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Gray Whale, Southern-Hemisphere Algae Seen In N. Atlantic
oxide7 writes "The gray whale hasn't strayed to the Northern Atlantic since the 18th century. The Neodenticula seminae, a species of algae, hasn't been there in 800,000 years. Now, members of both species have been spotted in the Northern Atlantic."
That was a terrible article. It has almost no detail. In particular, the only source given for this information is "scientists".
Here's a better reference for the algae.
I find lots of articles online linking the whales and the algae, which, while much better than the one linked to in the summary, don't say much more about the whale than that it was spotted off the coast of Israel.
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Of course it is relevant to understand what's causing a certain phenomenon. If we understand how current warming is caused by increasing greenhouse gases, then we also know how much we can influence warming by reducing the amount of those gases we produce.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame. That knowledge could be used to allocate the necessary funds to deal with the problems.
Well smartass, that was EXACTLY what the parent and the documentary are claiming isn't true. Nature was thought for a long time to be a balanced machine (to many rabbits, the foxes do well reducing the number of rabbits and then the excess of foxes dies as there are fewer rabbits to eat allowing the rabbits to restore themselves).
And the documentary showed how this believe came into being, how it was used and then how it was completely and utter debunked. In nature this does NOT happen. Not that nature doesn't appear to balance out but there is no balancing mechanism in place. It is VERY possible for the foxes to eat all the rabbits. No magic rebalancing act. Nature has plenty of example in all the extinct species.
Welcome to new century, some old ideas are going to be replaced by new ones. Constantly balancing eco system is so last century.
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And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold or that the sun revolved around the earth in scientific literature. That's because science is actually, and a little counter intuitively, quite stuck in its ways. When there is an established fact that the vast majority of the community believe in, it's very difficult to publish a counter argument (periodicals don't want to be viewed as "wacky" for publishing thinking outside the box), and it's led science down the wrong route many times in the past. That's not to say I believe the current position is wrong, but making anything difficult to openly question in scientific circles is unproductive.
1) The scientific method and the culture we identify as Science first started to look like their modern forms in the 1600s. It's not a coincidence that alchemy (which was always questioned and outright denied by many or most prominent "natural philosophers," despite your assertion to the contrary) began to die in the 1600s.
2) Your argument that science goes down the wrong route nicely refutes your argument that science is stuck in its ways - we only know that we've taken the wrong route because science is inherently great at revising ideas and getting us away from bad ones. The most fame you can have as a scientist comes from questioning and overturning (with evidence) current ideas. However, most current scientific ideas are pretty solidly grounded, so the most common claims of refutation are made by whacky pseudoscientists, since it's increasingly difficult to find accepted theories that are genuinely scientifically invalid.
More than any other field in history, science automatically adapts with time to more closely resemble the truth.
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