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The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete (theatlantic.com)
James Somers, writing for The Atlantic: The scientific paper -- the actual form of it -- was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little "computation" contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.
We are now in an era where only very few people actually need to know how reality works. The rest of us can become brand managers and youtube content creators.
In China, it sure seems to be.
This is more bullshit. blah blah scientists suck blah blah blah. Tripe.
When there's no justification for not publishing papers online for free, they're suddenly "obsolete". Funny that isn't it?
And it isn't our fault your parents raised you to be insufferable little know-nothing shits. If you are offended, talk to them.
That you can flood a scientific paper with reams of computer generated data is NOT science. That's technobabble. The point of the scientific paper is to lay down, ON PAPER, the technique you used and what you observed and then, in a separate section, editorializing what you've proven (or refuted).
That so-called scientific papers will merely dump the computer generated data or flood the paper with technical jargon without exposing the underlying algorithm or technique IS the problem.
At one time science was intended for the masses - that the Atlantic attributes this to "a simpler time" is also moronic as it was the intent of the authors, in fact all authors of the time, to write clearly and succinctly so that anyone could understand their work. You see that not only in the scientific papers of the time but also in the laws (the US Constitution). You also see the same problem in laws today where laws are now tends of thousands of pages long. How is any one person (let alone a dedicated group) supposed to understand the law as written?
To wit - it's a societal problem, not a scientific one or a problem with "overcomplex science"
Iâ(TM)ve worked with one dork who wrote a paper a month because it was a 2k bonus and after working with him briefly i found out he was basically was a historian. He just used other papers as a reference and did no actual study or research. I cancelled my IEEE subscription that year, he made it sound like that was the norm.
The scientific paper will last as long as paper-printing does. It's still very convenient.
That being said, TFA does make a good point about how current technology can do better than paper. If designed well, an interactive document with computer-driven content can convey a deeper and clearer message.
Better still, perhaps an AI embedded within the document could answer questions about it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I'm not sure what is going on here, except that the summary reads like clickbait.
The rule of thumb I was taught was that you write your papers with the assumption that your reader's got only a basic background in the field. We're talking 'has completed a minor in the field' levels at most, typically--you fill in the holes necessary to understand the paper itself in the introduction. At least in the fields I was in, nearly anything that made it into a significant journal--meaning, anything worth even reading the abstract--would be using one of a set of programs for the number crunching, and at least some of the options were open source. Unless there were privacy concerns, you generally could get a copy of the data sets with a few emails if you wanted to shove 'em through a different one of the standard number-cruching programs--privacy concerns just add a few extra hoops. Regardless of that, somebody should have the raw data and it should be in electronic form. You should typically know before you even start the email conversation if there ought to be privacy concerns; if they claim there are when there shouldn't be, or that they somehow don't have the data still, that's a red flag, especially if you're being very interested in learning more about their research and not in the least bit hostile, because researchers are normally very happy to talk about their work as much as they're able to. (It's a great way to keep one happily chattering away for a while, too.)
If you can't understand the jargon and symbols, and you're got a reasonably good background in the field...Google-fu will help some, but generally it's a sign that you've found a journal to dump papers to when you're in a publish-or-perish situation, and the number of papers published matters more than if any of them are of any quality whatsoever.
The scientific paper isn't obsolete. How publication works and academia's relationship to it, however...
If programs are central to the evaluation of a paper then programs need to be published alongside the paper - in source code form.
It doesn't matter if the source code is published with Apache, BSD, GPL, MIT or no license at all (remains copyright to the authors.)
What matters is that the source code is available to review alongside the paper. In this, it isn't performance that is critical, but bugs that influence results, be they buffer overflows or simply logic errors.
A group of people separate to those that do the peer review of papers then needs to review the source code for correctness as to the results it produces.
One of the main points of a scientific paper is that it's peer reviewed.
A decent paper will probably take around 2 hours to read and 2-12 months to write. As inefficient as this is, it has some desirable properties:
1) It presents information in a somewhat standardized format. After all the gimmicky digital notebooks etc turn to dust and the software which runs them becomes obsolete, the articles will remain.
2) It provides references and allows you to use itself as a starting point to discover more about the subject and the claims.
3) It generally represents an incremental advancement in the field.
Aside from the fact that the article is essentially a Mathematica ad, it is somewhat clear that the author has it written any scientific papers
See subject.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
there are thousands of AI bots, spamming the Internet with millions of generated articles full of nothing...
A nice book or piece of paper won't suddenly disappear when you need it as a reference/footnote.
The Scientific Paper Is not obsolete, it has just fallen into evil ways. Paper or electronic, it is still needed in it's original purpose. It just needs to be "beaten with a blacksmith's hammer to get the rust and crud off" !
As a scientist who has published papers in peer-reviewed journals, I strongly disagree. I don't care for many aspects of the publication process or how academia works, but the scientific paper isn't obsolete.
Regarding the use of software in creating results, it is definitely a problem when that software is difficult to use or isn't available at all. The same goes for data sets, many of which aren't released publicly for a variety of reasons. These are issues that need to be addressed.
In my own work, I try to release the software used to perform my analysis under the GPLv3. I also try to include adequate documentation to allow the work to be reproducible. I also support making data publicly available, but sometimes the volume of data sets makes it prohibitive to redistribute the work. The best option in that case is to provide detailed instructions on how to generate the data set. But sometimes it's even worse, such as when the research requires using a closed source program with a license that prohibits redistributing the output. The license makes it relatively difficult to obtain the software for anyone outside of the US government or academia, unless they pay for a commercial license. There isn't a comparable piece of software, but the university that licenses the software uses restrictive licensing requirements to increase their revenue.
To the extent that it's possible, scientists receiving grant funding ought to release their software as free and open source software. The data sets should be released or detailed instructions should be included to allow others to generate the same data set.
Papers can be difficult to read, but there are at least some steps in the right direction. One of the encouraging changes is the use of more first person in scientific papers and less passive voice. The formal tone is being being phased out in favor of readability. I wholeheartedly support this because the subject matter is difficult enough to understand without awkward sentence structures. Peer-reviewed papers also provide some level of quality control for research, though not to the extent of reproducibility.
Scientific papers still have a place, because they're still the best opportunity for scientists to present the key points of their results and describe their methods in detail. Simply releasing software and data sets is not enough. Those also aren't peer-reviewed. The bigger issue is that there just isn't a lot of funding to ensure that results are reproducible. Due to funding limits, there just isn't a lot of effort to reproduce all but the most surprising results. It would be great if funding agencies like NSF would allocate more funds for ensuring the reproducibility of existing results. Unfortunately, funding is so competitive that researchers have to sell their work as being very novel rather than verifying existing research.
Quality not quantity. If it can't be explained in a paper it's probably wrong.
It's clearly time to start writing riveting books about the process, the methods and the feelings and drama related to discovery. That way the general public can fund the science by just reading the drama, and there are enough pages to communicate the rest for other scientists.
At one time science was intended for the masses - that the Atlantic attributes this to "a simpler time" is also moronic as it was the intent of the authors, in fact all authors of the time, to write clearly and succinctly so that anyone could understand their work.
Science has never been "for the masses". Most concepts of any meaningful complexity are not going to be written at an 8th grade reading level. Issac Newton's Principia is certainly not written "for the masses" nor should it be expected to be dumbed down. As Einstein once put it, things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.
You see that not only in the scientific papers of the time but also in the laws (the US Constitution).
The Constitution isn't really a law. It is a framework for the laws. It sets the boundaries that are fleshed out by the laws. The actual federal laws are the United States Code, the United States Reports and the Code of Federal Regulations. There also
You also see the same problem in laws today where laws are now tends of thousands of pages long. How is any one person (let alone a dedicated group) supposed to understand the law as written?
You are presupposing that it is a good thing that laws be so simple that a single person can understand and know all them. The reality of our society is that it is so complex that the laws governing it inevitably will be similarly complex. Make a simple law and there are going to be gaps in that law unless you add complexity to deal with the corner cases. To circle back, science has no obligation to be simple enough for "the masses" to comprehend any or all of it.
MIT Random Paper Generator for computer science papers
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/arc...
Mathgen for Math Papers
http://thatsmathematics.com/ma...
Seriously, does anyone even read the paper anymore? I read the abstract and possibly the method.
At the end of the day, it is just an academic echo chamber where every paper references each other and none of it is very earth shattering. You should read the dissertations that don't make it into journals, those are really sad. For example, "Analysis of Socioeconomic Status and Student Achievement", or in other words, "Poor kids don't get good grades.", most papers could classified as Ric Romero papers where the outcome is obvious or in some cases statistically insignificant such that more papers need to be written with new experimental methods.
But for those of your writing papers, I leave you with my favorite research design song.
https://youtu.be/Hxbz656Euyw
Good - A paper with a straightforward goal and practical bent, allowing (encouraging?) the reader to reproduce the experiment, or at least repeat the analyses and verify the result.
Bad - A paper that obfuscates its purpose, doesn't explain the thing it's supposed to or doesn't have the accompanying data that allows a reader to confirm the analysis and conclusions. But at least you published Something. Or maybe several Somethings in a row since you stretched it out.
Reminds me (I'm more than old enough) about the "revolution" that would be occurring as soon as hypertext links (in the now obsolete sense, not html) were included in every paper. At the time, no one was considering that computer-to-computer communication/ data transfer would come to dominate the "connected world". The author disses .pdf format because it isn't "alive" enough for him. He apparently fails to recognize that for publishing (as we understand it today) you actually NEED to create a static object (the paper) rather than some constantly changing, impossible to pin down, meta-document. (Which has impossible to deconstruct internal structural dependencies... how do you verify a result if the process of obtaining it is opaque? You can't. This electronic notebooks thing just substitutes internal opacity for what we have now (as poor as it is). ) The best thing that has happened to science in the last 2 or 3 decades is the advent of the watch-dog sites. Not sure if that is sustainable. probably not. post science, indeed.
They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal.
It's funny having the Atlantic argue for concise articulation of an idea. Printing this article would take 17 pages.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Iâ(TM)ve worked with one dork who wrote a paper a month because it was a 2k bonus and after working with him briefly i found out he was basically was a historian. He just used other papers as a reference and did no actual study or research.
Yes, this kind of paper is called a "review article". What's your point?
Too much 'science' today consists of gathering a ton of data and clobbering it with statistics.
That's a dangerous trend. It's not science.
All the more reason for increasing coding skills in American schools, and raising the status of the nerd in society from an outcast to a potential innovator.
It is important for American business leaders not to export technical jobs to other countries, in order to foster the training of talent here in the United States.
Universities and colleges need to emphasize the applied sciences as much as the pure sciences. That is also true for mathematics curricula.
Computer science curricula needs to be merged with applied science curricula, so that computer scientists can collaborate better with scientists in their research. Historically, computer science has served commercial applications in businesses, and it has concentrated on pure computer science to make computers more efficient. Now computer science needs to increase its involvement with scientific research.
The scientific paper may indeed be obsolete.
But magazines like The Atlantic certainly are obsolete.
We are now in an era where only very few people actually need to know how reality works. The rest of us can become brand managers and youtube content creators.
There's an acceptance of this. It's unusual for someone to read a journal article before, say, junior year of undergrad. A lot of people probably graduate without reading one at all. Many of them will never pick one up in later life.
It means they can be duped more easily. When was the last time someone you know who disagreed with the existence of global warming picked up a journal article by a climate scientist? When was the last time someone who hates charter schools read through a journal article on charter schools by an economist? Most of us almost unknowingly adopt the positions we hear praised that sound reasonable without looking at data, and people who have *never* looked at data barely even have that option open to them.
If you don't read an article every once in a while, or if you don't know how, you're just trusting that whoever sounds best is right.
Maybe they are. They sound reasonable, after all. But it turns out that what sounds reasonable often isn't. The truth isn't about who sounds best to us.
Real lawyers write in C++
I’m a retard.
Fixed that door you.
With large datasets etc., it is clear paper-oriented publishing will have to change. Journals can become vetters and summarizers; giving links to fuller data sets. The journal may want to backup the data to avoid post-publish cheating, however.
it was the intent of the authors, in fact all authors of the time, to write clearly and succinctly so that anyone could understand their work.
Such an appealing idea... to the masses, basically meaning "if you cannot understand something, it was the writer's fault".
It sounded so... reasonable, until one mastered a difficult topic for the first time in their life. Then they find out that sometimes, there really are ideas that cannot be easily understood unless the listener had already learned a set of other ideas first, and thus it was not possible to explain simply to the masses.
Sure, you could "simplify" any idea so any ten year old might *think* they understood** the idea, but really didn't. Which is another way of saying you had made the idea simpler than what was possible, and thus no longer the original idea anymore.
** - I was using the Feynman's meaning of "understanding", meaning that to "understand" something, you would be able to guess/predict what would happen to that thing under certain circumstances.
But they are being damaged by the increasing proportions of bollocks being published.
As long as the academic research system values quantity over quality (AKA "publish or perish"), researchers will be pressured to publish papers as frequently as possible regardless of their quality or that they make meaningful contributions to science. Yes, it's really difficult to reproduce incoherent trash. Give "good" researchers tenure and reward the quality of the science they do, then we might learn more interesting and useful stuff. Prioritising quantity over quality just creates more noise in which to look for the good science.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
** - I was using the Feynman's meaning of "understanding", meaning that to "understand" something, you would be able to guess/predict what would happen to that thing under certain circumstances.
Wonderful! This should be quoted more than it is in modern society. I have had so many people tell me, who should know better, College professors with PHDs that "We don't even know what it means to 'understand' something!" They probably have been trained into this logical fallacy because it makes people with less than a certain level of IQ and experience shut up and go into thinking paralysis.
The truth is on a certain level a 5th grader understands this concept but cannot put it into words so eloquently.
This one needs to be brought out more when the young earth scientists and the creationists and the Flat Earthers and most importantly now the climate change deniers in the government try to discredit literally thousands of man years of careful research that has shown a consensus and it happens to disagree with their bosses business model. (That is the truth, it is not that there is any confusion in a lot of cases on how science works, how the things science is measuring works, it is that it makes billion dollar industries obsolete and therefore, it has to have FUD spread about it. FUD, remember that Slashdot? from back when you were really News for Nerds and stuff that matters??)
At a point I think the scientific community is going to ban together and take down the corporate elite. This is the future!
Maybe one of the dumbest things I've seen all day, and I've been on Reddit
I'm also a scientist, and like several others here, have serious problems with the prestige publishing culture of science, but the paper itself is not the problem. Could we present material better? Sure. Those are very field specific pedagogy issues though, we're not nearly all doing the same things wrong.
The problem with the premise of the article is the presumption that the paper IS the science. A scientific publication is not a scientific achievement, it is the scientific version of a press release (with peer review... but if anything could benefit from some modernization and interactivity, it's peer review). Reading a paper is only the very first part of seriously evaluating a new piece of science.
It's blind to imagine that all of science is wrapped up in a software focused world. Take electronics, for example. Researchers who have access to commercial fabs far outpace researchers who only have access to academic clean rooms.
This is not a case of university researchers being priced out of competition. Academics in many cases are more well funded than industry goups, and they generally spend more money on building and maintaining their clean rooms than it would cost to simply outsource to a fab. The trick is that they are very appropriately focused on education. Educating your students requires running material through training facilities, which is simply very expensive. (It's a digression, but one of the reasons industry is popular is the focus on pure technical achievement without the need to support training, win grants, or give up hands on work to get paid.)
There's no equivalent to free software in most of science; rather, software is unique in being able to provide industry standard performance in a training environment.
First, papers are not necessarily getting longer. It depends on the discipline and outlet. In CS papers are often published in context of conferences. They have generally page limited. In other disciplines and in journals, papers can become longer, as they have to provide more context as the disciplines and subdisciplines accumulate more knowledge. You just need more context info to understand the stuff.
Second, in CS, especially in software engineering, publications require now an empirical evaluation of the claim. This requires more space.
And their, presently papers are augmented by additional publications such aa data publication and source code. So I would rather see the paper evolving then going away or becoming obsolete. In future, we will have also interactive parts in a paper or related to a paper. Still you need some text to explain your hypotheses, your way of proofing it, and the evaluation.
I think the problem is misidentified in your comment, but in the details. The data publication is part of the peer review and publication process. It allows another specialist in the field to go over your study and its results, and attempt to replicate them. It also allows for discussion of conclusions. The "Abstract" is supposed to be the basic, plain language breakdown, including the conclusions. However, while you're right about the societal issue, there's a deeper one: All of the relatively easy science has been done. The questions are getting more complex. We're looking to more subtle phenomena to find more secrets of the way reality works.
The observations of physical phenomena that allow computers to work far exceeds the time of Newton (believed by many to be the last time one human could know the sum total of accumulated knowledge about nature). Fields are specialized, and "jargon/technobabble" are the layman's epithets for a field's shorthand that he/she doesn't get. Yes, we could likely simplify the law. Knowledge is not so readily boiled down. No one bats an eye at the odd uses of common words you find in the skilled trades, but everyone loses their shit when a scientist falls back on terms with precise meanings within their own fields.
NOTE: It was once common practice to include an attempt at a layperson's digest with a lot of papers, or at least publish it alongside the paper. This has gone away, which is a shame. However, when every such digest turns into Dunning-Kruger effect demonstration with the public, I would think it gets old. But a lot of the science being done now is beyond the limits of common understanding. Quantum computing, block chains, AMPS firewalls... It's hard to try to break that stuff down for the masses when the Flat Earthers are gaining ground!
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No, it started with the Enlightenment (and before them, the Greeks) when those primeval scientists realized that the masses knew squat and were incapable of understanding more sophisticated concepts and methods. No amount of writing for the masses is going to make them understand complicated interacting systems, mathematics, physics, etc. And most proles don't want to know about those elements of science. What they want are whizzy things that make their lives easier or more fun.
> You also see the same problem in laws today where laws are now tends of thousands of pages long. How is any one person (let alone a dedicated group) supposed to understand the law as written?
This is especially galling when those in power say stuff along the lines of "not knowing the law is no excuse for not following it". If it takes years of dedicated study to understand the law, and the vast majority of the population do not study law to anywhere near that degree, how the hell are we supposed to follow it? Natural "laws" at least physically constrain us from doing otherwise (you violated the law of conservation of energy, pay 500 or go to jail).
It does make me laugh. A physicist will give a public talk about "the astonishing simplicity of everything" and then the following week will publish a paper about "the astonishing complexity of even this basic 3-particle interaction".
At a point I think the scientific community is going to ban together and take down the corporate elite. This is the future!
I'll be honest, I don't see this happening. Life isn't a Simpson's episode.
This planet will go full ice-age before the masses start listening.
It's already happening now. I'll be surprised if it doesn't happen this half of the century given its recent acceleration.
The only thing you should be doing now is preparations for this inevitable future so your children can not only survive, but thrive.
The Scientific communication is not obsolete.
The paper form is.
But more importantly, what is really obsolete is the actual business model for profit editors on science content, like Elsevier, or IEEE and their dark friends.
They need abolishing or regulation. The fees they want just to read the content are horrendous, and non justified in the actual situation.
We need freely accessible science. For Everybody.
Ask a small fee for publishing, for example.
aaaaaaa
But when the tax code for ordinary citizens (I'm not even talking corporations) is so complicated that IRS employees who are answering questions from the public can't understand it, perhaps it's gotten more complicated than it needs to be.
Oh there is no question that you can overdo the complexity. But most of the unnecessary complexity of our tax code comes from politicians using it to fund their pet social policies inappropriately. For example whether you are married or single should have ZERO impact on your taxes. If the government wants to address that, the tax code is not the proper place to do it. If the government wants to subsidize something, just do so directly. Using taxes to do it is inefficient and adds needless complexity to the tax code. So we get heaping mounds of complexity where none needs to exist.
That said, some of that complexity is necessary. If we are going to have an income tax (whether we should is a separate question) you have to define income and that is surprisingly difficult to do in a way that doesn't have loopholes you can drive a semi through. I'm an accountant so I should know. There also is the question of fairness which is more of a social question than a technical one but it's also hard to have a tax code that is fair, functional, and simple. (no - plans like a flat tax fail that test though I understand the appeal) As HL Menken said "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
Papers haven't been about science itself in decades. It's how the industry rates your production as a career scientist/researcher. You get papers published or you don't get money and prestige. Doesn't matter what the papers content is.
In many disciplines (mine included - economics), the bulk of papers are written to satisfy some employment promotion criteria. Aside from this and the paper's review process, most papers are relevant to, and read carefully by, a handful of experts at best. To be clear: they do not describe scientific research that is relevant to others. It's not in the writing, but in the design of the research - the question being asked and the approach and tools used to answer it.
Is this a productive model or are there easily better uses of the authors human capital? I lean towards the latter.
Remember modern "science" is what brought us things like "evolution" and "global warming". People seem to be so willing to buy into obvious lies and misdirections that they have twisted the definition of science to make sure their beleifs fit.
How many scientists engaged in climate science research understand even the basics of the Carbon Cycle?
It is more or less generally accepted in the climate science community that the 20th century increase in atmospheric CO2 accounts for half of humanity's emissions of CO2, with the remaining half absorbed by sinks that are only partially understood. There is evidence from high-precision analytical chemistry methods for quantifying atmospheric oxygen available for only the last decades that about half of the net "sunk" CO2 is taken up by net photosynthesis over respiration whereas the remaining sink must be inorganic where free oxygen is not released in exchange for sequestered CO2.
It is broadly reasoned that emissions of CO2 are changing the carbon-isotope profile of the atmosphere -- what is called the Suess Effect after R. Revelle and H. E. Suess (1957) Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO, during the Past Decades, Tellus IX (1) pp. 18-27. This dilution of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere from combustion of fuel with a "fossil" isotope profile differing from the atmospheric baseline was throwing off C-14 carbon dating until it was recognized data methods were accordingly corrected.
The Suess Effect dilution of carbon isotopes, however, is considerable less than expected from a simple addition of combusted carbon with the fossil isotope profile. The carbon capacity of the ocean is 50 times that of the atmosphere, so why doesn't nearly all of the emitted CO2 isn't absorbed into the ocean. The rapid extinction of radioactive C-14 after the 60's Nuclear Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty suggests this should be the case.
The linear Henry's Law for solubility of gas in liquid would require that the dilution of carbon isotopes should be in direct measure with the emitted CO2, but Revelle's earlier work posited a chemical buffer system, where the mineral stew that is ocean water binds absorbed CO2 into what are called "soluble inorganic carbonates." Equilibrium in chemical reactions is non-linear and follows product law in the concentrations of the reagents. Physical chemists regard Revelle's buffer system to follow a 10th power law in the concentration of atmospheric CO2. This means that it takes a 10-fold increase in atmospheric CO2 to effect a 1-fold increase in CO2 in the ocean buffer system.
The ocean is vast, and even with the Revelle Factor of 10, most of the CO2 emitted by humanity should have disappeared into the ocean. Revelle and Suess in 1957 speculated on possible large natural sources of CO2 emission to balance this out. Since then, it is a scientific consensus that it takes a long time for the deep ocean to "turn over" by natural circulation and the combination of the Revelle buffer with a "compartmental" ocean model accounts for what is observed without that large, unknown natural source. But the deep ocean is difficult to measure, and the modelling is hand-wavy, at least in comparison to the multiple sigmas required to discover a new subatomic particle, although the atmospheric oxygen measures suggest a bound on how much CO2 is absorbed in the ocean.
But not just in the annual seasonal fluctuation but also year-to-year and over longer time scales, the variation in net CO2 increase in the atmosphere is large in comparison to the human contribution, suggesting variation in the exchanges of CO2 with the biosphere, the flows of which are known to be large compared to human-caused emissions. This variation also correlates with atmospheric temperature data. NOAA Carbon Cycle maven Pieter Tams argues this variation to result from changes in the rapid rotting of leaf litter in the tropical rain forests and is only short term. There is a body of literature emerging that rising global temperature are having a multi-decadal effect on increased CO2 driven out of temperate region soils, a potentially dangerous positive feedback leading to a runaway greenhouse.
Actually, you cannot have it
If you don't read an article every once in a while, or if you don't know how, you're just trusting that whoever sounds best is right.
It is actually worse than that because of predatory journals which have low to non-existent standards. Even people who read articles can easily get fooled if they read one of these so you not only need to read articles you need to know which journals to read and sometimes even which authors to trust.
Thanks for the keen insight, James Somers writing for the Atlantic. It's always refreshing when online journalists with degrees in nothing-in-particular come to sweeping conclusions about what's wrong with the scientific world.
One bit that provoked a chuckle is that he interviews Eric Weisstein who bemoans lack of clarity while gratuitously advertising Mathematica as a solution. I remember your MathWorld site Eric, but let's just say it wasn't exactly at the pinnacle of clarity and brevity. Half of the proofs looked like they were copied verbatim from ancient texts where the emphasis was never to bring science / math to a level that the masses could understand. Wikipedia articles are generally much better in comparison as they are broken up into distinct sections with some commentary, as opposed to the wall of equations style that permeated MathWorld.
Science is intended for the masses, the problem is that the masses are not interested in science and with time progressing not even capable of understanding basic concepts (aka flat Earth).
From what I read, in XIX (19th) century science was a common topic of discussions at homes and publicly, people were interested, were talking about science and participated in public lectures organized for non-scientists. Leaders consulted scientists, artists took inspiration from science. And to the contrary, nowadays being interested in science has pejorative meaning. It is OK to publicly boost of never being good at math, but not knowing how many Kardashians there are means somebody is socially inept.
I hope that masses will come to realization, that it's thank to scientists that their lives are so easy and comfortable nowadays and that there are adorable cat videos they can watch with a tap of their finger.
That was my favorite line in mid-1990s SIGGraph paper presentations. Riiiiight. My other favorite was when SIGGraph "course" conveniently glossed over the C/C++ code for implementing an adaptive 4th-order Runge-Kutta solver which is the key to any dynamics simulation software.
The point of scientific journals is not to communicate findings to the public but to record findings and share them with other members of the scientific community.
The papers are full of jargon because that's the state of the discipline. And it's not a bad thing. The people reading the papers will be up to speed on the jargon, so that's just how it's most effectively communicated.
Journals just wouldn't work if every paper had to start with a multi-year course on the topic to get the reader up to speed. It's up to the reader to have the background needed to understand the paper.
That's not obsolete; it's cutting edge!
Where exactly are they gaining ground? Or is that just a code word for anyone who disagrees with you.
That seems a bit of an elitist attitude, isn't it?
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The oceans are not absorbing the bulk of the (anthropogenic) carbon emissions -- their net absorption is only a quarter of what is emitted. This is the consensus, not a fringe conclusion.
The "CO2" skeptics Salby, Pettersson and Essenhigh claim that the oceans should be absorbing the bulk of the emitted CO2 -- mainstream scientists Revelle and Suess thought the same thing, but the reasons why they are not absorbing the bulk of CO2 is buried in the literature.
I shall look for your reference, but the technical understanding of the Carbon Cycle to refute Salby and the others is not generally available in undergraduate textbooks, otherwise, Salby's arguments would have been countered without resorting attacks on his character.
The reasons why the consensus Carbon Cycle explains the Keeling Curve of the 20th century increase in CO2 concentration along with why the extinction of the Bomb Test C-14 post the Test Ban Treaty are deep, not widely known even among the informed, and I had to dig deep to get at them.
The Consensus Carbon Cycle according to my dynamic system calculation indeed explains the Keeling curve quite accurate, that is ignoring the year-to-year fluctuations in the derivative of that curve that correlate with temperature according to Salby and other sources. What happens when you account for that temperature sensitivity, the amount of CO2 resulting from human activity in relation to the amount of increase from natural source on account of 20th century warming becomes uncertain. Pieter Tams of NOAA dismisses this uncertainty by claiming that the source of the fluctuation is a small tropical-forest leaf litter reservoir that rapidly rots and releases carbon back to the atmosphere on a 1-2 year time scale. Other data call this into question by measuring significant emission of carbon from temperate soils that correlates with temperature on decade-long times.
Have you ever contributed to a non-trivial paper? I've contributed to a few, and for an experiment of any complexity (at least in my field, which was testing the effects of radiation on electronics) there will be thousands of lines of control and data collection software, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of instrumentation with very consequential configuration options which would take thousands of lines to describe completely, spreadsheets and/or scripts for the data analysis, schematics for the many involved circuits, and test logs with hundreds or thousands of lines. Don't forget the MB of dosimetry data or the complete traceability information and specifications on the experimental parts (which basically amounts to the entire datasheet, or for a complex part the entire application guide). Oh, and maybe you should actually leave some room to describe your test procedure, which can involve stupid amounts of detail if you are actually being thorough (have to describe the custom power-up procedure you're using to run a modern DRAM in a highly custom configuration that diverges wildly from what the mfg ever intended, for starters).
We would include as much of this information as possible in test reports which would sometimes total 100 pages or more, but even then it's a challenge to include truly all the information required to replicate results. So, if you want to publish, you then need to distill all of that information, every piece of which has a potentially dramatic impact on experimental results, into less then 10 pages, but more commonly 2 or 3.
To be honest, it would make a ton of sense for science publication to start moving towards something more like a git project or some other publishing paradigm that could support the truly heinous amount of detail required to describe any modern experiment unambiguously. When you think about it, an experiment isn't so different from code - you need to execute a set of incredibly detailed steps in an absolutely consistent manner. But supposing that science hasn't gotten insanely complex is absolutely ignorant and shows that you've never had any direct experience with publishing or even given the matter serious thought.
A long web page that turns out as an advertisement for Wolfram's Mathematica software.