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... that America participates in science experiments on American soil.

We passed on Waxahachie, Tex. and many of the world's premier scientists are having coffee at the LHC. America could have detected the Higgs boson.

Hopefully, we'll get lucky and find something worth contributing regarding dark matter.

Then, America would be one of the cool peeps.

Whoa! Wait a minute who ever said anything about solving overpopulation. I'm just saying that from a career perspective caregiver can be rewarding. Also, to really be a caregiver you are going to probably have to be married with your partner working, unless you want to be one of the government dependents but then why are you asking about jobs.

However, I do have some issues with your points.

Food scarcity is normally not caused by society not being able to produce enough food. Well maybe we can't produce a enough meat for everyone to eat like a fat American, but we could meet the current worlds total caloric needs with some work. However, due to war, oppression, terrible government, stupidity, and callously choosing to say screw the poor I want double Steak we make that hard.

Energy scarcity: We have tons of Uranium and Thorium. If we could get off our asses and actually use it to build useful things like Modern power plants instead of bombs we might be able to have a sensible energy agenda.

Pollution Levels: The modern world needs steel and steel is dirty. Unless you want to go back to a pre-steel world we are going to have to put up with some pollution for the foreseeable future. But with good management we can limit the pollution.

Disease Susceptibility: People get sick. Always have always will. Poor people get sick more than rich people due to malnutrition or improper hygiene. Things are still better now than they were though. Maybe we should raise the standard of living in the rest of the world some.

Psychological Disorder: Always existed, society just killed people with this because they were "Possessed by the devil" before the enlightenment. I am not for a return to that idea even if it puts stress on society.

Political unrest: Come on wars are as central to human activity as breathing. As long as humans exist there will be war or at least arguments over something. If you think otherwise have fun in your utopia fantasy land. I welcome getting proven wrong.

Overpopulation in the Western World: Most of the western world is in demographic decline. (I'm assuming this is a predominantly western audience being English language and all.) The US and EU only skirt by with immigrants. So clearly we are not prolific reproducers anymore. Now for the rest of the world, they may have to tone down the reproducing, but unless we want to use that war thing to stop them I'm not sure how we could. And I'm not sure I can support a government that would go to war against the breeders it sounds to Nazi like to me.

Though in the end I agree with you. If we keep growing our population we will eventually run out of resources to support that population. In the end the only real answer is to get off this rock and colonize space. But that's not really an answer to the problem. It's just kicking it down the road for a really long time. (Universal Entropy and what not) Any other form of forced population control will require some form of world government. Otherwise the countries that don't comply will just swallow you up in a few generations.

I guess since it conducts heat well it won't go poof like this earlier material:
http://www.scientificamerican....

Genes and Race: The Distant Footfalls of Evidence

I forgot to add this recent article to my post. It goes to show that the problems I am talking about are not just my personal anecdotes or limited to my field.

http://www.scientificamerican....

What is its opposite to which you refer? If you are looking for an example of people disbelieving science when it conflicts with their own religious or political views, what is the scientific doctrine that Democrats typically reject?

Ask Scientific American.

It's the ground water pollution, for one.

For the other, this is completely different than the old days of shooting sea water or many times they used steam; so comparing fracking to old ways of getting oil is irrelevant.

Thridly, there are quite a few issues that are coming to light but the industry - like all induestries - is stone walling and as far as I am concerned, lieing until proven otherwise because ALL businesses will lie through their teeth to protect profits.

Money rules. Human wellbeing drools - in our society.

Profits turn people evil.

If the goal is to reduce global warming however, methane is a much more powerful warming gas. What I think would be a better use is transformation to calcium carbonate. This would produce cement.

http://www.scientificamerican....

If there were any kind of honest dealing, the "pro-life" camp would be the "pro-mind" camp [...] Already, consciousness can be measured. We are close to a verifiable measure of mind.

You might be referring to the study by Casail et al. to identify structure in the response to inductive stimulation of the brain. By that measure, one might choose to draw a line around the second trimester, which is when the circuitry for consciousness finishes forming.

If there were any kind of honest dealing, the "pro-life" camp would be the "pro-mind" camp [...] Already, consciousness can be measured. We are close to a verifiable measure of mind.

You might be referring to the study by Casail et al. to identify structure in the response to inductive stimulation of the brain. By that measure, one might choose to draw a line around the second trimester, which is when the circuitry for consciousness finishes forming.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Mar 17, 2008 By Robert Nadeau

RTF, if not Economics are about as scientific as Chinese medicine.

But apparently you assholes don't care about what you are going to eat while your permafrost thaws.

Oh, they needn't worry about that. When the permafrost thaws, all the sequestered CO2 and methane frozen in the ice and soil is going to release in giant poisonous bubbles and asphyxiate them all. You don't need to eat when aren't even breathing.

(I can't find a link to the article I read that melting permafrost could release its CO2 explosively, poisoning large areas, but here's a link about how much gas is stuck in the ground up north. So even if you don't accept the theory that melting permafrost could result in asphyxiation, it is still something we'd want to avoid)

In places where people have to worry about starvation I wonder if IQ might even be a liability.

Brain size and IQ are not particularly correlated, and I've seen at least some research suggesting that people with high IQs or more education are actually more efficient at using their brains, to the extent that there is some thinning of the grey matter in such individuals in their late teens or early 20's.

Thinking does take more energy than not, but this isn't a big effect compared to brain size: http://www.scientificamerican....

Please provide a single scientific proof of anything Al Gore ever accomplished?

OTOH:

Blood And Gore: Making A Killing On Anti-Carbon Investment Hype

Al Gore invests millions to make billions in cap-and-trade software

Al Gore Invests $6M To Make BILLIONS In Cap And Trade

Gore lies to Congress about personal finances

Gore’s Dual Role: Advocate and Investor

The Money and Connections Behind Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade

Al Gore pushes Global Warming for personal profit

Cyber-Thieves Make Millions from Emissions Cap-and-Trade Scam

Obama's draft budget projects cap-and-trade revenue

Cap-and-trade: The biggest scam of all

Experts: Carbon Tax needed and NOT Cap-and-Trade Emission Trading Scheme (ETS)

Leading Global Warming Crusader: Cap and Trade May INCREASE CO2 Emissions

Cap-and-Trade's Unlikely Critics: Its Creators

Fraud in Europe's Cap and Trade System a 'Red Flag,' Critics Say

Spending Cap and Trade Auction Revenues Will Undermine California’s Climate Goals

Yet LFTR get's pooh poohed because it's experimental. Amazing.

You need show that time travel is impossible, you need to exclude the null.

You think the null hypothesis is that time travel is possible!? Really?

Are you actually arguing against the 2nd law? :)

Precious!

1) A peer reviewed study showing time travel is completely impossible

Here: http://blogs.scientificamerica...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5513

"How would you know it was a legitimate fossil?"

Frankly, your question "how would you know it was a legitimate fossil" is misguided - it's like asking "how would you know that an experiment showing gravity is constant wasn't faked?" You're asking for a hypothetical on top of a hypothetical, as if the limitations of our ability to observe the world around us mean that nothing at all is indeed falsifiable - a clever argument, but not a convincing one.

Your Gish Gallop of a list is farcical, and I'll bet when you're honest with yourself you'll admit that as well :)

If you want to make the metaphysical argument that falsifiability isn't required, please, feel free - but insisting that time travel or aliens are appropriate objections to observations is just silly! :)

If you won't hear it from a qualified Engineer, then perhaps a 'trashy' magazine like SciAm can walk you through it slowly? http://www.scientificamerican....

I generally get my ideas by thinking and reading about a subject and discussing it with friends?
Here's an English article with (some of) the research that I base (some of) my ideas on;

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/17/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/

IQ tests test a set of skills which are heavily culturally influenced. A San bushman could score 50 on an IQ test and you could score 150, but in the Namib desert you would be depending on his skills and intuitions. Neither forms of intelligence are mostly genetic in my opinion. The parents of geniuses aren't necessarily geniuses themselves, although often well off enough to supply their progeny with ample food, free time and education etc. to develop themselves. The children of geniuses are not always geniuses, even with all the advantages of having genius parents. Ergo other factors must be, if not dominant, at least weighing in heavily.

As explained in the link in my previous post (did you even read it?), if you take a set of data that fluctuates noisily but has an long-term upwards trend, you truncate it carefully so that the beginning of your truncated subset falls near a high point in the random fluctuations, and you use that to deny the upwards trend, then you are using a trick called "cherry-picking". You can argue you're presenting "simply facts", but it's dishonest. Watt's also dishonest is failing to declare a rather blatant conflict of interest.

Also, your own post contains contradictions. You're saying "...OBSERVED warming trend is significantly less than the IPCC 1990 PREDICTED..." (implying there is still a warming trend), and then you're saying "it has leveled off". Only one of them can be true, and it's the first one. There is still a warming trend, and yes, it's lower than the low-end 1990 predictions. Scientists have been debating over why that is for a while now. Heat getting trapped in the depths of the pacific ocean seems to be gaining traction as the most prevalent hypothesis, which is worrisome because once this finite heat reservoir is saturated, the heating will pick up with a vengeance. More info here, here, here and here (the 3 first links are all discussing the study in the 4th; I'll let you pick which source you like best).

And yet, science is also based on assumptions.

Yes it is. And the level of trust in those assumptions should be based on how well our theories explain those assumptions.

Every scientific paper doesn't start by explaining gravity, even if it's a factor in whatever it's going to go on and try to prove.

No but what I have a problem with (and didn't express very well in my post) is people claiming the current theories on climate science are as well understood as the theory of gravity. And our understanding of gravity isn't particularly solid either. Our understanding of the complex interactions involved in the climate of this entire planet are miniscule when compared to our understanding of gravity.

there has been no increase in global temperatures during his entire lifetime.

Please read this Scientific America article, titled "Has Global Warming Paused?": http://www.scientificamerican....
Here is an extract:

'So as a measure of global warming, surface temperatures are not a good yardstick, because the atmosphere can only hold a small percentage of the heat that is trapped, he said.
Rather, the oceans should be the primary barometer of global climate change.
And they are certainly changing. Sea levels are going up "like gangbusters," Willis said'

The primary cause of glaciers shrinking is particulates in the atmosphere. This has been reported many times, but it doesn't fit with the whole Global Warming sound bite so it's generally ignored.

It's not the primary cause. It is a contributing cause, and is perfectly consistent with global warming. Global warming is a combination of factors that lead to warmer global temperatures. Increased GHGs are just one factor.

The primary cause of glaciers shrinking is particulates in the atmosphere. This has been reported many times, but it doesn't fit with the whole Global Warming sound bite so it's generally ignored.

It's not the primary cause. It is a contributing cause, and is perfectly consistent with global warming. Global warming is a combination of factors that lead to warmer global temperatures. Increased GHGs are just one factor.

The primary cause of glaciers shrinking is particulates in the atmosphere. This has been reported many times, but it doesn't fit with the whole Global Warming sound bite so it's generally ignored.

The primary cause of glaciers shrinking is particulates in the atmosphere. This has been reported many times, but it doesn't fit with the whole Global Warming sound bite so it's generally ignored.

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Few mourn the man responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of innocent people worldwide over the years. But the operation that led to his death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more. In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, he CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.

I'll let the rest of you decide where you think a national registry coupled with the laws of unintended consequences and human nature are bound to lead such a project.

Look, if you're a luddite and have chosen to not be vaccinated against infectious diseases, you are a public health risk.

To who? If you take care of yourself and your own then certainly not to you since you are vaccinated.

If you are un-immunized, you really have no business going into places like hospitals where you will put the lives of others at risk.

I would imagine that at some point EVERY UNvaccinated person goes into a hospital. That is were the vaccinations usually happen, right?

You want to be a plague carrier? Fine, but you can't go into public.

They recently found a couple cases of MERS in the USA. In the hospital's bureaucratic brilliance, they sent all the workers who had contact with the patient to their HOMES! Stupid is as bureaucracy does I suppose.

Diseases which had been mostly eradicated which are suddenly making a resurgence are entirely due to idiots who think the vaccine is going to give them another disease. You're entitled to your stupid beliefs, but you are not entitled to spread disease.

Overheated rhetoric. Mutant strains of many serious diseases exit because of failed application of medical science by the medical establishment itself. Greed, over use, incomplete use, substandard application, class stratification, lack of education AND, as it turns out, governmental subversion of vaccination drives for political purposes (as recently revealed that the CIA was using vaccinations as a ruse in its hunt for Bin Laden) have all conspired to render a noble idea increasingly useless.
Sure, we can put everyone in a database (yet again for yet another silly reason). And what will that serve? Nothing more than to make you a guinea pig to be injected with maybe a useful vaccine or maybe something else {see military vaccinations of soldiers, the Tuskegee experiment]. But of course, today the government would never do something so unscrupulous with its newly acquired power, right?
So, in other words, worry about yourself. If vaccinations are important to you, get them for yourself and your family but don't force your choices on others in some misguided attempt to buy yourself a little more false security.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04... http://www.scientificamerican....

> The above-ground casks can easily last that long.

Really, no. Between simple exposure and the fascinating chemical interactions with the low level radio-active material of numerous kinds, there's no evidence that the inexpensive containers will last that long. It's much like a start-up companies sales chart: a few early bits of information are extrapolated into a hopelessly optimistic long term graph that is unlikely to be relevent even for the next six months, much less the next 50 years.

There's a reasonable Scientific American article about this at http://www.scientificamerican..... They're apparently only rated for 100 years, and I consider that _extremely_ optimistic.

Will work as good as it does on dead fish
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

All this report shows is the the grid can handle a few EVs it says nothing about handling a lot of EVs.

Some quick googling shows lots of similar articles and studies. The utilities don't seem to be worried. My guess is that they are happily anticipating becoming the energy provider for transportation in addition to their current business. And, if BEV takes a decade to become commonplace they have a full decade to upgrade the grid.

"As the power grid stands right now, it can already handle millions of electric vehicles without bringing any further power plants online."
( http://science.howstuffworks.c... )

"Kjaer is less concerned about transmission or generation being overtaxed, as long as consumers are taught to charge their plug-in cars at night, during off-peak demand periods, to smooth the load. "
( http://www.scientificamerican.... )

"Doggett is CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas – which oversees the state’s electric grid. On Tuesday he told lawmakers on the Senate Natural Resources Committee that he doesn’t believe even widespread adoption of electric vehicles would have any negative effect on the transmission system."
( https://stateimpact.npr.org/te... )

"“Surprisingly, we found that in general, the electric utility infrastructure is already prepared to meet the President’s 2015 challenge. Our research revealed that utilities will not likely need to upgrade or expand transmission or generation capacity in the next ten years specifically to meet electric demand from EVs at projected adoption rates."
( http://www.forbes.com/sites/pe... )

And here is a paper from Southern California Edison which doesn't seem too worried about the impact of BEV on their grid:
http://newsroom.edison.com/int...

It isn't even that they need extraordinary evidence. Ordinary evidence would do just fine. But creating strawmen to demolish is not a rebuttal of actual science and that is the issue here. What is really sad is the part where the "bias" shows and is trotted out by deniers is true. He would've been remiss to omit it because it is a negative. All the referee did was acknowledge the political reality of the entire point behind the paper.

Its like being accused of bias when rejecting a paper that uses phrenology as proof that that whites are smarter than blacks due to greater cranial capacity because you point out that, in addition to being flawed and incorrect, it will just be used to support a racist agenda.

Apparently you should have stayed in bed today.

Plenty of scientific evidence exists.

It's not our fault if you don't like it.

Are you sure that isn't because we are treating them as immature until they reach 25? Turns out, culture has a major impact on cognitive & perceptual biology.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Yeah, that article contains good arguments in the sense that they're worth talking about, unlike the stupid denial of basic physics you have been professing. The scientists recognize the greenhouse effect and recognize the basic validity of climate models. They are trying to find an explanation for an observed inaccuracy in past predictions (the famous temporary slowdown in warming - please do note that the trend is still warming). Their explanation consists of slight inaccuracies in the data that have been fed to the model. Other explanations have subsequently been proposed , and while the topic is still subject to debate, heat getting trapped in the depths of the pacific ocean currently seems to be gaining traction as the most prevalent hypothesis, which is worrisome because once this finite heat reservoir is saturated, the heating will pick up with a vengeance (see links at the end of this post for mainstream media reports that quote the authors on making this same point).

To corroborate what I said, the article you're linking to was published in the "opinion & comment section". "Commentary articles are opinionated pieces that focus on a topical issue in climate research that is relevant to policy, the economy or society". In other words, this part of the journal is to stir up discussions. And discussions there are. Here are two articles in the same journal that cite yours:
This one says that even though the heating is slower, it's still getting hotter (yeah, it's also a commentary).
This is the famous paper that proposes a mechanism behind the observation that heat is being stored in the Pacific at an increasing rate (full peer-reviewed article).

And to close, for those who don't like to dig through highly technical papers or simply don't have access, here are three mainstream media reports on that last article. This is science at work, people. It advances through hypothesis and counter-hypothesis, and you cannot just go cherry-picking one report that seems to confirm your political bias without following the further developments of the story...

Thanks, interesting!

The article even links to this blog on scientific american:
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Science (or at least Scientific American) disagrees with you: http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Because polar vortices are not a result of AGW

Absolutely! Indeed, the kind of temperatures we saw in the US because of the polar votex used to be normal a few decades ago. So I guess that answer your questions: North America. Obligatory XKCD.

Other valid answers:
- Western Europe (here are the years in which winters were severe enough to hold an outdoor skating contest in the Netherlands; making a graph is left as an exercise to the reader)
- Australia
- The antarctic (yes, the ice is melting overall)
- Greenland, where ice sheet decline, is a boon for agriculture - Pretty much any place that has seen shifts in habitat (here come West Nile Virus and Malaria)
- Pretty much anywhere where there are glaciers

A better question would be: "can you name any area of the world that didn't have its climate disrupted as a result of global warming?"

Every time I read something like this, I wonder if any habitable planets we find will still be habitable by the time we can get to them. If we find a habitable planet just a relatively close 10 light years away, then we're already seeing it as it was 10 years ago. Something could've changed there by the time we're seeing it. It's probably unlikely there'd be THAT much change in just 10 years, but then you have to figure it'd take us thousands of years to reach it with our current technology 'cause we can't even go 1% the speed of light yet. I haven't done the math, but wouldn't that take thousands of years just to get 10 light year away? So even a habitable planet 10 light years away would be well beyond our reach for the foreseeable future.

Hey if all the hardcore greenies die off, that will leave plenty more of the Earth's resources for the rest of us, and we could have clean nuclear energy without any issues.

And yes Coal does release more radiation than nuclear. Funnily enough they keep the radiation in the nuclear plant extremely well.
Coal contains radioactive compounds in small quantities, which are then burnt, sent up a chimney and left to spread wherever the air currents want to take them.
http://www.scientificamerican....

Who is so stupid again? The people more educated than yourself?

Ever heard of nuclear?

The problem is, you still have to mine for it, and there's a finite supply of nuclear material.

And yet according to this article and this wikipage we won't run out of Uranium or Thorium for reactors any time soon (30,000 to 60,000 years) if we take the unnecessary measures to recycle as much of the fuel as possible. If we are not off this rock exploiting the solar systems resources by 30,000 years our species is doomed anyway. (i.e. a big dumb rock will hit us eventually.) So what's your point.

Actually seems that waste from coal plants is even more radioactive than the ones from nuclear plants, and that waste goes to the environment instead of being restricted in small areas.

Some idiot always trots this out whenever there is a discussion of nuclear power.

Let's see you explain how the waste from Fukushima and Chernobyl was "restricted to small areas", smart boy.

Actually seems that waste from coal plants is even more radioactive than the ones from nuclear plants, and that waste goes to the environment instead of being restricted in small areas.

The editors note in the Scientific American article is qualifies itself by referring to reactors in normal operation and not the entire Nuclear industry, it's accidents or production byproducts from enrichment. Furthermore radioactive isotopes in coal ash are not enriched like those used in Nuclear reactors.

The actual state of affairs with Nuclear waste is much more serious than the S.A article would lead you to believe and this sobering article from National Geographic reveals the current state of Nuclear waste, at least in America.

Actually seems that waste from coal plants is even more radioactive than the ones from nuclear plants, and that waste goes to the environment instead of being restricted in small areas.

A lot of what has been stated from science in the past was wrong. Not all genetic characteristics are Mendelian, for example.

I read a story recently where the characters on cereal boxes were said to be looking down at the children in the grocery store aisle.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Try this yourself. Take a cereal box and hold it up high. The Trix rabbit will never be looking down at you, because it is a 2D picture. Science can be downright flawed and stupid.

I do agree with the practice of using dead material for vaccine. However I question the use of adjuvants. Many things have been introduced to us in the past which were said to be safe and later the scientists flip flop. Who else flip flops? Politicians! Maybe this is the issue: politics within science are causing science to promote one view and quash any dissenters. There is also the corporate line. Who makes and tests the vaccine? Do I trust corporations to look out for me? No. If you say yes to that question, you must be young and naive. I can tell you that within a corporation, there is no freedom to exercise one's opinion. So you a reliant on the opinion of whoever is boss. Are all of your bosses right all the time? What kinds of people tend to become bosses? Yes people, not critical thinkers. Therein lies the flaw.

As for the big bang... What difference does it make if I agree with that or believe in a steady state universe or whatever? Anything that insists on 100% conformity is a cult. So I question why is there a hunt down on those who disagree with the big bang? If big bang is truly science, has it been replicated in a study using the scientific method? No, it is just a conjecture. Like the way Nietzsche conjectured the reabsorption of semen into the blood with monks makes them strong.

I think this is great that people are not ready to accept everything that is supposed to be true to the mainstream view of science. Anyone who believes science is always right has just found a belief system to replace the religion they said they could do without.

Anyone who knows anything about Ethanol knows that the two best sources are sugar cane and switch grass. Switch grass should be the choice for North America as it can grow just about anywhere. Corn, on the other hand, takes up valuable farm land, requires more water, and has higher production costs. Ethanol from corn is a nothing but a scam perpetrated by the corn industry. Believe this study or not, but there are much better options than corn...

http://www.scientificamerican....

Science tends to disagree.

Except that vaccines have nothing to do with Autism.
http://www.scientificamerican....

It is genetic, which is hard for patents to deal with. It is so much simpler to for a person to blame a big evil company than to hear that they passed on a "defect" to their child.
Of course the parents are not to blame but that doesn't mean that they will not blame themselves or that others will not blame them.

Around here, it's supposedly the FOP badges and/or stickers that help. Or it's the parking lot stickers for the local hospitals. Or it's the toll road transponders. Or it's being the next-to-last person in a cluster. Or it's being in the left lane. Or it's matching speed with the other speeders around you.

It's just like gambling. Everyone has their system that they think works, and nobody's ever done research to actually check if the statistics hold. Somebody sees a pattern and they think it's just so good that it must be right.

There is no upside with these problems.

To epilepsy, probably not. But blind and deaf people are known to have enhanced other senses to make up for it. Note that they don't just train themselves to pay more attention to senses they do have, but the brain actually "rewires" itself to use visual or auditory processing centers for processing other senses. Incidentally, this is why cochlear implants do not work as well as expected when the person has been deaf for a long time: the person receiving it is already using that part of the brain for other things. (source)

The underlying point still stands, though. The drawbacks of blindness or deafness far, far outweigh the benefits. Only a few potential counterexamples like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles might exist, though we'll never know how popular they might have been had they not been blind, and certainly not every blind person has musical talent on that level.

As far as we can tell, the Universe is symmetrical
No, sir, it isn't. It is just wishful thinking, like Keplers "Mysterium Cosmographicum". See http://www.scientificamerican....

or matter/anti-matter are an exception to all other particles
Here I question if you even know what matter are particles are