Slashdot Mirror

Sure, the scientists who are busy researching the matter, as opposed to creating phony "doubter" websites, use only those faulty stations that said doubters managed to find and photograph, and never cross-check these data with other sources.

The front page of surfacestations.org has a funny image: a location photo made in 2000s with a parking lot, a cell tower and its AC exhaust ducts near where the temperature sensor is supposedly hosted, superimposed with the graph from the same sensor that shows a steady rising trend since about 1950s. So all those asphalt coatings over the years, the cell tower installation and so on all conspired to create a neat smooth trend that keeps rising. The asphalt must have been aging without renewal, cars radiate ever more heat, and the ACs are dutifully cranked up a notch every few years. Finally, some solid debunking of climate change.

And I wrote the above even before I did a two-minute Google search that gave me more than enough information as to why surfacestations.org is full of shit.

For more on the Amazon http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate.php#more
and http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0204-amazongate.html

An analysis on Himalayas http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/02/anatomy-of-ipccs-himalayan-glacier-year-2035-mess/

Yeah! Our current system is so much better than the crappy health care in Japan, Sweden, Great Britain, Canada and basically the rest of the civilized world! Also because of socialized health care, all those for'n countries have mandatory gym memberships and shoot people for being fat! And because those for'ners allowed gays in their military, they had to reinstate the draft!

We should keep on doing exactly what we're doing, only more because it's working so well already!

Or, you know, we could learn what works from other countries that have done it already.

I don't see how that got set as troll...

Because it's wrong:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/03/the_hannah_poling_case_and_the_rebrandin.php

Good for you, we weren't all so lucky.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/07/very_off_topic_why_i_wont_be_a.php
^^^ (not me, FWIW)

Related, Wakefield was recently found to have acted unethically by the General Medical Council. The full report is up on Scribd. Some analysis and summarizing, as well as some of the crazy response from the anti-vaccine community can be found at Orac's blog.

Just to follow up on my other post, on example suggesting flu in the Tropics (and I can wonder about some other tropical diseases) is more common in the rainy season with high humidity:
"Do the tropics have a flu season?"
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/03/do_the_tropics_have_a_flu_seas.php
"The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here's a title like that: "Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007" (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar).
http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/15/3/pdfs/08-0238.pdf
Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to 11 years old and living in the capital of Managua were followed for 2 years, April 2005 to April 2007 and observed for development of ILI (influenza-like illness). We know a lot about influenza in major industrialized countries in the northern and southern temperate zones, but very little about the epidemiology of seasonal influenza in tropical regions. Is the pattern of the disease in these populations the same as in temperate climes? Is there a lot of flu or just a low level? Is it still seasonal influenza? The US and Europe have recently set up surveillance systems that help answer these questions but most countries don't have those resources."

So, understanding more about the effects of vitamin D deficiency may very well help a lot of people in the Tropics directly, much more than vaccinations, since adequate vitamin D is cheap to treat with, and that single thing might prevent a variety of illnesses, not just communicable ones, but also cancer, depression, heart disease, dementia, and so on.

Lots of sources here about vitamin D and influenza though:
http://www.google.com/custom?q=influenza&sitesearch=vitamindcouncil.org&sa=Search

Also, while it is often said people catch the cold and the flu because we are indoors more in the winter (or the rainy season), in the USA most people are indoors around others much of the time, between work, school, and malls. So, that explanation has limited value.

And vitamin D deficiency also impairs the bodies ability to deal with heavy metals, making vaccines harder to process that contain heavy metals (and causing seemingly random problems in those who are most vitamin D deficient and have an impaired ability to deal with heavy metals that don't show up in people getting enough sunshine?). Likewise, vitamin D deficiency impairs immune response (both potentially too little and too much), making vaccines less effective and more dangerous. So, there are lots of reasons to study this, even for those who still believe in the value of most vaccines.

Another comment on this:
"Flu is Vitamin D Deficiency Disease"
http://thehealthyhomeeconomist.blogspot.com/2010/01/flu-is-vitamin-d-deficiency-disease.html
"""
Why does the government push dangerous and untested vaccines on the public for the prevention of flu when it is so easy to prevent it with adequate blood levels of vitamin D? The answer is always the almighty dollar. Follow the green and you know why this simple flu prevention strategy is completely ignored. I personally haven't had the flu in over 8 years since I was informed of the critical role of vitamin D in preventing illness and have worked to keep my vitamin D blood levels adequate. In fact, I am so unafraid of the flu that I would be comfortable in a room full of swine flu patients with no mask! Fact is, you are not going to "catch" the flu if your vitamin D blood levels are normal any more than a sail

Measurement of pH of standard distilled water shows variances of + or - 0.1 all of the time.

Perfectly distilled H20 does have a pH of 7.0. Actual measured values will vary due both to the resolution of measuring instruments, and contamination of the sample - principally absorption of CO2. With expensive equipment and a pure sample (e.g. from nuclear grade resin purification) the sample variance should be lower than ±0.1

http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/inqu/finalprogram/abstract_54486.htm

You realise that this isn't a peer-reviewed paper, right? It's just a poster presentation at a conference. Calls for posters go out to everyone, even PhD students who have barely started their research, it's just a presentation of what you're doing, and is not supposed to be taken as finished, published, reviewed research.

Here's something to consider:

Morner used "coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating". Conspicuously absent from this list is any direct measure of sea level from tide gauges or satellites." Sea level rise at tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean islands by Church, White and Hunter published in 2006 in the journal Global and Planetary Change looked at data from tide gauges and satellites and found:
"In the Indian Ocean, the tide-gauge records at the Maldives indicate large rates of relative sea-level rise in agreement with Singh et al. (2001) and Woodworth (2005), and in disagreement with Morner et al. (2004). ..."

Maybe it includes no backdoors but backdoor generating code.

Believe me, everyone in climate science knows about climateaudit.org .

Steve McIntyre was shown to be gravely incorrect multiple times (more than I can care to count), yet I don't remember him admitting his mistakes and revising his views.

As far as I remember, he was able to muster only a few words deep in the comment threads.

You can see examples here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_warming/mcintyre/ - yes, there are whole sections of blogs dedicated to McIntyre-misinformation.

I like this one: http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2008/01/auditors-resolutions.html

" the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?"

I bet you're a lousy programmer...

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/we-cant-even-predict-weather-next-week.php

Not necessarily.

Here's one famous example.

If you are really paranoid, you will write yourself your own C compiler or else this could happen:
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/strange_loops_dennis_ritchie_a.php

Palin couldn't stop Joe Biden "o'Biden", which is why she asked if she could call him "Joe" in the VP debates. She still slipped during the debate and called him o'Biden anyway.

Experience is one thing, the ability to remember your opponents names is another.

Awesome! That's what I was looking for. She also did an interview while being completely oblivious to a turkey slaughter going on behind her.

However, Obama spent several minutes talking about pie in a campaign stop and Joe Biden told a man in a wheel chair to stand up and be recognized. George HW Bush blew chunks into the Japanese PM's lap and at one point said he and Reagan had sex. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush couldn't stop from saying "nucular" and Carter even worked on a nuclear sub. Politicians do stupid things sometimes. Actually, we all do stupid things sometimes, except not all of spend as much time in front of a camera.

Anyway, my point is that if you are going to disqualify Palin for saying O'Biden, then you'd have to disqualify Biden for all the incredibly stupid stuff he has said throughout the years.

Palin couldn't stop Joe Biden "o'Biden", which is why she asked if she could call him "Joe" in the VP debates. She still slipped during the debate and called him o'Biden anyway.

Experience is one thing, the ability to remember your opponents names is another.

There is a problem with that: they are also authorized to demand the passphrases for any and all encrypted data and can prevent you from officially entering the United States until you give them the passphrases.

Here's an article, and here is a post from the NorCal ACLU on the same topic. There are others out there but they're pretty easy to dig up.

Smart men are smarter than smart women, on average. (Stupid men are also retards compared to stupid women due to a male intellectual bell curve with significantly more outliers). Women are much more normalized, intellectually.

That's not nearly as well-established as you seem to think it is. As an example, from here:

Far more men play chess than women and based on that simple fact, you could actually predict the differences we see in chess ability at the highest level. It's a simple statistical fact that the best performers from a large group are probably going to be better than the best performers from a small one. Even if two groups have the same average skill and, importantly, the same range in skill, the most capable individuals will probably come from the larger group.

With this statistical effect in mind, Bilalic wanted to see if the actual sex difference that we see among chess players is any greater than the difference you would rationally expect. Fortunately, there are easy ways of finding out the answer for chess, as opposed to many other intellectual disciplines like science and engineering where success is nigh-impossible to measure objectively.

Every serious player has an objective rating - the Elo rating - that measures their skill based on their results against other players. Bilalic looked at a set of data encompassing all known German players - over 120,000 individuals, of whom 113,000 are men. He directly compared the top 100 players of either gender and used a mathematical model to work out the expected difference in their Elo ratings, given the size of the groups they belong to.

The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you'd see that difference close substantially.

...Of course, sceptics could argue that low participation rate is itself caused by the fact that women simply give up chess in greater numbers than men based on some innate disadvantage. As Bilalic says, the argument is "reasonable" but there is no evidence that the drop-out rate is higher in women than men.

In fact, Christopher Chablis and Mark Glickman recently found equal drop-out rates for boys and girls among 600 budding chess players of comparable age, skill and interest. Their study also found that both sexes improve at an matching pace, and they concluded that the success of men at chess's highest tiers is fuelled by the overwhelming majority of boys who enter the game at its lowest levels.

So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It's that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.

""According to The Simpsons, a "scientician" is "a scientist with questionable credentials who publicly supports spurious hypotheses.""

Ah, so that's what that Monckton chap who claims to be in the House of Lords ( and isn't ) and a Nobel laureate ( and isn't ) and a climate expert ( and isn't ) actually is!

""According to The Simpsons, a "scientician" is "a scientist with questionable credentials who publicly supports spurious hypotheses.""

Ah, so that's what that Monckton chap who claims to be in the House of Lords ( and isn't ) and a Nobel laureate ( and isn't ) and a climate expert ( and isn't ) actually is!

Must be referring to this.

. Maybe in the future the law will go so far that the "One Drop Rule" will mean that anyone with *any* White blood will be considered White. Maybe in the future the law will go so far that the "One Drop Rule" will mean that anyone with *any* White blood will be considered White.

Arguably, redefinition has begun.

Personally, I liked the Cat-vs-Dog Adult Swim election parody of talking heads a la Hannity and Colmes. Cat said something like, "Obama is going to be our first black president," and Dog retorted, "Why do you do that? Oh, he's 'black.' He's equally white. But you want to call him black. You racist." And you know what, Dog is right. He is equally white. So while some might hail Obama as our first black president, to me he's just the 44th cracker in a row. ;)

--
120 characters ought to be enough for anybody. - Cmdr Taco

95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated.
                                                                                -- Benjamin Franklin

I don't know why I bother reading the comments.

Maybe it's the favorable ranking Slashdot has in my Firefox awesome bar. Maybe it's the arbitrary and Skinnereque reinforcement that comes from being modded up. Perhaps it's just a bad habit. Regardless, arguing here is like wrestling a fifth grader. Between the ultra-individual libertarian ideologues and the clueless teenagers (never mind the considerable overlap), it's hard to find anything challenging.

As another poster mentioned a few weeks ago, Slashdot has become a site for "computer janitors" --- i.e, the bored and easily amused who have no real ideas, power, or authority. The comments section has become a showcase for naivety. Oh, there's sound and funny and fury, but there's no creativity, even among the trolls: does anyone remember OOG_THE_CAVEMAN? Now we're left with copypasta that aims to offend in the most superficial way.

Frankly, reading Slashdot has become an embarrassment. I mention it with the same tone and trepidation I might use to admit I'd purchased a Big and Rich album. Remember when we used to talk about technology? Now we mainly argue about people talking about technology.

If I want interesting stories, fair and timely news, or probing analysis, I know where to find it. Still, there's nothing that can replace the Slashdot of yore.

Do you mean Titanoboa cerrejonesis? If so, the linked article (from February) could serve as TFA — maybe that wouldn't be old news by Slashdot standards.

Interestingly, Zicam snuck in under a different loophole. Zicam was 10% Zinc Gluconate, which turns out to be pretty bloody high for intranasal use(check out what it did in animal tests). However, since Zinc Gluconate is one of the substances included in the "Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States" (a collection of homeopathic "remedies" put together according to this procedure) and since 10% is equivalent to the "1D" homeopathic dilution, Zicam could be regulated and sold as a homeopathic drug rather than a conventional drug.

Unlike "dietary supplements", homeopathic remedies are recognized as drugs under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act(in Section 201(g). However, unlike ordinary drugs, they are subject only to production and labeling standards, not safety or efficacy tests, and are almost always nonprescription. Normally, this isn't a big deal, because most homeopathic drugs are so diluted that the contain(on average) 0 molecules of the active ingredient, and are prepared using harmless dilutants. Zicam was unusual in that, while it arguably fell under the definition of "homeopathic", and was sold as such, it was well within the range for biological activity.

This article covers it...

http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/02/is_the_earths_magnetic_field_a.php

I've heard it from several sources though, they have geological proof that the earths magnetic field has been periodically flipping and reversing its polarity, and that it does this at periodic intervals, and that we are in fact due for a flip any millenia now.

the fault in your statement is that you assume that people in OK want science in their state to begin with...

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2009/03/oklahoma_hates_richard_dawkins.php

What you said, except THE OPPOSITE:

Russian analysis confirms 20th century CRU temperatures

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/russian_analysis_confirms_20th.php

Cuttlefish can also communicate (and hide) by changing their body patterns (and they can do it very very quickly):

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_3_109/ai_61524425/

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/cephalopod_camouflage_or_turni.php

While labeled flamebait, this is something of a problem, even in less politicized fields of science. Most scientists are earnest truth-seekers, but a minority are not, and the peer-review system is not always robust to them. I work in an area of computer science that will never make Fox News, but even in this area things are sometimes suppressed for what's hard to describe as other than political reasons. At the very least, politically unpopular positions get all sorts of extra hoops to jump through that others don't--- e.g. if you're casting doubt on a position the journal editor or one of his friends staked his career on, better expect some random made-up requirements. If your paper scoops a large and well-funded group's work, there's a chance it'll be rejected by one of their friends, so they get to publication first--- and their publication might coincidentally borrow a few ideas or theorems from your rejected paper.

It's not all bad, and in fact most is probably good. But there are some very rotten parts of the scientific-publishing apparatus. It doesn't help that most journals are run by for-profit companies that are a bit shady themselves (Kluwer, Springer, etc.) who have no real interest in the quality of the science they publish or how to improve it. And it doubly doesn't help that the academic rat-race has gotten increasingly cut-throat, so people feel they need to resort to dirty tricks to get/keep a job, get tenure, get grants, etc.

It seems perfectly natural and common place that anybody in employment has political issues to deal with, and that occasionally these will actually get in the way of the job being done right. Institutions also need to survive, and they also have political games to play.

What raised my sceptical curiosity about climate change was the constant repeating that anybody who disagreed was corrupt, and anybody who was in line was honest. If I accept that oil companies could be distorting research, then I have to also accept that activists can be distorting research. Any research could be distorted, potentially. Not that it is for real, necessarily, but the potential is there because we're all people with some degree of self-interest. Imagining you have a noble cause on your side really does not help one escape self-delusionary bias--at least money is a bit easier to see, but principles about saving the world? The world's religions have suffered massively due to their inability to self--discern their ideals from their human failings. But no... only the "bad" people disagree. That's what made me sceptical. I'm not a scientist, but I am human.

While labeled flamebait, this is something of a problem, even in less politicized fields of science. Most scientists are earnest truth-seekers, but a minority are not, and the peer-review system is not always robust to them. I work in an area of computer science that will never make Fox News, but even in this area things are sometimes suppressed for what's hard to describe as other than political reasons. At the very least, politically unpopular positions get all sorts of extra hoops to jump through that others don't--- e.g. if you're casting doubt on a position the journal editor or one of his friends staked his career on, better expect some random made-up requirements. If your paper scoops a large and well-funded group's work, there's a chance it'll be rejected by one of their friends, so they get to publication first--- and their publication might coincidentally borrow a few ideas or theorems from your rejected paper.

It's not all bad, and in fact most is probably good. But there are some very rotten parts of the scientific-publishing apparatus. It doesn't help that most journals are run by for-profit companies that are a bit shady themselves (Kluwer, Springer, etc.) who have no real interest in the quality of the science they publish or how to improve it. And it doubly doesn't help that the academic rat-race has gotten increasingly cut-throat, so people feel they need to resort to dirty tricks to get/keep a job, get tenure, get grants, etc.

Well here is an example from a blog I go to often.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

In the first couple of posts - "darn it too many people believe in God", hitting on religion and the idea that there is a soul or afterlife.

Next page - "Popular religious belief is caused by dysfunctional social conditions." Their piety didn't save them and didn't alleviate their pain or their desperate conditions — it made them worse."

Or that there are only two kinds of people that deny AGW - "The point he's making is that there are two broad categories of denialists, the ones who are sincerely nuts (like Monckton) and the ones know better but are lying to make a profit for their cause (like the odious Steve Milloy)."

Or if those aren't enough, check out the CRU emails.

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones wrote.

If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands ...which has been either minimal or non-detectable, as opposed to what the AGW fans have been telling us. Not exactly a good point.

Sea level changes from 1970 to 2009, compared with IPCC predictions. (from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Tim Lambert on Scienceblogs).

You should also note that if you go back to the beginning of serious AGW science (during the late 1980s), most of their predictions have already been falsified. The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed (check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations), the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions), and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not). None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.

Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?

The code is a non-story.
The offending code was commented out, and the corrected MXD data was not included in the paper.
Here's the paper. Figure 6 is the graph produced by the code. None of the corrected data was used.

I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.

Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:

1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .

2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).

3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.

Rinse. Repeat.

To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.

As someone pointed out back when the emails were leaked, it's a 61 MB "random" sample of the emails they stole. The fact that it's only a subset, with threads, that all paint the researchers in a negative light implies that this isn't truly a random sample, but rather a hand picked subset. And conveniently just before the big climate change summit. How "random"!

Of course the code is a mess and "not professional", it's written by climatologist grad students instead of some software engineer. Why was it written in Fortran? Easy. It's what they know, and it's a perfectly valid tool. Do you know what all the software that analyzes all the big physics experiments are in? Yup. Fortran. Why? It's what they know. Honestly, this is by far the weakest of all your complaints.

Most damning for the conspiracy folks is the fact that the code, simply doesn't show any evidence of fraud. "Hide the decline"? Well there are two graphs labeled "Northern Hemisphere MXD" and "Northern Hemisphere MXD corrected for decline."

Apparently they slept through "Fraud 101" in grad school huh?

Why would they call their estimation of temperature a "travesty" for when it showed an reduction in temperature for the last 10 years? Well, because temperature, as measured by thermometers, actually increased during that time. So ether the Earth is wrong, or the code is wrong. Which is it?

Climate proxies have been used for years. Do you really think that that they don't know that tree growth can be effected by something other than temperature? Anyone that knows someone that forgot to water a plant know s that. That's why in Dendroclimatology, you control for various effects by comparing trees from one region with those from another region that would be less likely to have been effected by whatever it is you're controlling for. I am shocked. SHOCKED! I say! That there are known methods for doing this correctly. Next you'll be telling me that the air bubbles in ice core data don't actually contain samples of the atmosphere at that time they were formed.

Only four datasets? Really? Well you better tell Steve McIntyre! His list of datasets goes on for for pages!

So the physics of CO2 that you can test in jar is wrong, and there's no correlation, even when measured directly. Wow. You are quite insightful. What is your expertise again?

Remember Gore's CO2 graph? Probably a 95% correlation between CO2 and temperature, which he presented as proof that CO2 CAUSES global warming. Except that the CO2 increased 800 years AFTER the warming trend. In other words, warming CAUSED CO2 increases, the opposite of what he implied.

That's a classic argument that has been refuted again and again. Like at How to talk to a climate skeptic; CO2 Lags Not Leads, or at Realcliamate.org; The lag between temperature and CO2. (Gore’s got it right.).

In short, with warming periods lasting for around 5000 years, a lag of 800 years isn't as significant as you might think. Other factors than just CO2 affects warming, which isn't surprising or unknown.

There's been another breaking climate scandal. Some big name climate skeptics have been busted big time manipulating temperature data and lying about it.

They've manipulated the data to make it look like it was cooling when it was really warming, and the Drudge Report and blogger Anthony Watts have been caught up in the lies, and have tried to blame it on some New Zealand climate researchers:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/

"As long as its green, I'm not quite sure about this moralistic issue."

- Quote about writing "scientific studies" for the tobacco industry by Frederick Seitz, the author of that cover letter for that petition of 30000 questionable signatures against the science of climate change.

The individual in question is typing by aid of "facilitated communication" where by an assistant helps them type the words. There has been a lot of criticism of this method before. It was attempted with severely autistic kids about a decade ago and later worked showed that it was likely that the messages were coming almost completely from the facilitators not the kids. See http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/really_this_guy_is_conscious.php

"Well, I think the big thing that this data-dump shows is that it's actually a small group of tightly knit e-mail connected individuals that are driving a whole lot of the AGW effort."

Quite the opposite. There's a small group of tightly knit individuals that are driving ANTI-AGW.

And that's actually proven: http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science/2008/06/ninety_percent_of_enviro_skept.php

"Its been cooling for a decade and there is even an email about it with one of those guys asking the other what they should do about the current evidence, with a hint that the instrumental record (direct observations!) must be wrong."

WRONG! I F&@#(G WANT TO KILL ANYONE WHO REPEATS THIS TRASH! DO THE F##$!#G GOOGLE SEARCH FOR IT!

http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/20/hacked-hadley-emails-hottest-decade-on-record-and-the-oceans-planet-keep-warming/
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.php
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/satellites-show-cooling.php

"Its been cooling for a decade and there is even an email about it with one of those guys asking the other what they should do about the current evidence, with a hint that the instrumental record (direct observations!) must be wrong."

WRONG! I F&@#(G WANT TO KILL ANYONE WHO REPEATS THIS TRASH! DO THE F##$!#G GOOGLE SEARCH FOR IT!

http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/20/hacked-hadley-emails-hottest-decade-on-record-and-the-oceans-planet-keep-warming/
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.php
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/satellites-show-cooling.php

I don't have the time, or desire to get into this but here:
http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/the_hacked_climate_science_ema.php#more

Beck's skin is too thin to take the criticism, so he wants the site down. Beck is represented by a learned and respected legal team. Accordingly, it is beyond doubt that his counsel advised him that under the First Amendment to the United States' Constitution, no action in a U.S. Court would be successful. Accordingly, Beck is attempting to use this transnational body to circumvent and subvert the Respondent's constitutional rights.

It's funny really - Beck is all for the Constitution, except when it's inconvenient for him. Then he appeals to those same transnational bodies he rails against on his show to get around it.

The example of artificial insemination is a good example. When artificial insemination was first introduced there was a lot of outcry over it. Now the only major objection is from the Catholic Church. Others who still object do so out of side-effects such as the destruction of embryos rather than objecting to the process as a whole (which the Catholic Church does). And in a few years even the Catholics will likely be fine with it.

But at the same time, this sort of example isn't so great. It involves a direct application: people are much more willing to change their ethical and moral attitudes when they see the actual benefits of a new technology.

The general worry of poor treatment of science is a valid one. Sarah Palin railed against research involving "fruit flies" and John McCain complained about research about bear DNA, and neither of those even had any moral or ethical component to them. There's a very strong anti-science attitude in certain groups in the United States. Worse, it appears on both sides of the political spectrum (the anti-vaccination movement and much of the fringier elements of alternative medicine are very much on the left end of the political spectrum). Moreover, strongly negative attitudes about evolution and abiogenesis research have already won out in some Islamic countries. Look at Turkey for example which is a nominally secular country (indeed with disturbingly enforced secularism) and yet evolution isn't taught in schools and universities have trouble doing any research connected to evolution or abiogenesis. See for example http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/11/islamic_creationism_in_the_new.php for a quick summary of the current situation in the Islamic world. Moreover, Islamic creationists in Turkey have succeeded partially due to support and cooperation with Christian creationists in the United States. So it is possible for religious fanatics to really restrict this sort of thing: It has happened in other countries. Is it likely? Probably not. But it isn't impossible.

Theres interesting twist on that one lately. Baxter, which also previously almost "accidentally" spread modified bird flu in 2008 until it was noticed in one of the labs just at final moment, was supposedly testing some bio weapon in Ukraine.

http://www.consciousape.com/news/swine-flu-wars-baxters-ukraine-bio-weapon-exposed/

And further: “He said that Baxter’s Ukrainian lab was in fact producing a bio-weapon disguised as a vaccine. He claimed that the vaccine contained an adjuvant (additive) designed to weaken the immune system, and replicated RNA from the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic Spanish flu, causing global sickness and mass death.”

We should perhaps note that Moshe revealed this information in August, a full two months and more before the Ukrainian ‘flu’ epidemic broke out.

Interestingly that was noted 2 months ago, and something unknown is now spreading there.

Since the moment the epidemic started to spread, 871,037 people have been diagnosed with flu and other respiratory viral infections, including 101,317 over the past 24 hours. As many as 39,603 of these people have been hospitalized, including 4,732 over the past 24 hours, and 317 are in intensive care.

60 people have died of severe respiratory conditions in the past week – 4 confirmed swine flu deaths, and what are being described as 56 “unexplained deaths” in the west of the country.

Looking at whatever has been happening with Baxter previously and with the swine flu.. interesting stuff.

About eight years ago I read about a line of experiments that measurably increased rodents' performance in a set of memory and learning tasks. I believe the genetic change involved the NMDA receptor, but a quick search doesn't turn up an obvious link to that.

There was a report this September that gene therapy had been used to grant "full" color vision to colorblind monkeys, following on an earlier experiment that did the same thing to rodents. That is, the rodents were given three-color vision where they normally have two color receptor types. (Would that make them transrodents?) Apparently, the brain automatically adapts to having a new receptor type installed in the retina! And the same technique could be used on humans to grant us a fourth receptor type, maybe a UV receptor gotten from parrots or something. I'd volunteer to have this done to one eye. (The first comment on this article presents a dissenting view that just because the monkeys were able to distinguish colors in greater detail than before, that shouldn't be taken as proof that they "have full color vision". All the more reason to try it in a human!)

The rodents could be in combination with cyborg cats though, as seen in this 1995 report of recognizable images read directly from a cat's visual cortex.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason it drew ire was because in their quest to be contrarian and unintuitive they manage to get everything completely wrong, including such gems as claiming that "The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity and the rest is reradiated as heat - which contributes to global warming." Of course, not only are most solar cells blue, not only do they generally cover surfaces that have no better an albedo than they do, not only would the waste heat from even a large decrease in albedo be no bigger than the waste heat produced by coal plants, but of course the effect of waste heat is completely insignificant compared to the heat trapping effects of the CO2 released by the other power generation methods that solar would supplant, as the most basic sanity check would have shown.

The also manage to consistently cite climate scientists as saying things diametrically opposed to their actual positions, which is the sort of thing that really pisses people off, and all to push a highly flawed geoengineering "solution" which would require climate models much more precise than we have to not go disastrously wrong, would not stop ocean acidification, would not even stop massive climate change, since the earth is not a uniform system and energy would still be shifted around, and would require a feat of engineering and political cooperation beyond anything humanity has ever accomplished that would have to continue to disperse sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere every year for however many centuries humanity intends to survive on this planet, making it considerably more expensive and difficult than the comparatively easy task of just reducing the fucking emissions.

I've read suggestions to make people (kids in particular) get vaccinations before but frankly I have never been comfortable with the concept. When you start telling people that they must put something foreign into their bodies at what point exactly does it stop?

If you don't like foreign substances in your body, don't eat :-) But vaccinations are a matter of science, not how you feel. Did you that vaccine rates and disease rates are inversely correlated? Germs and viruses don't care if it gives you the willies. And yes, vaccines have side effects, sometimes people die, but it is either that or smallpox. The danger isn't eliminated, you're just trading real danger for a one in a million risk.

Everything you put in your body contains at least some trace amounts of environmental contaminants.