Slashdot Mirror

in the "what are you going to believe, your own eyes?" department...

Research in Phenology (the study of the seasonal changes of plant and animal life) shows significant advances in spring activity at points across the globe.

http://www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;324/5929/887
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15592880
http://www.seaturtle.org/PDF/Parmesan_2003_Nature.pdf

These are supplemented by anecdotal evidence - particularly in higher latitudes - that things are changing rapidly, and that surroundings are changing with in a generations living memory.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/the-great-global-experim.html

Plant growth, CO2 is a plant nutrient,

The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was increased by 200 microliters per liter in a forest plantation, where competition between organisms, resource limitations, and environmental stresses may modulate biotic responses. After 2 years the growth rate of the dominant pine trees increased by about 26 percent relative to trees under ambient conditions. Carbon dioxide enrichment also increased litterfall and fine-root increment. These changes increased the total net primary production by 25 percent. Such an increase in forest net primary production globally would fix about 50 percent of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide projected to be released into the atmosphere in the year 2050.
Net Primary Production of a Forest Ecosystem with Experimental CO2 Enrichment

and

Recent climatic changes have enhanced plant growth in northern mid-latitudes and high latitudes. However, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of global climatic changes on vegetation productivity has not before been expressed in the context of variable limiting factors to plant growth. We present a global investigation of vegetation responses to climatic changes by analyzing 18 years (1982 to 1999) of both climatic data and satellite observations of vegetation activity. Our results indicate that global changes in climate have eased several critical climatic constraints to plant growth, such that net primary production increased 6% (3.4 petagrams of carbon over 18 years) globally. The largest increase was in tropical ecosystems. Amazon rain forests accounted for 42% of the global increase in net primary production, owing mainly to decreased cloud cover and the resulting increase in solar radiation.Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999

you said

Right, but that's 3% over equilibrium, and it's cumulative.

and nature reply by sucking 6% more CO2 from the air!

It would seem prudent first to ask whether we have any data to suggest there is much CO2 in the stratosphere. If we do have measurements to show it is there, why deny this observation simply because you are not yet aware of the mechanism?

Then maybe relevant data (such as historical trends) could shed some light on methodologies for such transfer.

Suggesting that it must be some sort of anti-gravitation mechanism we could harness for transportation seems a bit premature.

If you really are interested in researching this (which... ahem... your tone belies), you could start with these sites:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v316/n6030/abs/316708a0.html
http://www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/274/5291/1340

That's for the supplementary stuff.

This link works for me for the main article. But that may be because of where I work.

I guess /.'rs aren't that excied about these news, or I am certain the legal link for the full PDF paper would have been posted already, as it lies right there in Google

Real scientific results are reported in scientific venues like professional conferences and peer-reviewed journals.

You mean, this might be a real scientific result if it were, say, an article called Learned Predictions of Error Likelihood in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Science Magazine, a peer-reviewed journal? (No, that link won't take you directly to the article - you have to buy access or join the American Association for the Advancement of Science to get access.)

Or pick up a news magazine that targets intelligentsia like the Economist . Just recently, I picked up an issue with remarkably good coverage of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organization that publishes Science. In the science section of that issue was a remarkably lucid description of photonic-crystal optical fiber and how it works, and there was also excellent coverage of competing theories in evolutionary biology and of work being done with adaptive optics to study the human eye, IIRC. Of course, the journalism in the Economist tends to be head and shoulders above most other newspapers and news magazines, so maybe it's not so much a problem of bad science journalism as it is a problem with bad journalism.

There was a paper in Science a few years back that took a similar approach.

I don't have the references any more (but here is a similar source), but here's the gist: They built strands of RNA with specific sites being mapped to parts of the travelling salesman solution, replicated those strands billions of times with PCR. and mixed well. The reactions that prevaled were logically the "shortest" path.

Nature abounds with massively parallel computing engines.