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Craig Venter Tackles Global Warming
Venture$cience writes: "Fresh from his arguably successful sequencing of the human genome with his company Celera Genomics, Craig Venter is now entering the field of global warming. Specifically, he is readying an ocean wide expedition to harvest novel forms of bacteria from the ocean's deep. From these collections he hopes to find bacteria that excel at converting CO2 into proteins, sugars, and methane. The current candidate for an atmospheric "scrubber" is the ancient Archae family of bacteria that is believed to have helped modify the early Earth's original atmosphere. This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?"
As a geologist and paleontologist, who happens to work in a department where a significant amount of research goes into both "ground truthing" climate models, I find the image of lab rats and cancer the usual confusion between experimental science and historical science. Historical science is largely a case of examining trends and variation around mean values. The fact that the UK Met office simulations do a very good job encourages us to take modelling seriously. The fact that all of the IPCC models agree the mean annual global tempertature will increase is fairly convincing evidence that an upward trend is on the cards. The comment by on the other reply to the thread is a good one, and I would add that weather forecasting has become much better than it used to be. Doppler radar WILL tell you if it going to rain in the next 5 mins. As a scientist who works in a (notional) democracy I don't think it should be up to scientists to make public policy, but I hope the voters are more informed on the issues than this post would suggest.
"Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt." David Quammen
Chaotic systems are strongly dependant on initial conditions, meaning that you can't know a system's behaviour to the second, but larger patterns can still be observed and predicted. A system where this is not true is random (and the weather is not random). Your case with all the houseflies on the planet doing the same thing at the same time is a quetion of statistics - as the sum of the data becomes more meaningful, freak occurances will become more common (the more times you flip a coin, the more likely you are to at some point land twenty heads in a row, and the closer your heads/tails ratio will be to one). About your last point, we can know alot about long term weather from plants (trees especially) for example...
...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'