Slashdot Mirror

CO2 is a proven heat trapper

Actually, it turns out that in the atmosphere, CO2 is a coolant.

Care to link to a study showing MJ smoke causes lung cancer? Because I'll link to one that shows it not only does not cause cancer, but in fact has been shown to inhibit lung cancer cell growth: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com....

Or, were you just regurgitating old "reefer madness" inaccuracies for some unknown reason, since other people's usage in no way affects you?

Disclaimer: I'm a non-smoker, but a champion of facts and exterminator of ignorance.

That's what the science shows: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

And here comes science to take your stupid politicized assumptions about what good public housing does and flush them down the shitter. Public housing shows serious reductions in intergenerational poverty against control populations facing similar problems.

Now the best results come from people who temporarily reside in public housing and move into low/middle income housing after a few years, and the worst results come from people who face dual problems of mental illness or addiction in addition to homelessness, but that's not the boogeyman you're trying to take down.

The easiest way to tell might be to compare cultures where normal pornography is easy to get, to those where it is very difficult to get, and see if the rates of sexual attacks and deviant acts vary between the cultures. Does anyone know if such a study has been done?

Comparing different cultures with each other doesn't work, you can't determine weather differences are due to the availability of pornography or to a wide range of other cultural factors.

What you do is compare a single culture with itself, before and after a major change in the availability and content-range of porn. In fact a substantial number of such studies have been done, across a substantial number of countries. The results are consistent. Increases in the availability and content-range of pornography are generally followed by a decrease in rape and other sex crimes, or at worst no change in those rates. This result also extends to a smaller number of country-cases that included child pornography becoming legal. In every such case rape, other sex crimes, and child molestation always decreased. Countries where child pornography changed from legal-to-illegal had increases in child molestation rates.

A Google Scholar search can turn up a variety of such studies. Here are links to one two of them.

Abstract one:
The Danish liberalization of legal prosecution and of laws concerning pornography and the ensuing high availability of such materials present a unique opportunity of testing hypotheses concerning the relationship between pornography and sex offenses. It is shown that concurrently with the increasing availability of pornography there was a significant decrease in the number of sex offenses registered by the police in Copenhagen. On the basis of various investigations, including a survey of public attitudes and studies of the police, it was established that at least in one type of offense (child molestation) the decrease represents a real reduction in the number of offenses committed. Various factors suggest that the availability of pornography was the direct cause of this decrease.

Abstract two:
Pornography continues to be a contentious matter with those on the one side arguing it detrimental to society while others argue it is pleasurable to many and a feature of free speech. The advent of the Internet with the ready availability of sexually explicit materials thereon particularly has seemed to raise questions of its influence. Following the effects of a new law in the Czech Republic that allowed pornography to a society previously having forbidden it allowed us to monitor the change in sex related crime that followed the change. As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase. Of particular note is that this country, like Denmark and Japan, had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal and, like those other countries, showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse.

I wonder what the world would look like if we had legislators who legislated on the basis of evidence and reality rather than ideologies and soundbites.

-

Folks like Sarkeesian have been publishing feminist critique of pop culture for years, in their little bubble of academia. She's mostly being punished because nobody outside of the bubble ever knew that PCA is a thing, and she was the first visible target.

What twenty years of research on cannabis use has taught us

Read the full study in the journal Addiction

What twenty years of research on cannabis use has taught us

In the past 20 years recreational cannabis use has grown tremendously, becoming almost as common as tobacco use among adolescents and young adults, and so has the research evidence. A major new review in the scientific journal Addiction sets out the latest information on the effects of cannabis use on mental and physical health.

The key conclusions are:

Adverse effects of acute cannabis use
- Cannabis does not produce fatal overdoses.
- Driving while cannabis-intoxicated doubles the risk of a car crash; this risk increases substantially if users are also alcohol-intoxicated.
- Cannabis use during pregnancy slightly reduces birth weight of the baby.

Adverse effects of chronic cannabis use
- Regular cannabis users can develop a dependence syndrome, the risks of which are around 1 in 10 of all cannabis users and 1 in 6 among those who start in adolescence.
- Regular cannabis users double their risks of experiencing psychotic symptoms and disorders, especially if they have a personal or family history of psychotic disorders, and if they start using cannabis in their mid-teens.
- Regular adolescent cannabis users have lower educational attainment than non-using peers but we donâ(TM)t know whether the link is causal.
- Regular adolescent cannabis users are more likely to use other illicit drugs, but we donâ(TM)t know whether the link is causal.
- Regular cannabis use that begins in adolescence and continues throughout young adulthood appears to produce intellectual impairment, but the mechanism and reversibility of the impairment is unclear.
- Regular cannabis use in adolescence approximately doubles the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia or reporting psychotic symptoms in adulthood.
- Regular cannabis smokers have a higher risk of developing chronic bronchitis.
- Cannabis smoking by middle aged adults probably increases the risk of myocardial infarction.

Professor Hallâ(TM)s report is published online today in the scientific journal Addition.

The question is when will you read science ?

Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends
The ups and downs of global warming

Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed. Please, try again. Be sure, your links point to differences between ratios of law-breakers vs. prosecutions by race. Any pointers comparing ratios populations vs. prosecutions are meaningless and will be discarded.

Not the op, but how about this one:
The interaction of race, gender, and age in criminal sentencing: the punishment cost of being young, black, and male
"(1) young black males are sentenced more harshly than any other group, (2) race is most influential in the sentencing of younger rather than older males, (3) the influence of offender's age on sentencing is greater among males than females, and (4) the main effects of race, gender, and age are more modest compared to the very large differences in sentencing outcomes across certain age-race-gender combinations."

Translation: Young Black Males are the most screwed if they end up in court, likely to receive far longer sentences for the exact same crime. The severity of their likely sentence drops if they're female or a different race, or are older. "Young Black Male" is statistically treated significantly worse than "Young White Male", but once they start passing into middle age the significance drops.

A review of other articles (scholar.google.com) shows that sex&age are probably bigger factors though. An old black guy is about as well/badly off as an old white guy in most criminal trials. I hate Taylor Francis, btw, they don't take my university credentials to see the full papers, so I'm mostly working off of abstracts. Some of the issue seems to be that states with high percentages of poor black populations also tend to be the harshest sentence-wise. So a crime in a predominantly white state where the defendant(90% likely to be white) might get a year regardless of their skin color, but 'down south' where the defendant is statistically black(let's go with 60%), odds are he'll get a decade, again, regardless of skin color. Appropriate sentence for a crime is up to debate, of course, but I'm trying to keep it about race.

In complete denial of the FACT that Antarctic sea ice is at the HIGHEST LEVEL in decades, these Global warming cult members keep spreading the blatantly false propaganda.

This would be wrong. It has been known from the older GRACE satellites that Antarctic Ice has been losing mass from the ice sheet.

In Antarctica the mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009, i.e., an acceleration of 26 ± 14 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009. (Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE, I. Velicogna, Geophysical Research Letters, (2009))

You might be thinking of the Antarctic Sea Ice.

Now they are saying that if I don't drive a Prius, that the earths gravity will fail.

I don't think that that's what they're saying.

My reading of it is that they're saying that Antarctica and Greenland together are now losing 500 cubic kilometers of ice per year. They don't mention what will be the effect on that of you driving a prius, but I suspect not a lot.

This was measured using Gravity. I don't think that they say that gravity is failing.

This got modded "funny", but I see a lot of posts here that are modded up that are coming from a very unscientific worldview, so I'm not sure how 'Poe'd this comment has been.

For those to whom it needs to be said, the Antarctic Ice sheet is losing mass at about 300 Gt/ yr, and the rate of loss is accelerating at about 15Gt / yr.

A Gt is about a cubic kilometre of ice.

While the Antarctic Sea ice is at an all time high, the ice cap, is, and has been melting.

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

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

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

all software architects ever do is waste and overhead from a lean perspective.

I have worked with software architects who might fit your description but for a big system to succeed someone competent still has to do the architecture. Kruchten for instance notes an example of a big agile project that fell over its lack of architecture. Coplien Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development is nearer the mark. He is, after all, an expert programmer as well as a software architect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fyfe
http://hypergeometric.wordpres...

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

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

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

Also, people during that age were not especially healthy. They probably died in their 40s.

Wrong. Half of them died young (typically before the age of 5) and the rest lived to their 60s and 70s, sometimes even older. Reconstructed modal age for primitive hunter-gatherers is 62 to 64 years of age.

There is a marked reduction in average size, and sudden appearance of generalized tooth decay, traces from infectious diseases and formerly absent bone deformities in our record of skeletons from the paleolithic to neolithic transition. Granted, the infectious disease became more widespread because of the growing densities of populations at the time, but the rest has been determined to come from the evolution of the diet. There is also a reduction of serious injuries observed, because less hunting decreased the exposition to dangerous predators and hunting accidents.

As for life expectancy, it decreased slightly with the agricultural revolution until circa 2000 BC, at which point advances in hygiene, sanitation, productivity and trade compensated for the difference. And we only now have caught up the loss in average height. There has been evidence of an adaptation to agricultural diets over time, but its effect is still small in terms of life expectancy.

It's too bad that this very interesting research - cancer in hydra! - is being overshadowed by sweeping statements about cancer. There are a number of species which experience little to no cancer, from naked mole rats to some whale species. There are a number of different ways that different species reduce or prevent cancer, from additional cell-death signalling via hyaluronan in naked mole rats to additional cell-death signalling via p53 pathways in blind mole rats to replicative senescence in many large mammals, to who-knows-what in eastern grey squirrels and elephants and whales.

The cancer-fighting idea in each case is something that should be near and dear to systems administrators: Redundancy. The more cell-death pathways there are, the harder it is for a series of mutations to result in immortal cancer cells. Redundant Arrays of Immortality Suppression, if you will.

This doesn't mean that we'll ever get rid of cancer in humans, mind you, because evolving a new cancer-prevention signalling pathway takes a couple of million years. But the fact that hydra get cancer doesn't have anything to do with whether we'll ever get rid of cancer in humans, either.

Considering that Solar panels only have a effective life span of 15 years

"Many manufacturers currently give a double power warranty for their products, typically 90% of the initial maximum power after 10 years and 80% of the original maximum power after 25 years. Applying the same criteria (taking into account modules electrical performance only and assuming 25% measurement uncertainty of a testing lab) only 176% of modules failed (35 modules out of 204 tested). Remarkably even if we consider the initial warranty period i.e. 10% of Pmax after 10 years, more than 657% of modules exposed for 20 years exceed this criteria."

Thus nearly 2/3 of tested panels lost less than 10% of their output after 20 years. Your number for effective lifespan is way off.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

some say oxygen and ozone were in the early atmosphere in significant concentration due to disassociation of water by ultraviolet light

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

As always when a new miracle medicine is hailed in the media, I check the effects of the ancient medicinal plant, tobacco on the same biochemical mechanisms, and it didn't disappoint this time either -- as shown in this paper (pdf), it boosts the same Fibroblast Growth Factor-1 by 50% (nicotine will do as well in this case).

You are flailing around without a clue. You have no shame and will just say anything, no matter how baseless, no matter how nonsensical. It would be fun to watch if it wasn't so embarrassing.

Here the link to the code they released. They made it available to Zeke Hausfather who made it available to everyone else.

Regarding the 17 year "plateau" that you deny, apparently you can't interpret a graph, don't know what 'statistical significance' means, and Nature isn't good enough for you either. Right off the top of my head, here's a paper that tries to explain the "hiatus". According to your insightful analysis there is nothing to explain.

I've provided links directly to the temperature data, yet you accuse me of making it up and plucking those figures out of my ass. It is obvious that you are in a state of denial. How ironic that a global warming supporter denies what the data says and denies the scientific journals (when it suits him). Your behaviour here contributes to my thesis. Thank you for your time.

And once again, you are distorting my comment, which was an admission that I did not know the answer, and characterizing it instead as some kind of denial. You have deserved this at least a hundred times: fuck off, until you figure out how to actually have a discussion with someone rather than insulting them and claiming they said something they didn't. You sorely lack social skills, man. I mean the minimum kind needed to have a rational debate. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-06-08]

Given the content of your reply, I am going to give you some credit for relevance. But I do so only very cautiously, in light of your past behavior. I say up front: if you have science to present, then present it. Facts and figures, with references. Otherwise, you have nothing to say to me. I have been very tolerant, and even so I do not like you, or your behavior, or your methods. But if you can produce real science, I will look at it. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-06-09]

Charming, as usual. It's strange that you ask for real science to support the "alarmist" fact that humans caused the rise in CO2 because we're burning carbon to release CO2 faster than the warming oceans can outgas their dissolved CO2. Is anyone we know of disputing that? Is it even part of the "debate"?

"Humans releases more gas then can be absorbed in the same time period as the release." [geekoid]

Yes, we know that. Nobody I know of is disputing that. It's not even part of the debate. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2012-05-09]

The misinformation campaign masquerading as a "debate" certainly does include people disputing the fact that humans caused the ~40% increase in CO2 since the Industrial Revolution.

"Do you also believe that atmospheric co2 levels reaching 400 ppm isn't an [anthropogenic] effect?" [tolkienfan]

Why would I believe anything like that? Have you seen me anywhere claiming that I do? Don't be ridiculous. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-27]

Since Jane asked:

What you've done is proven that CO2 levels may be rising. You haven't proven what has caused those rises. Correlation doesn't equal causation. ... [Archangel Michael, 2010-12-31]

Agree with Archangel Michael. Human-caused CO2 is about 0.28% of the total. Even if the oceans are getting significantly more acidic or not, it's pretty damned hard to pin that on human activity. Not only is it not "case closed", it's "what case?" [Jane Q. Public, 2010-12-31]

Jane agrees with Michael's claim that we don't know what caused CO2 levels to rise. Jane's "0.28%" meme disputes the fact that simple accounting (

You may find this paper interesting. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

"Yes. Assuming it's a legitimate fossil, we're left with divine intervention (aliens), or time travel (the end of causality as we know it). Now, it just so happens that the falsification of evolution pretty much falsifies reality as we know it, which lets you know just how strong of a theory we're dealing with"

How would you know it was a legitimate fossil? You are just going to use that word to get out of any fossil I bring you. Give me a comprehensive definition of 'legitimate' both necessary and sufficient to rule out all reasonable null hypotheses. Seriously, go read Quine's work, "“Epistemology Naturalized” is a good placce to start, and you should probably read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as your approach to science is hopelessly outdated.

"But while we're on hypotheticals, are you willing to entertain the following notion:

[snip]"

Richard Linzen's hypothesis is legitimate but unlikely, that is the reason he continues to get funding for his work. Why is it unlikely, well for a start he put forward ways to test his hypothesis in a paper. This paper showed evidence for the hypothesis you list. Unfortunately this work was deeply flawed and a follow up study which Prof Linzen acknowledges addresses the flaws in his paper found that the impact of clouds on climate sensitivity did not reflect a large global impact of the mechanism he proposes. The relevant citation from Trenberth is below.

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

I strongly believe Linzen should continue to be funded. Even with the studies conducted so far there may be non-linear impacts from cloud cover which could have some regulatory impact on the climate. A clear understanding of the effect cloud cover will make climate models more robust, reduce the amount of disagreement between them. So yes, I give that hypothesis more credence than the explanations for a precambrian rabbit.

But just like you made the perfectly reasonable operating assumption that time travel is impossible (even though there is nothing in the laws of physics to rule it out), you should also make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the impact on the sensitivity of changes in cloud cover can be reasonably inferred from the recent temperature record and that it is not crazily non-linear, especially given the paleoclimate record (why did this non-linear effect of cloud cover not impact previous hot periods in this non-linear way?). Doing that places an upper bound on how much the sensitivity can be impacted by the effect of clouds. Especially when we have results like Dessler's:

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfi...

It isn't comprehensive but it suggests that, at least for current levels of warming clouds may exhasperate global climate change (water vapour is a green house gas).

Much of this is covered in the IPCC 5th Assesment WG1 report, which I provide a link to below.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5...

You want section 7.

I know you wont reflect on your position though, or read any of the citations I've provided, because I've interacted with you in the past and I strongly suspect you are a paid shill for the fossil fuel industry. So this is for anyone else reading this, look at which of the two of us is supporting their position with references to the relevant literature (be it the philsophy literature when it comes to the nature of scientific investigation, or the climate science literature when it comes climate science). hsthompson69 does not cite sources for hypotheses and claims he makes, he is likely doing this deliberately because unless like me you happen to be familiar with the literature it makes it much hard to check what he is saying, makes it hard to look up standard refutations and makes it hard to consult the relevant literature. He wont address any of the points I've brought up but will instead switch to a new set of canards and gish gallop.

The main input is electricity. Upstate NY has access to power from Hydro Quebec. With an energy payback time approaching 0.5 years, they may supplement that with solar as well. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

No, the reasons they're not allowed to donate are outdated reasons. It made sense when there was no test, or when the tests were less reliable. Today, we obviously have tests, every donation is tested. The false negative rate is 0.03%. So it's pretty safe to take a negative as a negative.

Gay men are also more likely to have had an HIV test than most people, and they would self-exclude themselves if positive. Given that gay men could already simply lie, it's not like a whole lot would change there.

As far as empirical evidence: it appears that bans on gay men donating blood doesn't do much. The American Medical Association is convinced it's a stupid policy.

Lastly, there are drugs to treat HIV. If you die from a shortage of blood, there's no drugs yet to manage that.

Well, could trust a blog, or check the peer reviewed science?

What are the predictions of climate models, should we believe them, and are they falsifiable? Probably the most iconic and influential result arising from climate models is the prediction that, dependent on the rate of increase of CO2 emissions, global and annual mean temperature will rise by around 2–4C over the 21st century. We argue that this result is indeed credible, as are the supplementary predictions that the land will on average warm by around 50% more than the oceans, high latitudes more than the tropics, and that the hydrological cycle will generally intensify. Beyond these and similar broad statements, however, we presently find little evidence of trustworthy predictions at fine spatial scale and annual to decadal timescale from climate models. -- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

It's not a bad theory, but the leading candidate relates to impact processes that leave what is called "remanent magnetization". The science is not settled. The abstract here gives you a feel for the kind of discussions taking place (but you probably have to pay to get to the article). Google will turn up more work along these lines, including tests in hypervelocity launcher facilities.

I see no real argument for saying that the PETM had significant ocean acidification yet this isn't the first it's been trotted out as an example of the dire effects of ocean acidification. [khallow]

Rapid Acidification of the Ocean During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Ocean acidification and surface water carbonate production across the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum

Asians tend to score about 6 points higher on IQ tests (Ethnic Group Differences In Cognitive Ability In Employment And Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis)

Most reasonable folks don't believe all the doomsday is impending scenarios because many have already been proven wrong

Oh, really? Name three. Please provide citations of peer reviewed scientific research, not whatever bullshit you read in the popular press.

Don't worry, I'll wait.

I know you're just trying to build a straw man, but I'll bite anyway.

First is this paper, which finds Inspecting commonly used parameterizations for subgrid-fluxes, we find that some of them obey the Second Law of thermodynamics, and some do not. The conforming approaches are the Smagorinsky momentum diffusion, phase changes, and sedimentation fluxes for hydrometeors. Conventional turbulent heat flux parameterizations do not conform with the Second Law.

Next shows that prevalent climate models (CCSM3) cannot accurately model the climate observations influenced by Atlantic sea currents, Hence, although there is some potential climate predictability in CCSM3, it is not realistic.

Finally, a big nail in the coffin is this paper published in Nature, which demonstrates that "semi-arid ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere may be largely responsible for changes in global concentrations of atmospheric CO2." The authors find links between the land CO2 sink in these semi-arid ecosystems "are currently missing from many major climate models." In addition, they find that land sinks for CO2 are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, thus modeled projections of exponential increases of CO2 in the future are likely exaggerated.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

"The big scary headline claim in almost all of these alarmist articles which screamed that the rate of Antarctica ice loss has “doubled” compared to prior estimates is wrong. The alarmist reporters have managed to confuse two distinct issues addressed in this latest study which dealt with both continental Antarctic ice loss as well as the contribution of this Antarctica ice loss to sea level rise.

This latest study (abstract link below) clearly establishes that the continental Antarctica ice loss estimates based on past satellite gravimetry surveys are “consistent” with the latest study radar altimetry total ice loss findings. Specifically the full study says:

“At the continental scale, the most recent estimates of Antarctic ice sheet mass balance are based solely on satellite gravimetry surveys [Barletta and Bordoni, 2013; Velicogna and Wahr, 2013; Williams et al., 2014]. According to these studies, the rate of ice mass loss from Antarctica has increased progressively over the past decade and, between 2010 and 2012, fell in the approximate central range 105 to 130 Gt yr-1. Our survey puts the contemporary rate of Antarctic ice sheet mass loss at 159 ± 48 Gt yr-1, a value that, although larger, is nevertheless consistent given the spread of the gravimetry-based uncertainties (16 to 80 Gt yr-1). A possible explanation for the discrepancy is the exceptional snowfall event of 2009, which saw an additional ~200 Gt of mass deposited in East Antarctica [Boening et al., 2012; Lenaerts et al., 2013; Shepherd et al., 2012] that, although absent from the CryoSat-2 record, does factor in the gravimetry-based estimates of imbalance.”

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com..."

If this is the case, then civilizations can probably adapt to the havoc this will cause to coastal communities. However, we have evidence from prehistoric warm periods that this could occur over decades. At this point we don’t know long it will take, but we do know that the climate forcing today is much stronger than at any time in over 50 million years.

Assuming you are referring to radiative forcing, all we have are forcing assumptions and climate models that use them, and it appears so far from observations that the assumptions of warming based on forcing are not accurate. A recent paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research demonstrates that global temperatures are entirely independent of radiative forcing.

Heh, now you accuse me of not providing links to support the claims I didn't make :-)

But if you like. A couple of studies (of many) predicting increases in wildfires due to climate change:

* Gonzalez et al 2010: Global patterns in the vulnerability of ecosystems to vegetation shifts due to climate change

* Moritz et al 2012: Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity

And a study (one of many) showing that climate is the dominant factor in the size of the wildfires we've been seeing:

* Littell et al 2009 Climate and wildfire area burned in western US ecoprovinces:

We demonstrate that wildfire area burned (WFAB) in the American West was controlled by climate during the 20th century (1916-2003)....For 1977-2003, a few climate variables explain 33-87% (mean = 64%) of WFAB, indicating strong linkages between climate and area burned.

By contrast, Mr Watts' "facts" are also nothing more than unsubstantiated declarations and assumptions, just like yours. A few random examples from your link:

* "This [CO2] percentage increase means nothing. Human CO2 emissions didn’t begin to rise significantly until after 1945": Keyword is 'significantly' - he claims the rise is not significant, but provides no justifications for this assumption, other than that the atmospheric percentage is "about as close to nothing as you can get" (it's a really small-looking number). No citations given.

* "...there is no way that this miniscule amount [of atmospheric CO2] can have any significant effect on climate." Another unsubstantiated declaration in his "facts" list. No citations given for this claim.

* "CO2 also lags short-term warming [historical graph] showing that warming causes rise in CO2, not the other way around if CO2 was the cause." - Incorrectly assumes that CO2 must either be a cause or an effect, but could never be both. No citations given for this "fact", either.

* "...global climate marches in lock step with sun spots, length of the sun spot cycle, and intensity of the solar magnetic field... total solar insolation (TSI) correlates very well with climate". Once more, he just claims this as a fact, with (wait for it) no citations given.

* "HadCRUT4 temperature curve showing that 56% of the warming since 1895 occurred prior to 1945"... according to his arbitrarily-drawn red lines. The HadCRUT4 temperature graph may well be accurate, but (of course) he provides no citation for any peer-reviewed source for his claimed "56% of warming" cut-off point (looks to me like the red line that claims to show this is just drawn to the peak of the biggest short-term fluctuation he can find, without regard to averages or trends or anything).

I could easily go on, but I have work to do. If Watts' unbacked assertions are what you consider "facts", then it's no wonder you usually don't bother to link to them.

Your first cite shows someone changing their mind - it doesn't have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement :)

Heck, people convert to Christianity all the time, but that doesn't make Christianity science :)

Are you the one of the Taubes followers?

The insulin hypothesis is backed up by observations - the fat-heart hypothesis is not. Taubes is just reporting the science, he's not making it.

The fact of the matter is that even if we are "correcting", it's taken us over 40 years - by that measure, we'll finally realize the error of AGW in about 20 more years :)

So 97% of climate scientists agreeing isn't consensus

That's a political number, not a factual one.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

But I again remind you, consensus isn't science :)

In specific "Satellite measurements of outgoing longwave radiation". CO2 trapping more heat in the atmosphere means that there will be less radiation emitted from the atmosphere in the related wavelength. That's a falsifiable hypothesis and it's a hypothesis they tested by looking at the thermal radiation.

That certainly may be *necessary* for AGW to be true, but it's clearly not *sufficient*. Heck, it doesn't even begin to touch on the origins of CO2, or the lack of any sort of relation between human CO2 emissions and measured CO2 levels (CO2 emissions vary widely both seasonally and yearly, but global CO2 levels have been monotonically increasing, as if governed by completely different drivers than simply human input).

Futhermore, the outgoing longwave radiation hypothesis is, in fact, subject to significant question:

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

"We further examine the impact of cloud overlapping assumptions on the results of linear regression of spectral differences with respect to predefined spectral fingerprints. Cloud-relevant regression coefficients are affected more by different cloud overlapping assumptions than regression coefficients of other geophysical variables. These findings highlight the challenges in constructing realistic longwave spectral fingerprints and in detecting climate change using all-sky observations."

So there's a question as to whether or not anyone has constructed a "realistic longwave spectral fingerprint".

But here's the real problem - your SS cite throws a bunch of stuff at the wall, but does not actually specify falsification observations. And if you're honest, you'll admit that when there *are* observations of falsifications, the AGW trope is protected by ad hoc special pleadings asserting that they aren't "consequential" :) It's a very typical astrology trick :)

To me that sounds like you're trying to get to agree to a ridiculous sounding simplification just for the purpose of making me sound ridiculous.

Sorry, but to be honest, it was ridiculous before the simplification - and you come pretty close to admitting it, acknowledging the spin and overplayed certainty. And *this* is what poisons the well - you're quoting people who are positing a convoluted explanation for observations inconsistent with their original predictions in order to preserve their dubious central conceit, and when you get past the song and dance, the reduction of their position is clearly contradictory.

But that doesn't mean the consistent message given by climate scientists is just hype.

Any "consistent message" is a political one, and you know it. There is broad disagreement on climate sensitivity, impacts, drivers, and the role of natural variation. Science isn't about *messages* - it's about necessary and falsifiable hypothesis statements, and the earnest attempt to find those falsifications.

And I'll still come back to the original assertion you made, about the increasing extent, is itself misleading compared to the decreasing volume.

Okay, so check this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

"For the latter, the issue is reconciling the observed expansion of Antarctic sea-ice extent during the satellite era with robust modelling evidence that the ice should melt as a result of stratospheric ozone depletion (and increases in GHGs)."

So to be clear, the "robust modeling evidence" was what predicted increased antarctic ice extent - but the nature of a non-falsifiable hypothesis, such as AGW, means that even when observations are *opposite* of predictions, ad hoc special pleadings are made. In this case, the ad hoc special pleading "we didn't really mean ice extent, what counts is ice mass".

So, if measuring extent is misleading, let's at least admit that this bad path was the very one mapped out by GCMs :)

"To live outside the law you must be honest" The coal industry may not be outside the law, but the same principle applies. You may lie to others about your business, that's business as usual. But when you begin to believe your own lies that's insanity, and leads to bad ends. Even excluding any climate effects, the externalized costs of the coal industry make it more expensive to society than any power source which has NOT been exempted from EPA regs, including all the renewables. These guys who get their income from the coal industry are, pure and simple, on the dole. http://solar.gwu.edu/index_fil... http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/el... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.cleanair.org/Downwi... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.aeaweb.org/articles... http://apo.org.au/sites/defaul... http://www.eea.europa.eu/press...

"To live outside the law you must be honest" The coal industry may not be outside the law, but the same principle applies. You may lie to others about your business, that's business as usual. But when you begin to believe your own lies that's insanity, and leads to bad ends. Even excluding any climate effects, the externalized costs of the coal industry make it more expensive to society than any power source which has NOT been exempted from EPA regs, including all the renewables. These guys who get their income from the coal industry are, pure and simple, on the dole. http://solar.gwu.edu/index_fil... http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/el... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.cleanair.org/Downwi... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.aeaweb.org/articles... http://apo.org.au/sites/defaul... http://www.eea.europa.eu/press...

Of course, the journal "Climate Change" has been published since 1977. And "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change" was published in 1955. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... But you go ahead and believe that "they changed it" just to fool you guys, but you're just smarter than "them".

Regular superglue (neglecting that it's actually dermabobond) forms a healed wound with several layers.
You get the two sides of the wound somewhat reacting and generating an abnormal layer, and you have bits of plastic in the wound.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... (image)

The technique mentioned essentially makes the cut surfaces into glue, with a non-toxic additive.
There will not be a scar due to reaction between the glue and the flesh - because there is no glue in that sense.
The scar tissue will be very limited - as the flesh is clamped together along the whole length of the cut, without anything in between it.

And one other thing I forgot to add:

Had they focused their modifications only on creating high yield and high nutrition crops

There is no single gene for yield. Yield is a factor of weather, soil fertility, moisture, biotic conditions like disease, pest and weed pressure, ect. You take away pest pressure, and you don't think yield won't go up? well, it kind of doesn't, not in developed countries anyway, where we were spraying pesticides to control pests. But in developed countries, things are very different. So, you really can't say they don't improve yield, or sustainability. Even the much maligned herbicide tolerant ones do.

Of course, higher nutrient crops don't fair any better than Monsanto's crops, perhaps they are hated even more, if the protesting is anything to go by. Which makes sense I guess...the claim that GMOs are all bad and there's no nuance whatsoever and therefore you should don't money to professional anti-GMO activists might look a bit silly when it is out saving even more lives. God forbid Greenpeace, Navdanya, OCA, and all those other greedy sociopaths put humanity before profit. Their actions have lead to more deaths than the anti-vaxxers.

(Link heavy...) I think you got the wrong end of the stick, there.

Some studies have been done that show a minimum 30% penetration is possible for *any* region (and this one stopped their modeling at 30%, so its likely higher)...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...

An earlier study from Europe (no link at moment) put the figure around 40%.

Another US study comes in around 45%...
http://arstechnica.com/science...

UK study comes in at >90%...
http://www.gizmag.com/uk-natio...

German study comes in at 100%...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
More on this...
http://www.renewablesinternati...

Some of these show cost savings from adding renewables, another one showed costs rising about 10-15%.

Iowa already got over 25% of power from renewables in 2013; not sure about the mix but I don't recall hydro being a big player there. The state has set a 40% target for 2015!

As for diverse power generation, that is a good rule of thumb, however the non-renewable generators cannot continue to operate in the long-term and nuclear in particular is even worse than variable renewables as the latter has a large correlation with demand curves. Anyone scanning the field for the past few years, however, is getting the idea that a diversity of storage will be at least as important. And there are a LOT of different options. The state of the art in this field has moved completely beyond the 1990s consensus that your post is predicated on.

Hydropower operating permits are up: http://grist.org/news/america-...

In Germany, they have closed a deal with Norway which has vast hydropower resources.

Batteries are considered the least economic storage solution, but I suggest you google "flow batteries". Here are some examples other storage types:

Zynth batteries
http://www.eosenergystorage.co...

Battery EV storage pilot in US
http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Ice bears (cold storage for hot nights)
http://www.renewgridmag.com/e1...

Undersea pumped hydro (you read that right)
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...

Power-to-gas
http://www.nasdaq.com/press-re...

Molten salt
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...

let's take HADCRUT4 as being at least a reasonably honest attempt to evaluate a global surface temperature anomaly even though they do not attempt to correct for e.g. UHI and hence almost certainly have a monotonic warming bias

A November 2013 paper (so, after AR5) pointed out that HadCRUT4 has no data from the polar regions, which might mean the most drastic warming -- in the Arctic -- is not taken into account (source). Obviously this will spur some further research, but whether it's true or not, there is an option c) the global mean surface temperature change has been underestimated.

Which is neither here nor there -- if global warming is disappearing into the oceans, that's fabulous news as the oceans can absorb the heat for a century and still hardly change temperature, if not, well, time will tell.

That might be generically true (I'll take your word for it), but the way it's happening -- absorbing CO2 -- is causing ocean acidification. We know this for sure, and it's a bad thing for current ocean life. Between that, overfishing, and pollution from oil and nuclear accidents, we're messing up a rather important food source. True, it may adapt as you implied in a later post, but it will cause upheaval in the meantime. In addition, I know researchers have proposed links between warmer oceans and extreme weather events like the polar vortices causing the cold snaps this year, that is, warmer oceans weaken the jetstream. But I don't know how much traction that has among climate scientists.

If you bother to actually go out and grab AR5 to read what it actually says instead of what distortions of summaries of paraphrases might have said, you might stop by and read paragraphs 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3. They are sublime. Basically they say "We have no defensible reason to think that the average of all of the climate models in CMIP5 has the slightest actual meaning, and we have excellent reasons not to just take the numerical average of their individual mean predictions with equal weight and to prune out the failing models, but we're going present the numerical average of all of the models, including the ones that are overtly failing, anyway".

I just looked at those sections, and to me it reads, "these (Multi-Model Ensembles and Perturbed-Parameter Ensembles) are the types of simulations we've taken into account [9.2.2], these are their weaknesses [9.2.2.1-2], and this is how we combined them to evaluate them as a whole [9.2.2.3]." Perhaps you're referring to the direct quote "...collections such as the CMIP5 MME cannot be considered a random sample of independent models," which is repeating the weakness described in 9.2.2.1, which is that a lot of models in that set use components from other models in the set. To me that makes perfect sense because we do that in engineering all the time: reusing model components that (seem to) work well. I can see why that would seem fishy, though. It'd be nice to see someone dig into that and see what components are reused and how they might bias the results.

If you repeat a lie often enough, it doesn't make it true.

See the author's photograph: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand?

Probably just as much as the global warming alarmists do, seeing as they predicted the opposite result before it happened, but of course are now claiming that they knew all along that this was a possibility. That assertion has been thoroughly debunked, by many actual scientists, but that doesn't stop anti-science people like you from making your specious claims to support your ideological agenda.

Most adults don't swell up and die just because they encounter something new.

So we shouldn't assume that it's such a great idea to intentionally introduce such allergenic foods to young children without independently reproducible proper scientific studies (too much fraud nowadays) proving that it's a better idea for most.

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

. The most effective dietary regimen is exclusively breastfeeding for at least 4â"6 months or, in absence of breast milk, formulas with documented reduced allergenicity for at least the first 4 months, combined with avoidance of solid food and cow's milk for the first 4 months.

I know some parents introduce some foods before the baby is even 6 months. But as the recommendation says - exclusive breastfeeding for at least 4-6 months.

So maybe these hyperallergic kids were getting traces of peanuts while they and their immune systems were way too young, or at the same time they were fighting off some infection (plenty of people carrying em etc). And so when later on they get a bigger dose, their immune system goes on all out war.

I think people sometimes underestimate how awful coal power is.

Sherco was the quintessential baseload coal fired power plant cranking out 2400MW through three units.

Assuming the 2400MW was running continuously, that amounts to 21TWh per year. According to this article (free copy here), the air pollution produced by 21TWh of coal power generation in a developed country is estimated to cause about 500 deaths and almost 5000 serious illnesses. Using the estimate from another article (free copy here), the externalities due to air pollution from 21TWh of coal power generation are about $2 billion, excluding costs associated with climate change.

The fact is that the vast majority of CO2-based climate models have been downright terrible at predicting anything so far.

They have predicted an increase in global mean surface temperature.
This has been observed

The have predicted increased warming at the poles,
This has been observed.

They have predicted a decrease in the diurnal temperature range.
This has been observed.

They have predicted greater warming in winter than summer.
This has been observed.

The surprise is how well models have been reproducing the global mean surface temperature: Why are climate models reproducing the observed global surface warming so well?, Reto Knutti, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 35 Issue 18 (2008)

Do you have any basis for this claim that they are "downright terrible at predicting anything, because it really needs a citation.

Of course, if you cherry pick 1996-2012 you can get a small trend line... but if you start in 1996 (instead of 1998 like the article states, as most skeptics avoid that since it's such an easy counter-point) you have no statistically significant warming 17 years. Benjamin Santer in http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JD016263/abstract declared that "Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature."

Translated, it essentially means that if there is no significant warming for 17 year periods we need to start searching for the real causes and not just sink money in to finding more human causes to blame.

Then you add in that the sun goes in to a lull and suddenly we have no more warming and a huge number of record colds being recorded in the northern hemisphere yet the alarmist have been shouting it from the rooftops that changes in the sun are too small to affect climate citing the TSI changes rather than the changes in different frequencies (which are quite large). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510

Maybe instead of people having a decrease of scientific understanding they are just waking up to the facts and as they learn more they realize the alarmists are hand waving ninnies.

I saw the same idea showcased at a conference last year by a a japanese team led by Mitsubayashi. They had succesfully done this in rabbits. Their paper from 2012 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2230586 and 2005: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/elan.1140070110/abstract