether they were positive or negative. Then, if you had been selected for the negative feed, you would see more negative posts by friends than positive ones. The content of the actual posts was not changed. This seems to be one of the big misunderstandings of the actual study.

There is a HUGE difference between putting a message out there and seeing how people react to it versus actually changing what you or I say and how it is delivered to someone else without my consent.

Facebook did not change the content of the posts. The News Feed does not display every post made by those your follow. It selects the posts to display based on an algorithm. They changed the algorithm to prefer positive and/or negative posts. After which, they observed to see whether this had an influence on the posting behavior of those with the adjusted feeds.

From the actual study:

On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook’s “News Feed” product (8). Because people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. One such test is reported in this study: A test of whether posts with emotional content are more engaging.

The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion. People who viewed Facebook in English were qualified for selection into the experiment. Two parallel experiments were conducted for positive and negative emotion: One in which exposure to friends’ positive emotional content in their News Feed was reduced, and one in which exposure to negative emotional content in their News Feed was reduced. In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10% and 90% chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing. It is important to note that this content was always available by viewing a friend’s content directly by going to that friend’s “wall” or “timeline,” rather than via the News Feed. Further, the omitted content may have appeared on prior or subsequent views of the News Feed. Finally, the experiment did not affect any direct messages sent from one user to another.

I am having a difficult time seeing how this is actually different from beer company marketing.

Here's the "Science" magazine page:

http://news.sciencemag.org/env...

and here's the referenced paper:

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

Maps showing anomalies for summer heat in the paper "Perception of climate change" by Hansen et al. show Sweden as having led a charmed existence so far. http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

The US Northwest and Mid-Atlantic, A region around the Urals and China have been fortunate thus far as well.

I believe I will believe the science being done by scientists. Granted, they are from Texas and Texas is an oil state, but it's up for peer review in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" and I have yet to find anyone challenging it.

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

But then again, I believe in sky fairies as long as we are confessing our beliefs in things.

It's worth reading the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

The point is that the well known properties of the game theory algorithm explain why sex has the effective properties which have been observed but not explained. I haven't read John Holland's paper. Does it refer to the details of the multiplicative weight updates algorithm?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/study-pollution-from-chinese-factories-is-harming-air-quality-on-us-west-coast/2014/01/21/225e9b1e-8281-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/... http://www.pnas.org/content/111/5/1736

So your point is that China actually fights Global Warming by producing lots of sulfate emissions?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/study-pollution-from-chinese-factories-is-harming-air-quality-on-us-west-coast/2014/01/21/225e9b1e-8281-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/health/pollution-china-pnas/
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/5/1736

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09...

Here, we use a large representative study in the Philippines (n = 624) to show that among single nonfathers at baseline (2005) (21.5 ± 0.3 y), men with high waking T were more likely to become partnered fathers by the time of follow-up 4.5 y later (P < 0.05). Men who became partnered fathers then experienced large declines in waking (median: â'26%) and evening (median: â'34%) T, which were significantly greater than declines in single nonfathers (P < 0.001). Consistent with the hypothesis that child interaction suppresses T, fathers reporting 3 h or more of daily childcare had lower T at follow-up compared with fathers not involved in care (P < 0.05).

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

Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

The study that the Guardian reported on is freely available here: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

If you read the article in PNAS ( http://www.pnas.org/content/ea... ) you can see that they consider the question of examination equivalence by only looking at previous studies that "were largely or solely limited to changes in the conduct of the regularly scheduled class or recitation sessions;" So based on what I have read in the paper I would classify this as very far from junk science.

(One possible reason why lectures are still so common: It is a cheap teaching method that scales well with class size.)

So to answer your concerns I tracked down the publication in PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

To quote from the article:

The data we analyzed came from two types of studies: (i) randomized trials, where each student was randomly placed in a treatment; and (ii) quasirandom designs where students self-sorted into classes, blind to the treatment at the time of registering for the class

In other words, if I understand the article correctly, the authors only considered studies where active learning was contrasted with traditional lectures in the same course! Therefore it seems likely that active learning is a good idea, regardless of whether the topic is hard or easy. (By the way, active learning doesn't necessarily have to involve fun and games, although if a student, in general, doesn't think that learning is fun, perhaps he or she should consider doing something else...)

Here's one original study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 There are many more out there. The consensus is that a non-trivial amount of people are wrongly sentenced to death, and an even higher proportion are wrongly convicted, but never exonerated on further review

Genuine paleolithic people would have eaten anything edible that was worth the effort / risk of obtaining around them - animals, bugs, reptiles, fish, birds, eggs, shellfish, seeds, nuts (incl chestnuts), roots, starchy tubers, berries, fruit, fungus and even grain. Presumably their physical activity was higher than ours too and thus their calorific intake would have been higher to maintain the same weight. There is evidence of that they ground up grain and other starches, presumably because they were nutritious.

Maybe paleo "works" but only the same way other diets work.

How the hell did that get modded informative, that's blatantly false.

They planted Roundup-resistant plants

'They' here being farmers, do you have any idea how supply chains work?

all over while saying "the resistance will never spread to other plants" without actually bothering to check whether that was the case, as if they had never heard of plasmids.

Yes, your degree from Google University means you know more than all the scientists at Monsanto. And what the hell do plasmids have to do with anything?

Roundup-resistant weeds with the Monsanto gene in them were found IN THE NEXT FIELD BELONGING TO A DIFFERENT LANDOWNER four months after the first crops were planted

Man, if horizontal gene transfer happened that easily we'd be living in a very different world, however, that didn't happen. This is evolution 101 here; apply a strong selective pressure over a large area upon a fast reproducing species and you produce genetic shifts. If you knew anything about agriculture (you clearly don't) you would know that the first examples of herbicide resistant weeds emerged in the 70's, decades before GMOs. This is a problem systematic of agriculture, not one of GMOs. As for the Roundup resistant weeds, their mode of resistance is well understood, with mutations such as amplification of the EPSP synthase enzyme, or blocking of glyphosate translocation, or modification of the glyphosate binding site responsible, but never once has there been a single instance of the weeds uptaking the crop's genes. I'll eat my hat if you can find me a single example of the C4 EPSPS gene (the gene used in RR crops) being integrated into a weed's genome. Come on, prove me wrong, I'd love to hear about it. If Monsanto is so evil, and the hate so justified, the evidence of what you say should be abundant, and it shouldn't be hard to shut me up.

Since then, Monsanto have lied repeatedly about the spread of resistance

And here's Monsanto talking about it., Two seconds on Google is all it would have taken to find that. That news is all over the ag world, no one is covering it up, its been a topic of discussion for a long time, and if you paid attention to ag news or watched ag TV programs like on RDF-TV then you'd know that.

I really wish people who knew nothing about agriculture would stop going around saying what's what when they wouldn't know guanine from glufosinate.

For an adult human, 400-600 is about the limit of what we can detect.

No.

For most average human adults, the limit is about 300 dpi.

Speaking as a graphic designer with over two decades of experience, there is a reason that graphic designers have always targeted a print resolution of 300 dpi for colour images.

How 400-600 entered the conversation is beyond me. The percentage of people who can visually tell the difference between a 300 dpi output and anything higher than that is very, very small. The number of people who can spot the difference at 400+ is not even a consideration for discussion.

When I was a graphic designer, I was told 300 dpi --- unless the image had type, in which case, 600. I've found some corroboration:

1. Experiments with Pixels Per Inch (PPI) on Printed Image Sharpness by Roger N. Clark
2. Guidelines for Author Supplied Electronic Text and Graphics
3. Digital Art Guidelines

Apparently the eye is more forgiving when looking at photographs than at text.

Possible source: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea.... Unfortunately paywalled.

It's definitely from there, see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6165/1418.3.full

Possible source: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea.... Unfortunately paywalled.

Or, we might look at the actual data instead of, you know, spilling bullshit. Oh there's none? No, quite the opposite, things get published all the time by scientists in some of the most prestigious venues, but these accounts are not publicized in the mass media, for they are not scary. So let's look at something from this year. Conclusions? "The mean annual radiation dose rate in 2012 associated with the accident was 0.89-2.51 mSv/y" and "the extra lifetime integrated dose after 2012 is estimated to elevate lifetime risk of cancer incidence by a factor of 1.03 to 1.05 at most, which is unlikely to be epidemiologically detectable." Scary, right? They say that people do get an extra 3-5% chance of getting cancer, so "0.89-2.51 mSv/y" has to be huge, right? Well if you live in the US, as opposed to Japan, you are going to be getting 1.9 mSv/y more exposure, for there is more radon in the air in the US than there is in Japan. And these are country-wide averages, so I am sure that in a country as vast as the US, in some places you will be exposing yourself to a significantly more radiation. This goes to say that if you don't worry about where you live in the world and don't know the local natural radon activity, you shouldn't be any more worried about the Fukushima accident. Not so scary after all? Well, the mass media thought so too, so they've kept silent. In all fairness, this data does not include radiation dosages from 2011, the year of the disaster, but the data shows that there is hardly any increase of mortality there, either

I live in the country with the freest press in the world, so you'd expect there to be less fearmongering. Maybe so, but here's my story. On the day of the earthquake, I was in Fukushima, actually making my way through the city to Tokyo in order to fly back home. Granted, I was not near the coast, but that should hardly matter to ill-informed journalists. When I returned to my home country, the press were waiting for the passengers with video cameras, for the flight that I'd booked months ahead happened to be the first out of Tokyo. I was interviewed, and the journalists asked questions like "were you scared?" and "is it because of the nuclear threat that you flew out?", and my answers were quite categorically "no". Was my interview aired? Also no, but people who had left the country, even though they'd been visiting the southern parts and in no danger whatsoever spilled their guts and cried out of fear for the cameras, had their takes on the subject shown. Makes better TV, I'll have to give them that, but not a very objective one.

this article was published in 2009 From the abstract:

"Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers"

This study does not seem to have the flaws you mention. There have been several studies I've seen with similar outcomes.

Okay, so you're obviously not capable of agreeing that this evidence exists.

Thus, I think it is foolish to claim that this input and its effects can be determined completely merely by estimating the concentration of CO2 before the Great Dying and the concentration after the Great Dying, and drawing a line through those two points.

Only someone who's "deliberately ignorant" could think scientists were doing that after looking at the more than a dozen points in the carbon isotope excursion in Fig. 2 of Payne et al. 2010. I've already pointed out that Shen et al. 2011 resolved two distinct carbon isotope excursions, but there's no point in repeating this because people who are "deliberately ignorant" aren't even capable of agreeing that this evidence exists. To them there will only ever be just two points and a foolish line drawn between them, because there's no need or want to look any closer than this superficial analysis.

Okay, so you're obviously not capable of agreeing that this evidence exists.

Thus, I think it is foolish to claim that this input and its effects can be determined completely merely by estimating the concentration of CO2 before the Great Dying and the concentration after the Great Dying, and drawing a line through those two points.

Only someone who's "deliberately ignorant" could think scientists were doing that after looking at the more than a dozen points in the carbon isotope excursion in Fig. 2 of Payne et al. 2010. I've already pointed out that Shen et al. 2011 resolved two distinct carbon isotope excursions, but there's no point in repeating this because people who are "deliberately ignorant" aren't even capable of agreeing that this evidence exists. To them there will only ever be just two points and a foolish line drawn between them, because there's no need or want to look any closer than this superficial analysis.

It's an estimate with order of magnitude error right there in time and another significant error in CO2 quantity (with a ceiling of 2 PgC incidentally rather than the 1 PgC claimed in the article).

The quote from that review paper is a summary of references 54-56 which are Payne et al. 2010, Wignall 2011 and Shen et al. 2011. The quantities of carbon come from Fig. 3 in Payne et al. 2010, but the 20kyr timespan comes from Shen et al. 2011 where it only refers to the second carbon isotope excursion. The PgC/year range is a summary of all those references' PgC/year estimates, but with each using their own quantities and their own timespans to avoid mixing apples and oranges.

We also don't have a good idea what else was released, which might have been more lethal than the CO2 (for example, sulfates or fluorides).

A few sentences down in Honisch et al. 2012:

"Knoll et al.(59) inferred the preferential survival of taxa with anatomical and physiological features that should confer resilience to reduced carbonate saturation state and hypercapnia (high CO2 in blood) and preferential extinction of taxa that lacked these traits, such as reef builders (32)."

To be consistent with the fossil evidence in Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF), your "more lethal" extinction mechanism would have to have the same marine extinction pattern as that expected from a massive release of CO2. Also, the PETM doesn't have an obvious volcanic culprit but does have a carbon isotope excursion, rapid warming, and a similar (albeit smaller) marine extinction pattern.

Finally, it's worth noting that even if your assertion is complete and accurate, it would take at minimum a millennium for current rates of CO2 production and 13,000 PgC (the lower bound) to put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to match the impact of this extinction event. The upper bound increases that to over four millennia. We should be able to figure things out long before that happens.

Species adapt to climate change by migration and/or evolution, both of which have rate limits past which extinctions become more likely. In light of this, why should the total be more important than the rate?

What is the hurry? Sure, we don't want to run the situation out for a few millennia until we end up in a huge global extinction event. But we can figure things out in far less time than that.

Just suppose the national academies are right to say that we should try to limit global warming to "only" 2C. All else being equal, warming is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions. Here are three different ways to achieve that. Notice that the longer we wait to address the CO2 problem, the steeper our emissions cuts will have to be.

Can't comment on that paper but if this subject interest you check out this highly readable paper on the evolution of symmetry in biological molecules.
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

One's the average, one's the maximum day-to-day. It fluctuates. It's not the study that's "full of shit", it's that the New Scientist article is written unclearly. You can find the original PNAS at the bottom of the NS piece, can't tell if it's open-access because I've got a golden ticket:

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

Nope, definitely low-level; it's a tropospheric transport model. Apparently it's a standard model (GEOS-Chem) that's pretty reliable, and it seems to incorporate interactions between particulates and the surface, including e.g. exchange of particulates between the troposphere and ocean/land.

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

Although wind power does not contribute to global warming through greenhouse gas emission, it does extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere and therefore may alter global climate even at continental scales

It may be the lesser of evils compared to some other supplemental energy options but it isn't perfect- and it isn't a good candidate for base load

All energy sources have pitfalls. The advantage of renewables such as wind, solar, geothermal and others is its renewable and key to the long term survival of the human race at a decent but lower standard of living. When we lose fossil fuels in the coming centuries, provided that civilization doesn't collapse, being forced to rely on renewables will destroy our throwaway culture. To get our money's worth out of renewables will require doing everything in our power to extend the lifespan of our solar panels, wind turbines and so on particularly after all the low hanging fruit is taken.

The principle disadvantages of renewables are the amount of space required and the unpredictability of them. Wind has unknown effects on global climate and kills flying animals (birds, bats and insects). Solar could have an effect at global scales like wind power. Solar could withdraw some heat from the planet. But could that withdrawal compensate for global warming? I doubt it.

Fossil fuels have the primary advantages of being energy dense and predicable. So fossil fuels take up less space. But fossil fuels are polluting and will not last much longer.

Also nonrenewable is nuclear. Nuclear is extremely energy dense and will take longer to use up than fossil fuels. Aside from extremely hazardous nuclear waste that could be used for nuclear bombs, nuclear is relatively clean. Nuclear will likely be turned to when the rate that fossil fuels that can extracted from the planet go into sharp declines and renewables are unable to meet the gap.

Although wind power does not contribute to global warming through greenhouse gas emission, it does extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere and therefore may alter global climate even at continental scales

It may be the lesser of evils compared to some other supplemental energy options but it isn't perfect- and it isn't a good candidate for base load

Right. This is what happened with the financial meltdown, exactly. There were few prosecutions and none of the household -name people - Jamie Dimon Lloyd Blankfein, Angelo Mozilo, Richard Fuld, Bear Stearnsâ(TM)s Jimmy Cayne, Merrill Lynchâ(TM)s Stan Oâ(TM)Neal, Citigroupâ(TM)s Chuck Prince all of these people are untouchable even though we lost literally a trillion dollars and more during the meltdown and entire lifetime retirements of people were destroyed . Eric Holder and his justice department looks and looks but golly! just can't find a gosh-darn thing he can charge them with.

It's a joke. A sick sick joke and made me lose a LOT of respect for the whole process of criminal justice. This is not a nation of laws, it's a nation of money and a nation of men when it comes right down to it. Same thing with the Transpacific Partenership- people with money and connections are literally usurping the environmental, labor , patent, copyright and other laws of nations. Laws which were arrived at through the respective societys' democratic process.

This is how empires fail They overreach. They heedless impose the will of mere individuals - or in this case corporations- upon people who disapprove of what they're doing by a ratio, in this nation at least , of 300 million to one.

This is how societies collapse. This is the steady rip rip of the social contract between the government and it's people that is not forgotten but instead goes underground, into people's living memories only later to emerge and play a decisive roll in the dissolution of that society. The government is known by all, in this case left and right and center, to be corrupt, unresponsive, indifferent to its people and serving only the needs of its elite, which are endlessly craven and grasping and greedy. People are cynical, but that's just the outward tell of their inner states.

Then something ecological happens directly owing to the untrammeled greed of the 1% and the society goes down all at once. This is not speculative, it's happened time and time again. To the Anasazi of the U.S. Southwest, to the Classic Lowland Maya, to the inhabitants of Easter Island and some other Polynesian societies, to the Greenland Norse, to the Mycenean Greece, and to the Western Roman Empire.

Hate to present a totalizing narrative which "explains all things" but it's not just my opinion that this is coming; it's the Pentagon's and the NSA's also:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism

If the Pentagon and the NSA and Obama had any sense at all, they'd prioritize climate legislation and start treating the manufacturers and purveyors of climate change denial like the threat to civilization they literally are.

Then they'd go after the deprivations of the 1% - typical example the contents of the TPP- which are literally tearing the social fabric of this nation apart.

https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

http://www.exposethetpp.org/

https://www.citizen.org/TPP

Environmental disaster as the trigger to societal collapse:

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/3632.full

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

\http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/07/17/2858655.htm

That sure is something actual climate scientists have said, and not some kind of elaborate strawman you set up for yourself to attack.

Yep.

Now, statistically There has been a small increase in drought severity and frequency in the northern hemisphere as some oceanic changes occur, which has some limited, but measurable fallout. But that doesn't mean any given drought is climate change.

The paper analyzes an collection of historical *data*, not a bunch of scientific papers other people have written (although each data set in the collection may have been used in a separate paper.)

You would need to look at the other works the paper references. Here is an example from the abstract:

The amplitude of the associated changes is, however, poorly constrained (5, 6), with estimates of solar forcing spanning almost an order of magnitude (7, 8, 9). Numerical simulations tentatively indicate that a small amplitude best agrees with available temperature reconstructions (10, 11, 12, 13).

However, of you go look at the papers they reference for this information (like 7 and 10 just for example), you see that what they are actually saying is:

(A) It's hard to know what solar forcings are because the estimates span almost an order of magnitude. (This is important.) And

(B) Numerical simulations tentatively indicate that a small amplitude best agrees with available temperature reconstructions.

Okay? So far so good. Now: have a look at the paper referenced at (10). It is a paper stating that a particular climate model can simulate forcings that would account for the differences, if the sun did not.

We used a coupled climate system model to determine whether proxy-based irradiance series are capable of inducing climatic variations that resemble variations found in climate reconstructions, and if part of the previously estimated large range of past solar irradiance changes could be excluded.

(This paper also mentions that estimates of solar forcing are all over the map.) The conclusion of the paper, is that yes, they can in fact model observed climate change by using a radiative forcing model and excluding solar forcings.

So what you have, in summary, is a conclusion that because models can simulate forcings rather than the sun, the models are doing the forcings rather than the sun. Pretty much all these papers decry the fact that estimates of solar forcings are widely variable. So instead they are trying to replace it with models that are not widely variable.

In effect, they are using their conclusion as their premise. Because solar forcing estimates are all over the map, they claim their models better reflect reality because they are not all over the map.

But... is this a justified conclusion? After all: I can model wind with a fan, and get rid of all that pesky and hard-to-estimate-because-it-is-too-variable wind. But the fact that fans give more reliable results is not evidence that fans cause wind.

When there are ~4-6x10^30 of you, you reproduce unbelievably quickly, and know neither fear nor pain, very few things are futile...

Would it kill them to link to the original paper? It's not even paywalled:

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/44/17623.full.pdf+html?sid=5925a7b2-3efe-4a21-99f9-0e448cd3a7cf

If you read this paper. It should give you the answer. Makes sense to me but I'm not sciencist and certainly not an expert. All I can say is it seems to me sense if you look at the timing from the point the seismic activity started and the gas injection.