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More accurately, the GGP's statement is true only if discussing wet bulb temperature. From the wiki:

A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 C (95 F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it.[7] Thus 35 C is the threshold beyond which the body is no longer able to adequately cool itself.

Further, according to this summary of a recent study (abstract):

In today's climate, about 2 percent of the Indian population sometimes gets exposed to extremes of 32-degree wet-bulb temperatures. According to this study, by 2100 that will increase to about 70 percent of the population, and about 2 percent of the people will sometimes be exposed to the survivability limit of 35 degrees. And because the region is important agriculturally, it's not just those directly affected by the heat who will suffer, Eltahir says: "With the disruption to the agricultural production, it doesn't need to be the heat wave itself that kills people. Production will go down, so potentially everyone will suffer."

So things are not quite projected to become the charred hellscape that GGP envisioned, but still pretty bad for a lot of people.

The /. article has a broken link: http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

The "climate change" concern in the 60s and 70s was global cooling, not global warming. The only bit you got correct is that Carter got involved; he signed the National Climate Program Act to deal with "the global cooling crisis."

I worry for Slashdot when I see such revisionism as yours upmodded to +5.

See this report from the National Research Council, which the Carter White House commissioned in 1978 about carbon dioxide and global warming:

See, also, Wallace Broecker, "Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Science 189 460 (1975).

Going back to the 1960s, we can see Lyndon Johnson requesting a report from the Presiden't Council of Advisers on Science and Technology about global warming:

On 5 November, 1965, the group now known as the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) cautioned President Lyndon B. Johnson that continued accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from fossil-fuel burning would “almost certainly cause significant changes” and “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.

Okay and which ones would those be.

Umm, many? "All models are wrong" is a very common thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The biggest one I remember is when the models overlooked the ocean as a gigantic heatsink, leading to a massive gap in "missing heat": http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Most recently, the most recent models have been shown to vastly overstate the warming case: http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...

Just one quote: "Here's where it gets interesting. The average global temperature now stands at about 0.9 C above the pre-industrial baseline, which implies that global temperature would have to increase by 0.6 C between now and 2021 if the IPCC carbon budget calculations were right. This is highly implausible since such an increase would be about 10 times faster than than what has actually heretofore been observed"

"Scientists pull random theories out of their butts and decades later pick and choose the ones that were correct" isn't how science actually works.

And yet that appears to be almost exactly what they're doing...you basically shotgun a bunch of models based on "best understanding" of a very complex ecosystem. After observing end results (hindcasting), the ones that best fit you keep, the others you throw out. Which is a perfectly fine method of science long-term, with the exception that you aren't allowed to make a bunch of claims of certainty of the end of humanity when you're far from having it figured out. You know all those people that claims 90+% scientific consensus that we're on a path to global catastrophe? Right down to exact "tipping point" climate timelines which were pretty much used to craft the guidelines in the Paris accord.

D-Wave makes quantum annealing processors - and is only useful for a sliver of useful computing (adiabatic quantum computing).

There's no small amount of controversy as to whether D-Wave systems are truly quantum machines. A number of groups found "no quantum speedup" and have shown better performance using traditional silicon, and studies have been published to that effect.

Having worked in supercomputing for a decade, I've looked hard are D-Wave's "quantum" computing, and give it slightly more credibility than the E-Cat cold fusion reactor, or Quantum vacuum thrusters.

IBM's effort is a true general purpose quantum computer - the kind that can run Shor's algorithm and render RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and ECC cryptography useless.

The link to the underlying research is incorrect. This is the correct link: http://science.sciencemag.org/...

The desperation of CNN... just smells sweeter every day!

Man, really! Unfortunately, it has everybody fixated. The hysteria has infected every facet of mass media. Russia is an adversary to be sure, but if their "interference" had so much effect on the the vote, what does that say about all the simple minded idiots who believe the bullshit? I mean, look closely at Trump/Clinton/Congress/etc, and look even more closely at why the fuck anybody would vote for them. We do indeed have a very representative government. It truly reflects all of our deepest desires, or vice versa. Either way, the power to change can only come from us. Presently we are headed off the cliff. We either go along or not. Our choice. What will *we the people* do? Are we really going to let the accuweather guy lead NOAA into the abyss? Or are we going to keep jerking off over Russia?

That does not lead to the conclusion that three-quarters of all the honey (from everywhere) is the same as that sampled.

Correct. That's just shoddy science journalism as usual. The actually article in Science doesn't make such a claim. That's the kind of thing that would get you screwered in peer review.

This is not limited to tribes, and not everyone in pharma is happy about it either:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/26/more-on-the-mighty-mohawk-maneuver/

Let me spell it out for you since you are clearly logically challenged and/or incapable of grasping basic concepts:

If a business or country hires/pays/blackmails/threatens a person to steal for them and then that entity receives the stolen goods, then that entity is morally and legally guilty of the theft. However, in the case of China, they literally don't give a shit what the rest of the world thinks or demands or what is legal/illegal, unless it actually costs them money or power in some way. The US has mountains of evidence from our counter espionage against China that they have stolen US IP hundreds if not thousands of times in the last 20 years. Evidence like photographic evidence of the thief dead dropping the data to a Chinese diplomat, electronic evidence of payouts to the thief from a Chinese state backed entity, testimony from the thief that his family back in China was under threat, etc.

You might want to do a little light reading, maybe have a few of the facts before you start making a fool of yourself. http://www.ipcommission.org/re...

Some other pertinent information:
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
http://www.politifact.com/pund...

Yeah but you're talking about early-generation AI.

All we have to do is go a little META on the learning algorithms and representations, and give them a general goal like "learn more about everything", "form goals (for beneficial modification of environment, for assistance to human wishes?)", "learn experimentally how to progress toward goals" etc.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

There are no lawyers without law degrees.

Not to deflect your point in any way, but had to correct a bit of misinformation.

You can pass the patent bar and practice patent law in front of the USPTO without a JD
http://www.sciencemag.org/care...

Carry on.

Hi,

I'm a white male software engineer. I'm having a really hard time trying to separate out my own biases and the biases of others in reaction to the memo with actual factual discourse about the science. In almost all of the reaction commentary, even some of the better discourse, people keep wielding any ammunition they can find to defend their point of view on both sides. I worry that I am inclined to do the same thing.

I've been trying to read as much research as possible in the last couple of days as science feels like the only bastion where I can try to come to a reasoned conclusion about all of this. That path has lead me to some unusual places, like wondering if there is a biological explanation for higher average verbal intelligence in women that allows them to have greater selection in careers (Ref 1) and differences in brain anatomy where men have thinner average cortical thickness than women but higher variability. (Ref 2)

Given that you are a female engineer directly affected by all of this, do you think it's reasonable to explore these kinds of questions? Does it diminish the effects of the real sexism and bias that face women in tech to examine other potential explanations for the gender gap?

Ref 1: http://journals.sagepub.com/do...

Ref 2: http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

False equivalence much?

> women are less suited to have tech jobs

[[Citation]]

> because of inherent differences between men and women.

You DO realize there are biological and social differences, right?

Hell, even the brain is wired differently.

Lastly, I don't hear anyone complaining about the low number of male nurses because everyone else is too busy just trying to get their job done instead of making drama over reverse discrimination issues of bullshit "diversity" issues.

--
SJW, noun, Stupid Juvenile Whiner.
 

https://phys.org/news/2015-03-... http://www.sciencemag.org/news... If dark matter were simply some existing form of baryonic matter, even if trapped in black holes, then a phenoma like this where dark matter halos separate from collided galaxies and behave under different rules to continue on their existing path should not be possible at all, because it, like all the other ordinary matter involved, it should have followed the same paths gravitationally bound.

What makes you think batteries don't need to be cooled? While EVs don't need as much cooling air as an ICE, they still need some air intake since the most obvious source (underneath) is blocked by a thick metal plate to protect it from being punctured by road debris. (Yes you can use it as a heat sink, but then you're only disseminating heat to a two dimensional layer of air contacting the plate, instead of a volume of air.) And you want a duct anyway so you can put a fan in it to force air through when the car is stopped or traveling too slowly but the batteries are overheating.

In all fairness that is that site's take on the paper that was published. The actual paper that they cite in it's paper states that a 40-year drought in the southwest region of the US (mostly CA), is roughly sitting at 12% a chance of starting within the next two decades. So sometime between when that paper was published (2015) and 2035, there is a 12% chance of a 40-year drought kicking off.

Lesson to learn here, you really shouldn't be taking a news site's ability to report science as fact. In fact, I'm paraphrasing as well since I really don't have the time to go over the whole paper, but you should give it a read. It's interesting to say the least.

Damn. Accidentally hit send there. The most recent research published last week as well outlines economic impacts:

http://science.sciencemag.org/...

The source is Cheng et al., (2017), but it is entirely consistent with any other recent study of ocean warming.

bestweasel noted:

E.U. member states agreed [last month] on an ambitious new open-access (OA) target. All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020, the Competitiveness Council - a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry - concluded after a 2-day meeting in Brussels.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Unfortunately, that was just the Competitiveness Council's resolution. To put actual teeth into it as an EU policy will require action by the European Parlaiment.

In the meantime, there's the Unpaywall extension for Firefox and Chrome. If there's a non-paywalled version of a journal article available on the Web, it'll find it for you. (And it pays to check back, because free versions often become available sometime after the initial publication of a journal article.)

E.U. member states agreed [last month] on an ambitious new open-access (OA) target. All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020, the Competitiveness Council - a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry -
  concluded after a 2-day meeting in Brussels.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

I get it, you want to promote a vegan lifestyle. Allright: Meat is evil, evil, evil. So, with this out of the way, can we get back on topic?

But like I said somewhere else, science is not a democratic process and doesn't really give a fuck whether you like it or not. Human IS the apex predator. Actually, we prey on other predators and even use other predators to do our dirty work. We kill about 14 times more adult animals than the other predators together. No, sadly I didn't find a more approachable source, but given that the study is like 2 years old by now, it should be possible to find some if you are really interested.

There is a mounting body of research that it is not just genes that are passed on from parents to children but epigenetic markers as well. These markers affect gene expression and suppression and are just as important as the genes themselves. Unlike genes, they are constantly changing due to environmental pressures thus providing a mechanism to pass on a sort of genetic memory of the parents life experience which should help prepare their children for the conditions they are likely to encounter. Research has shown that a mother's traumatic experience during pregnancy goes on affect gene expression even in their grandchildren http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

First, the title is misleading. They used a satellite equipped with classical optical telecom to checkup some ground-based quantum receiving technology, but this was NOT quantum communication with the satellite. The sat they used is dead classical, built for other purposes. A new properly equipped quantum satellite would be needed for actual quantum communication.

Second, this is old news. The team has been reporting this experiment at conferences for the past year. This is to say, the German experiment was much less impressive but they got it a year ahead of the Chinese team.

Claiming that there are satellites showing a reduction of deserts is just idiotic.

It may have been caused by improper reporting of a discovery last month. To put it simply, better quality satellite imagery have revealed that there is 378 million hectares more forest than previously thought... most of them in dryland areas that we considered as deserts. It's not that deserts shrunk, it's that we incorrectly labelled areas as deserts due to poor quality imagery.

The interesting thing -to me- is that we already have the ability to restore large-scale damaged ecosystems, but that somehow it doesn't seem to be a priority for western civilization.

Very good question, because of the quite bad headline.

At the time of writing his original paper regarding light bending between two stars, Einstein was already sure that the light-bending effect occurs (it had been already observed during a solar eclipse in 1919). However, he assumed that it would never be observable with two stars, one in the background and other in the foreground (different to the sun) because the light of the two stars would merge and not be distinguishable. From his paper (full copy here): Of course, there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly. First, we shall scarcely ever approach closely enough to such a central line. Second, the angle b will defy the resolving power of our instruments [...]".

The relevant contribution is that current science (Hubble resolution) and appropriate search has managed to observe this effect. In particular, the linked overview clarifies it: Because the foreground star observed by Sahu et al. was about 400 times brighter than the background star, the brightening of their combined light was far too small to be detectable even with Hubble. However, the apparent displacement in the background star’s position, so-called “astrometric lensing,” was measurable. The interesting part is that by measuring the displacement of light, they have been also able to measure the mass of the star, and determine that it is not an exotic "iron core" white dwarf.

And while the medieval warm period was, in fact, a thing (with parts, notably the coastal regions, of Greenland being rather greener than today)- it was so incredibly localized that it did not affect global average temperatures at all.

Research is indicating that the medieval warm period was much more global than those with financial interests in it being regional will admit.

Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4C and 1.5 ± 0.4C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65 warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large. Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years Science 01 Nov 2013:
Vol. 342, Issue 6158, pp. 617-621
DOI: 10.1126/science.1240837

Humans, Human Civilization and the environment all did much better at warmer temperatures.

If you agree that scientific knowledge is good for a person, then every time someone reads a paper there was positive impact, if it happens on a poor country, there was positive impact on a poor country.

I know this might not be what you are talking about (scientific progress in the country, better researches there, etc), but I believe that the personal improvement of individuals accounts for positive impact in the country. I also believe that more important than the country having a positive impact is that thanks to these illegal activities, people have access to knowledge that they didn't have before. At least not without gigantic effort.

I got my bachelors degree in one of the top universities in Brazil (the ones with access to journals). One week after graduation I tried to enter the library and my access was revoked. I didn't publish anything with what I illegally read after that, but I still think that reading science is good for me. Anecdotal, I know.

Who's downloading pirated papers

http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
In rich and poor countries, researchers turn to the Sci-Hub website.
By John BohannonApr. 28, 2016 , 2:00 PM

Yes, Daniel Kish for one.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

/sarcasm If only there was a place one could search for information ...

--
Fuck You Red Cross for hijacking the + operator and the color red in a video game hundreds of years AFTER the Templars first used red crosses.

http://www.nature.com/news/hum...

A human nose has around 400 types of scent receptors. When the smell of coffee wafts through a room, for example, specific receptors in the nose detect molecular components of the odour, eliciting a series of neural responses that draw oneâ(TM)s attention to the coffee pot. But many details of that sequence are still unknown.

âoeThe relationship between the number of odorants that we can discriminate and the number of receptors that we have is unclear,â says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Some scientists assume that having more types of scent receptors indicates a more-sensitive sniffer.

2004 study

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

However, some recent behavioral studies suggest that primates, including humans, have relatively good senses of smell. Resolution of this paradox may come from a larger perspective on the biology of smell. Here we begin by reassessing several overlooked factors: the structure of the nasal cavity, retronasal smell, olfactory brain areas, and language. In these arenas, humans may have advantages which outweigh their lower numbers of receptors. It appears that in the olfactory system, olfactory receptor genes do not map directly onto behavior; rather, behavior is the outcome of multiple factors. If human smell perception is better than we thought, it may have played a more important role in human evolution than is usually acknowledged.

Comparing the data on smell detection thresholds shows that humans not only perform as well or better than other primates, they also perform as well or better than other mammals. When tested for thresholds to the odors of a series of straight-chain (aliphatic) aldehydes, dogs do better on the short chain compounds, but humans perform as well or slightly better than dogs on the longer chain compounds, and humans perform significantly better than rats (Laska et al. 2000). Similar results have been obtained with other types of odors.

A third type of study demonstrating human olfactory abilities shows that in tests of odor detection, humans outperform the most sensitive measuring instruments such as the gas chromatograph.

2006 study
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

A surprising new study suggests that people can track a scent across a grassy field--at least if they're willing to get down on their hands and knees and put their noses to the ground. The findings are unlikely to put hunting hounds and drug sniffing dogs out of work, but they may earn a little respect for the poorly regarded human sense of smell.

Humans are widely believed to be poor at tracking scents, especially when compared to other mammals such as dogs and rodents. But few had ever put that idea to the test. A research team led by Jess Porter and Noam Sobel at the University of California, Berkeley, dipped 10 meters of twine in chocolate essence and laid it in a field to form two straight lines connected at a 135Â angle. Then they blindfolded 32 undergraduate students and had them don earmuffs, thick gloves and kneepads to prevent them from using sensory cues other than smell. When set loose in the field, two-thirds of the subjects successfully followed the scent, zigzagging back and forth across the path like a dog tracking a pheasant, the researchers report online 17 December in Nature Neuroscience.

Nearly all the subjects reported that the task was challenging, Porter says, but four of them got a chance to improve with practice. Over the course of several days, they learned to follow the trail faster and deviate less. Even so, their performance remained well below what other researchers have reported in dogs.

And this ignores the not uncommon case of people who have more sensitive sense of smell than average.

127,000 dpi, what's with the archaic units? Roughly 200 nm/dot?

Which asshole modded that down? In fact my estimate was bang on, according to Figure 1B. Sheesh. What happened to the quality of Slashdot readers? Well there is a bright side: when you kids get to high school you will at least have some technical exposure.

If this is too theoretical for you then perhaps you would like this article titled, Most mammals need only 12 seconds to poop ;)

That's only because they can't read.

If this is too theoretical for you then perhaps you would like this article titled, Most mammals need only 12 seconds to poop ;)

Not yet. There's still a significant window where babies can't be supported out of the womb. This would be useful for early premature born babies, born months early, not from conception on. Doctors have been pushing back how early a baby can be born and still survive for a while now.

Scientists have recently also had breakthroughs on the other side of things, keeping embryos alive from IVF longer without implanting them, but that was pushing it forward a matter of days, not say into the second trimester.

I don't see a definite timeline on when technology will advance to the point of supporting embryos from conception to viability either. The research on pushing how long embryos are viable after conception without putting them in a mom is all academic for understanding how embryos form, it's not gearing towards what you're talking about in humans. There is a "14 day rule" established in the 70's saying you can't let human embryos develop beyond that in a petrie dish. That was established when 14 days after IVF seemed like an impossible barrier to overcome. Without a clear medical necessity, there's not going to be much of a push to remove that rule, and there is no clear medical necessity: surrogates, IVF, and adoption are all things. The pro-life crowd is going to oppose ending the rule. Granted, the pro-life crowd is really focused on slut-shaming and punishing women who don't want children, embryos in a dish are not really their thing, so it's not going to be as vicious as their attacks on planned parenthood.

I digress, my point is there's no strong push to figure out how to keep an embryo alive out of a womb from conception to a point where the bag would support life, so expect it will be a very long time before it's a possibility.

I watched Gattaca recently with my daughter. Only to find news articles the next day about the limited approval to use DNA editing on embryos in the U.S. to prevent diseases (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/us-panel-gives-yellow-light-human-embryo-editing). That combine with the recent advances of CISPR... makes this movie a very real possibility. I think it should be required watching for any legislators working on any genetic editing laws.

How about we work towards a cure instead of blowing money on problems that have already been solved?

Apple has zero experience working in a wet lab. So, Apple puts money where it does have experience.
Further, Curing biological diseases is hard. When Microsoft offered to debug cancer, Derek Lowe had this quote:

Unfortunately the world of code and computational hardware, as important, useful, and lucrative as it is, is just a sandbox compared to the real physical universe, of which living creatures are just a tiny little part. But biology has no debugging programs, no annotations, no manuals. It wasn't written by humans -- in fact, as far as we know, it wasn't written by anyone at all, it "just grew" in a process that has no good counterpart to the ways that humans generally get things done.

Which I think sums it up pretty well.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Sorry, you shouldn't bundle all AI together like this. AI is just a subset of software, it's made all different ways. In the Science article we look at standard natural language AI components. We actually look at them from two different sources, Stanford (main article) and Google (supplement.) But they just scrape language from the world wide web. It's just stuff people say. It's not a special biased subset. So this tells us more about language than it does about AI. http://science.sciencemag.org/...

I hope you mean the Guardian article not the Science article? I think that although we presented this pretty liberally we were also pretty open minded and clear about the fact that language communicates all associations, learning the associations is called "bias" in ML and bias is what you need, it's the signal you've found in all the noise of the universe. Read the Science paper? http://science.sciencemag.org/... Or otherwise, read the blog posts? https://joanna-bryson.blogspot...

You guys should read the Science report, I think it's open access? All the stimuli come directly from previously run psychological experiments, and are listed in the supplementary materials here: http://science.sciencemag.org/...

Can a muslim change its barbarism? Can a leopard change its spots?

An octopus can edit its RNA. Is that close enough?

This is common knowledge to anyone who has worked in the field - it's like asking for a citation for the claim that eating too much junk food leads to obesity. But here are two data points:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So that's less than 20% of approved drugs that are discovered in academia to begin with. Academic labs aren't large-scale operations - a single-investigator R01 grant from the NIH might be $5 million over 5 years, and most investigators won't have more than a handful of these. For the really big superstar labs, let's assume a very generous upper bounds of $10 million per year (not all of which is necessarily from the government). If it's a big multi-investigator project, maybe double that. Except for a handful of big centers (like the NIH itself, or genome sequencing centers), academia just doesn't operate at a large scale - a typical university research department is just an aggregation of many smaller units that are largely autonomous. The hidden advantage to these organizational limitations is that failed projects usually fail before anyone spends too much money on them. So let's hypothesize at the extreme, academics spent no more than $50 million per drug candidate. Compare to the numbers in the Wikipedia article.

Now, you could of course argue that because drug development is informed by the public-domain knowledge generated by taxpayer-funded researchers, drug companies are leaching off the public in that way too. I guess that's technically true (albeit difficult-to-impossible to quantify), but you might as well argue that because the government invented digital computers, companies like IBM and Intel should have been nationalized. (Note that the difference in salary between academia and big pharma is relatively large - to shift more drug development to academia, you'll need to raise salaries, or find a lot of scientists willing to work for academic salary while doing grunt work on massive projects that will mostly likely fail.)

To pick a more specific example, the NIH spends approximately $1.2 billion per year on aging-related research (including but not limited to Alzheimer's):

https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/...

Most of that will be single-investigator grants, and as anyone who has worked in basic research can tell you, the majority of the grants that are funded won't lead to any immediate treatments, although they may provide useful information in the long term. In contrast, here is an estimate of the total cost per Alzheimer's drug being $5.7 billion (including failures, and keep in mind the overwhelming bulk of that is spent by drug companies):

https://alzres.biomedcentral.c...

This isn't to argue that taxpayer funding of basic research isn't valuable - it's absolutely essential IMHO. But most of what it produces isn't going to lead directly to new drugs or treatments.

Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for a drug company, but I did receive funding from them as a government scientist, and receive a small bonus from IP licensing fees every year. Frankly it was far more trouble than it was worth; drug companies are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, even if you only talk to the scientists.

Generally bacteria are less resistant to radiation, having only one chromosome and no backup copies. But you're right, Deinococcus radiodurans is tougher than water bears. I do wonder which can survive both radiation AND vaccum AND cold for longer.

I think though it's not just a facile "they're more like us." It sounds like it's also "so tardigrade mechanisms for handling radiation might be more useful to human health." D. Radiodurans seems like there's more fundamental differences in DNA. It would be harder to engineer human tissues to use bacterial mechanisms.

I've been modded down already

Well it wasn't one of your more accurate contributions was it? Oooops.

Beside the confusion between Penn State and the University of East Anglia, to say Dr Mann is "really really bad at statistics" is perhaps to overstate the actual criticism leveled at his now infamous 1998 paper. In any case subsequent reconstructions, --and the last word, I presume, goes to Marcott et al. 2013 --more or less confirm the original conclusions of Mann et al.. I'm would assume you (and I genuinely respect your intelligence and erudition phantom) are already aware of that.

it's also worth mentioning that this paper is using computer models

And, invaluable though they may be, we would certainly exercise caution when considering the findings of simulations. In any case, we would naturally be sceptical of any only recently published paper. It's the weight of the extant literature of course, including the examination and perhaps replication by the entire profession of newly published work, that forms the best available science.

I realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, and I realise that warming here in Australia is occurring at a faster rate than globally, but this summer just gone has been truly alarming. Driving my family through 46C heat on the NSW South Coast in Feb was the first time I was literally scared of the temperature (not just uncomfortable but frightened that the vehicle and air-con might give out).

Medieval warm period was global: http://science.sciencemag.org/...
http://co2science.org/data/mwp...
http://www.climatedepot.com/20...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-culture-clash-noaa-led-flap-over-high-profile-warming-pause-study

Rose's story ricocheted around right-wing media outlets, and was publicized by the Republican-led House of Representatives science committee, which has spent months investigating earlier complaints about the Karl study that is says were raised by an NOAA whistleblower. But Science Insider found no evidence of misconduct or violation of agency research policies after extensive interviews with Bates, Karl, and other former NOAA and independent scientists, as well as consideration of documents that Bates also provided to Rose and the Mail.

Instead, the dispute appears to reflect long-standing tensions within NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), based in Asheville, North Carolina, over how new data sets are used for scientific research. The center is one the nation’s major repositories for vetted earth observing data collected by satellites, ships, buoys, aircraft, and land-based instruments.

In the blog post, Bates says that his complaints provide evidence that Karl had his “thumb on the scale” in an effort to discredit claims of a warming pause, and his team rushed to publish the paper so it could influence national and international climate talks. But Bates does not directly challenge the conclusions of Karl's study, and he never formally raised his concerns through internal NOAA mechanisms.

Tuesday, in an interview with E&E News, Bates himself downplayed any suggestion of misconduct. “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was,” he told reporter Scott Waldman. And Bates told ScienceInsider that he is wary of his critique becoming a talking point for those skeptical of human-caused climate change. But it was important for this conversation about data integrity to happen, he says. “That’s where I came down after a lot of soul searching. I knew people would misuse this. But you can't control other people,” he says.

At a House science committee hearing yesterday, Rush Holt, CEO of AAAS (publisher of Science and ScienceInsider) stood by the 2015 paper. "This is not the making of a big scandal—this is an internal dispute between two factions within an agency," Holt said in response to a question from Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the panel’s chairman, and a longtime critic of NOAA’s role in the Karl paper. This past weekend, Smith issued a statement hailing Bates for talking about “NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.”

Some climate scientists are concerned that the hubbub is obscuring the more important message: that the NOAA research has generally proved accurate. “I’m a little confused as to why this is a big deal,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, a California nonprofit climate research group that has examined surface temperatures. He’s the lead author of a paper published in January in Science Advances that found Karl’s estimates of sea surface temperature—a key part of the work—matched well with estimates drawn from other methods.

Researchers say the Karl paper’s findings are also in line with findings from the Met Office, the U.K. government’s climate agency, which preceded Karl’s work, and findings in a recent paper by scientists at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, an alliance of 34 states based in Reading, U.K. And although other researchers have reported evidence that the rise in global temperature has slowed recently, they have not challenged the ethics of Karl’s team, or the q

Until population growth stabilizes. Learn about population from Hans Rosling https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

  In that same Science magazine is a tribute to Hans Rosling by Bill Gates Hans Rosling (1948â"2017)

Sooo, do you have the balls to actually act when you follow that logic all the way to its end?

Of course not - you only want to apply logic to others and won't be offing yourself, now will you? So you don't really believe in the drivel you're spouting.

Until population growth stabilizes. Learn about population from Hans Rosling https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

  In that same Science magazine is a tribute to Hans Rosling by Bill Gates Hans Rosling (1948â"2017)

Until they can show peer reviewed research showing climate change, I'm not believing it.

It's a Chinese hoax.

Here's the google scholar result, 1.4 million hits: https://scholar.google.com/sch... Is that enough?

Here's a summary of the peer-reviewed science: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
and here's another: http://science.sciencemag.org/...

I have the opposite question: is there any peer-reviewed research showing a credible alternative hypothesis to the greenhouse effect hypothesis? If so, I haven't seen it.