The reef environment is considerably different to the hydrothermal vent environment, not least in the nature of the sediments deposited in each. That Dr. Maloof describes them as "reef-dwelling animals" rather strongly implies that he's looked at the materials, established their characteristics, and come to a conclusion as to whether the word "reef" or the phrase "hydrothermal vent" better describes the environment.
Pay attention. He knows they existed before "snowball Earth" and he knows they existed afterwards. His speculation about how they survived is entirely bogus because he doesn't claim that species of sponge survived, he states that relatives of theirs did. A more reasonable guess would be that sponges lived all over the damned place, including at hydrothermal vents and other deep ocean locations, and that his reef dwelling species did indeed die out, the reef being re-colonised sometime later by their cousins from the deep.
is a rhetorical device leading up to just such a hypothesis
When you say rhetorical device, you mean "a marketing device for future research grant applications". I'm sick to death of idiotic scientific press releases.
Which do you think is more likely?
Having a PhD does not make you smarter than anyone else. It simply means you're familiar with historical and contemporary literature, techniques and theories in some particular area of knowledge, and have contributed to the literature therein. So in answer to your question, the existence of his PhD neither favours nor is contrary to the proposition that he's smarter than I am.
'Since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the Snowball Earth.'
Forgive my trolling, but Dr. Maloof is an idiot. There are things called hydrothermal vents that certain species of sponge live around. So unless he thinks "Snowball Earth" involved the complete freezing of the oceans and, indeed, all other bodies of water, a hypothesis can easily be constructed to answer his question.
What you haven't shown is any understanding of the sociological and epistemological operation of peer review
On the contrary, what I'm attempting to refute is the idea that saying we have "x number of peer reviewed papers" is an absolute indication that the fact of the matter has been established. An excellent example to give is that of Helicobacter pylori, the main cause of stomach ulcers. There were x number of peer reviewed papers (probably thousands) about the dietary causes of stomach ulcers, were there not? Ultimately it was all bollocks.
It's all very well well to feel superior, it's another thing to put your opinions to the test in front of people who are competent to critique them
That would be a great idea in theory, but in practice the critique is not a very fair minded one. We promise our chums on the team a friendly review and won't try to reproduce their results with different methods (the implication being that the methods are correct, even when authorities on the techniques [Wegman, for example] show them to be erroneous). We promise to reject those that disagree with us - it's a war out there (of political ideas) and the contrarians can't be allowed to gain any traction with their ideas. The world is about to go up in smoke, so the ends justify the means. The ends being to publish, the means being fakery, fraud, obfuscation, censorship and law breaking (deletion of information under FOI). None of this is the science I grew up with. Perhaps your experience has been different.
Unfortunately the system discriminates against people who want to change scientific consensus but don't have the patience to make their case against a hostile and well informed audience.
True, but you've got it the wrong way around. Those promoting the fraud don't want to share a platform with critics. Indeed they are actively discouraged from doing so by their peers (certain individuals, Judith Curry for example, notwithstanding); they don't want to give contrary views any legitimacy. Frankly I'm touched by your faith in the Scientists, but I do fear you're naivety as to motives in this case is a somewhat unfortunate blot on your intellect.
I thought having followed the original literature (instead of reports of what that contains) might, but apparently it does not.
Of course it doesn't. As far as I can see there's no way of telling which papers in the literature contain genuine results and which contain fake results (statistical "tricks"). After all, I'm sure a huge weight of them must be fake, given that the advantage in the scramble for grant funding is given to those papers with the phrase, "because of man-made Global Warming" in them. It's ironic though, that the papers most trustworthy in terms of the integrity of the researchers are probably the early papers, but their conclusions are no more trustworthy than any others purely because of the immaturity of the basis in knowledge from which they're constructed. The problem I have here is personal: I am no longer able to read any Scientific paper without raising an eye-brow. Actually this is a rather healthy intellectual disposition to have. It's just a shame that it isn't a sentiment shared more widely in the Climate Studies community.
Presumably then, you also watched the AGC (cooling) consensus being built in the previous decade. When Mann decided to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (inconvenient as it is for AGW), he effectively decided to throw away public trust in the Scientific Method. The fact your wife is a physical oceanographer therefore, does not impress me in the slightest.
What you don't seem to understand is that it is supposed to work that way.
Such a system isn't inherently flawed, as paradigms do take decades to overturn. The problem here however, is that this particular little backwater of Scientific misunderstanding is attempting to drive public policy. Overturning or otherwise the laws of Thermodynamics really doesn't have the same impact, so you cannot apply the same due diligence to it. At the stage you describe, it's a problem for the funding bodies and various nerdy PHd's trying hard to get tenure or to attract a research grant, not HM Government or the President of the USA and their various tax-paying agents ("the people").
I hope someday that there will be scientific proof of perpetual motion machines and ghosts, but it takes more than a single credible sounding report to establish those things.
Here is a common fallacy: scepticism of AGW is equivalent to being sceptical of [fill in the blank of firmly established science]. Notwithstanding philosophical arguments about whether we can ever actually know anything, Climate Science does not have a firmly established body of knowledge at its foundation. What it does have are activist Scientists, interested political movements, scaremongering media outlets and environmental pressure groups driving its consensus hypothesis, regardless of whether or not that hypothesis is rational, reasonable or even true. That is why Peer Review cannot be the back-stop for the establishment of truth in this area, because peer review, where all of your peers are "on the team", is basically censorship (in a political sense).
Peer-reviewed studies of glaciers profoundly disagree with you.
Whenever someone says, "peer review", I imagine a group of Climate Scientists sitting around a table, throwing out papers they don't agree with and accepting ones they do. The fact that you think the calving of a giant ice island many times larger than Manhattan doesn't happen in the absence of 0.5 degree of surface air warming shows what a crock of shit this whole subject is and also shows your unbelievable credulity in the face of Green Propaganda. It's just not credible to say that that this is anything other than a completely normal occurrence.
Moreover, as current temperature changes are well within the bounds of natural variability, all of these other techniques you're expounding here, which may or may not be relevant (I doubt they are relevant given that Climate Scientists can apparently re-construct the entire Northern Hemisphere temperature history from a single tree core in Siberia, using statistical "magic" and a very special tree) are nothing more than the reading of chicken's entrails followed by the promotion of said entrails in the promotion of some political cause.
In my humble opinion most if not all of Climate Science is complete and utter bollocks.
If it's about averages, then you have to set the bar for the average. You can say a 30 year average is significant, or a 60 year average, or a 600 year average, or a 6,000 year average. Which are you going to choose? The problem here is we don't have reliable data for the average that may be significant, so no conclusions can be drawn. And how are you going to compare and contrast the Medieval Warming Period (for example), with today's warming? What about the Little Ice Age? Why is your "average" today so much more significant than the averages of the past, which were if anything more extreme than they are now?
On point of the original post: ice shelves calve. There are momentous dynamic forces at play here. The surface air temperature really has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It would still calve in the absence of any atmosphere at all.
But anyway, can someone explain to me why this application costs £235,000,000? When I look my pay slip, I can't really see the link between these huge costs and how much a developer actually gets paid.
I would sure love to know where to get a new fan for a 4890 (and how to fit it). I paid £150 for that card! I've replaced it with a 5870. It's not as fast, but at least I get DX11 now (this is useful for me as a developer more than anything else).
Crysis Warhead killed my ATI 4890. The fan bearings went (the card still worked and the fan kind-of cooled it, but the noise was unbearable). So yes, playing games can kill your graphics card, in much the same way that driving your car a long way can cause it to break down.
Mod parent up. The OP is missing the big opportunity here. There are millions of lines of FORTRAN and COBOL code out there today in live production environments.
No it isn't. The Earth's magnetic field has negligible effect on cosmic rays: they are far to energetic for it to influence them significantly. What protects us from cosmic rays is the atmosphere.
There is a link between solar activity and cosmic rays and of course there is the interaction of the solar wind and our magnetic field, so in theory there is a pathway between cosmic rays and the Earth's magnetic field.
seems very reasonable to estimate that the decidedly natural effect(s) responsible for the periodic temperature change in the graph you link to account for no more the 5-10% of the temperature change referred to as "global warming".
Wow, with that train of logic, you can't go wrong!
Did you consider that there is almost always a step change (actually, it's a defining feature) when you merge a proxy and an instrumental record? Let's not even get into the fact that the surface instrumental temperature record itself is tainted by UHI effects that are not adequately dealt with. How could they be? Surface station management is an absolute mess, with 80% of the stations in the US (by far the largest number of stations in the world) cited incorrectly, or moved, or built around, or modified in some way.
Hmm...geographical barriers...like the distance to the moon? How about Mars? Little tough to set up a booty call to Mars, wouldn't you think?
It's an interesting scenario but I think that unless society X loses the ability it once had to transport genes from planet X to planet Y, a homogenising flow will be inevitable. What you're talking about here is some natural disaster (or un-natural of course, which is more likely in our case) that stops gene flow, coupled with evolutionary pressures in genes on either planet X or planet Y that lead to a significant divergence within the time it takes either society X or society Y to re-invent or otherwise re-acquire it's interplanetary travelling technology. Can we say that the "velocity" of the acquisition of technology is greater, or less than that of genetic change? I would say that it is much, much greater in the average case, but every now and then Humanity has passed through a genetic bottleneck (come close to extinction) and in this case significant divergence can be expected. The question, which I think must be undecidable, is whether or not that divergence is significant enough to cause speciation. I wonder if we could have interbred with our pre-ice age ancestors?
However, in perhaps as little as 10,000 years you'll find there is more than one species of human
I disagree. Speciation cannot occur in the absence of the geographical barriers that inhibit gene flow. In today's world, there are no such barriers. It doesn't take a huge amount of gene flow, perhaps less than 1%, to maintain the Homogeneity of a population.
It's not evolution's fault that we can't define a "species" well enough to tell when a group of animals switches from one to the other
Sure we can. Consider the ring species. Each individual in the ring can interbreed with it's immediate neighbours either side of it, but as individuals move further away from the start and end of the ring, they are less likely to be able to mate. Where the ring ends meet, two individuals from one end and the other cannot interbreed and are effectively a different species. The same is true of all individuals, the only difference being most intermediates are extinct. So we can say that any two animals that can mate and produce fertile offspring are the same species. Of course there are some grey areas, but that is because we are dealing with a continuum. As Dawkins has pointed out, an inability to visualise the evolutionary continuum for any given species is an example of a "discontinuous mind".
It's possible to write crap code in any language. C++ just gives you more rope to hang yourself with. For example, I was googling the other day for fast vector classes and I found this gem. I see this kind of "trickery" all over the place. The ability to obfuscate your code like this is positively encouraged in the C++ community, at least among those who do not have to maintain their own code, or other people's.
I'm guessing this is marketing spam from Microsoft, particularly as it doesn't contain someone like David Braben but does contain a whole load of x-box designers.
Slashdot Mirror
Pay attention. He knows they existed before "snowball Earth" and he knows they existed afterwards. His speculation about how they survived is entirely bogus because he doesn't claim that species of sponge survived, he states that relatives of theirs did. A more reasonable guess would be that sponges lived all over the damned place, including at hydrothermal vents and other deep ocean locations, and that his reef dwelling species did indeed die out, the reef being re-colonised sometime later by their cousins from the deep.
When you say rhetorical device, you mean "a marketing device for future research grant applications". I'm sick to death of idiotic scientific press releases.
Having a PhD does not make you smarter than anyone else. It simply means you're familiar with historical and contemporary literature, techniques and theories in some particular area of knowledge, and have contributed to the literature therein. So in answer to your question, the existence of his PhD neither favours nor is contrary to the proposition that he's smarter than I am.
Forgive my trolling, but Dr. Maloof is an idiot. There are things called hydrothermal vents that certain species of sponge live around. So unless he thinks "Snowball Earth" involved the complete freezing of the oceans and, indeed, all other bodies of water, a hypothesis can easily be constructed to answer his question.
On the contrary, what I'm attempting to refute is the idea that saying we have "x number of peer reviewed papers" is an absolute indication that the fact of the matter has been established. An excellent example to give is that of Helicobacter pylori, the main cause of stomach ulcers. There were x number of peer reviewed papers (probably thousands) about the dietary causes of stomach ulcers, were there not? Ultimately it was all bollocks.
That would be a great idea in theory, but in practice the critique is not a very fair minded one. We promise our chums on the team a friendly review and won't try to reproduce their results with different methods (the implication being that the methods are correct, even when authorities on the techniques [Wegman, for example] show them to be erroneous). We promise to reject those that disagree with us - it's a war out there (of political ideas) and the contrarians can't be allowed to gain any traction with their ideas. The world is about to go up in smoke, so the ends justify the means. The ends being to publish, the means being fakery, fraud, obfuscation, censorship and law breaking (deletion of information under FOI). None of this is the science I grew up with. Perhaps your experience has been different.
True, but you've got it the wrong way around. Those promoting the fraud don't want to share a platform with critics. Indeed they are actively discouraged from doing so by their peers (certain individuals, Judith Curry for example, notwithstanding); they don't want to give contrary views any legitimacy. Frankly I'm touched by your faith in the Scientists, but I do fear you're naivety as to motives in this case is a somewhat unfortunate blot on your intellect.
Of course it doesn't. As far as I can see there's no way of telling which papers in the literature contain genuine results and which contain fake results (statistical "tricks"). After all, I'm sure a huge weight of them must be fake, given that the advantage in the scramble for grant funding is given to those papers with the phrase, "because of man-made Global Warming" in them. It's ironic though, that the papers most trustworthy in terms of the integrity of the researchers are probably the early papers, but their conclusions are no more trustworthy than any others purely because of the immaturity of the basis in knowledge from which they're constructed. The problem I have here is personal: I am no longer able to read any Scientific paper without raising an eye-brow. Actually this is a rather healthy intellectual disposition to have. It's just a shame that it isn't a sentiment shared more widely in the Climate Studies community.
Presumably then, you also watched the AGC (cooling) consensus being built in the previous decade. When Mann decided to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (inconvenient as it is for AGW), he effectively decided to throw away public trust in the Scientific Method. The fact your wife is a physical oceanographer therefore, does not impress me in the slightest.
Such a system isn't inherently flawed, as paradigms do take decades to overturn. The problem here however, is that this particular little backwater of Scientific misunderstanding is attempting to drive public policy. Overturning or otherwise the laws of Thermodynamics really doesn't have the same impact, so you cannot apply the same due diligence to it. At the stage you describe, it's a problem for the funding bodies and various nerdy PHd's trying hard to get tenure or to attract a research grant, not HM Government or the President of the USA and their various tax-paying agents ("the people").
Here is a common fallacy: scepticism of AGW is equivalent to being sceptical of [fill in the blank of firmly established science]. Notwithstanding philosophical arguments about whether we can ever actually know anything, Climate Science does not have a firmly established body of knowledge at its foundation. What it does have are activist Scientists, interested political movements, scaremongering media outlets and environmental pressure groups driving its consensus hypothesis, regardless of whether or not that hypothesis is rational, reasonable or even true. That is why Peer Review cannot be the back-stop for the establishment of truth in this area, because peer review, where all of your peers are "on the team", is basically censorship (in a political sense).
The distribution of mass is the key feature here. It's called Gravity.
Whenever someone says, "peer review", I imagine a group of Climate Scientists sitting around a table, throwing out papers they don't agree with and accepting ones they do. The fact that you think the calving of a giant ice island many times larger than Manhattan doesn't happen in the absence of 0.5 degree of surface air warming shows what a crock of shit this whole subject is and also shows your unbelievable credulity in the face of Green Propaganda. It's just not credible to say that that this is anything other than a completely normal occurrence.
Moreover, as current temperature changes are well within the bounds of natural variability, all of these other techniques you're expounding here, which may or may not be relevant (I doubt they are relevant given that Climate Scientists can apparently re-construct the entire Northern Hemisphere temperature history from a single tree core in Siberia, using statistical "magic" and a very special tree) are nothing more than the reading of chicken's entrails followed by the promotion of said entrails in the promotion of some political cause.
In my humble opinion most if not all of Climate Science is complete and utter bollocks.
If it's about averages, then you have to set the bar for the average. You can say a 30 year average is significant, or a 60 year average, or a 600 year average, or a 6,000 year average. Which are you going to choose? The problem here is we don't have reliable data for the average that may be significant, so no conclusions can be drawn. And how are you going to compare and contrast the Medieval Warming Period (for example), with today's warming? What about the Little Ice Age? Why is your "average" today so much more significant than the averages of the past, which were if anything more extreme than they are now?
On point of the original post: ice shelves calve. There are momentous dynamic forces at play here. The surface air temperature really has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It would still calve in the absence of any atmosphere at all.
But anyway, can someone explain to me why this application costs £235,000,000? When I look my pay slip, I can't really see the link between these huge costs and how much a developer actually gets paid.
Isn't anyone around here a Solipsist?
I would sure love to know where to get a new fan for a 4890 (and how to fit it). I paid £150 for that card! I've replaced it with a 5870. It's not as fast, but at least I get DX11 now (this is useful for me as a developer more than anything else).
Crysis Warhead killed my ATI 4890. The fan bearings went (the card still worked and the fan kind-of cooled it, but the noise was unbearable). So yes, playing games can kill your graphics card, in much the same way that driving your car a long way can cause it to break down.
Mod parent up. The OP is missing the big opportunity here. There are millions of lines of FORTRAN and COBOL code out there today in live production environments.
There is a link between solar activity and cosmic rays and of course there is the interaction of the solar wind and our magnetic field, so in theory there is a pathway between cosmic rays and the Earth's magnetic field.
Wow, with that train of logic, you can't go wrong!
Did you consider that there is almost always a step change (actually, it's a defining feature) when you merge a proxy and an instrumental record? Let's not even get into the fact that the surface instrumental temperature record itself is tainted by UHI effects that are not adequately dealt with. How could they be? Surface station management is an absolute mess, with 80% of the stations in the US (by far the largest number of stations in the world) cited incorrectly, or moved, or built around, or modified in some way.
Ah yes, I was wondering when someone would post the Vostok graph, which kind-of puts this whole thing into perspective.
You mean a set of 7 variables all multiplied together where all of them are unknowns? Remind me how to solve that will you...
It's an interesting scenario but I think that unless society X loses the ability it once had to transport genes from planet X to planet Y, a homogenising flow will be inevitable. What you're talking about here is some natural disaster (or un-natural of course, which is more likely in our case) that stops gene flow, coupled with evolutionary pressures in genes on either planet X or planet Y that lead to a significant divergence within the time it takes either society X or society Y to re-invent or otherwise re-acquire it's interplanetary travelling technology. Can we say that the "velocity" of the acquisition of technology is greater, or less than that of genetic change? I would say that it is much, much greater in the average case, but every now and then Humanity has passed through a genetic bottleneck (come close to extinction) and in this case significant divergence can be expected. The question, which I think must be undecidable, is whether or not that divergence is significant enough to cause speciation. I wonder if we could have interbred with our pre-ice age ancestors?
I disagree. Speciation cannot occur in the absence of the geographical barriers that inhibit gene flow. In today's world, there are no such barriers. It doesn't take a huge amount of gene flow, perhaps less than 1%, to maintain the Homogeneity of a population.
Sure we can. Consider the ring species. Each individual in the ring can interbreed with it's immediate neighbours either side of it, but as individuals move further away from the start and end of the ring, they are less likely to be able to mate. Where the ring ends meet, two individuals from one end and the other cannot interbreed and are effectively a different species. The same is true of all individuals, the only difference being most intermediates are extinct. So we can say that any two animals that can mate and produce fertile offspring are the same species. Of course there are some grey areas, but that is because we are dealing with a continuum. As Dawkins has pointed out, an inability to visualise the evolutionary continuum for any given species is an example of a "discontinuous mind".
This is what Richard Dawkins calls, "the argument from personal incredulity" and as you are no doubt aware it is extremely weak!
It's possible to write crap code in any language. C++ just gives you more rope to hang yourself with. For example, I was googling the other day for fast vector classes and I found this gem. I see this kind of "trickery" all over the place. The ability to obfuscate your code like this is positively encouraged in the C++ community, at least among those who do not have to maintain their own code, or other people's.
I'm guessing this is marketing spam from Microsoft, particularly as it doesn't contain someone like David Braben but does contain a whole load of x-box designers.