Would he have re-read it so carefully if it was being cited by evolutionists rather than creationists? Probably not. So?
Are most scientific papers written so poorly that a quick re-read (fifty years later) will reveal a ton of factual/methodological mistakes that make it worthy of withdrawal? No. But creationists using your paper for support is a pretty good signal that you may have done something wrong (assuming that they're not just misrepresenting it). You can think of creationists as a filter to detect poor science. It's not just coincidence that he found errors after creationists started citing it; they started citing it because it had errors.
The author made an argument about how a lot of specific events would have to happen simultaneously for life to arise. Creationists picked up on this; it's one of their own standard arguments. But it's a wrong argument, and the author realized that after being reminded of it.
He says he no longer believes the arguments in that paper:
"Things grew worse when he reread his paper, he said, because he discovered errors. [...] Another assertion in the paper, about what would have had to occur simultaneously for living matter to arise, is just plain wrong, he said, adding, "It was a dumb mistake, but nobody ever caught me on it.""
Virtualization, from a security standpoint, is just a firewalling method. It increases isolation between instances, and more isolation is ALWAYS good. More isolation is ALWAYS good? Bah, I think it's a real pain. It makes it much harder for me to write security exploits.
Except that there's no need to do it. A position you have utterly failed to support and which disagrees with the vast majority of climatologists, economists, etc. who have seriously studied the issue. I am sure you are familiar with these conclusions so there is no need to link to the IPCC reports.
Which would be a fantastic argument if only those alleged impacts were based in reality, which they are not. Proof by assertion doesn't cut it.
CO2 isn't pollution Whether CO2 is "pollution" is semantics; what matters is its ultimate effect on the environment, which is arguably a net negative. If you don't want to call that "pollution", fine, but it doesn't change the point.
and there is no cost to "cleaning it up." False. Carbon capture and sequestration has costs; so does abatement.
Actually there is a NEGATIVE cost to cleaning it up. Also false, since you're focusing on the benefits CO2 fertilization and ignoring all the other negative effects of CO2 via its climate impacts.
(Not that CO2 fertilization is such a huge benefit anyway; commonly plants are limited by nitrogen or water, not CO2, so extra CO2 doesn't necessarily help much; C4 plants don't benefit from CO2 fertilization in the first place; and agriculturally CO2 fertilization may lead to bigger plants but sometimes less nutritious ones. Elevated CO2 helps plants some, but not as much as people think — and that's before factoring climate change into the mix as well.)
If you're so worried about the environment why don't you simply put your efforts into "cleaning up" your particular state instead of (more easily ofcourse) blaming it all on one man and start the (to me:) typical selfish American approach of sueing? The states that are suing generally are the ones putting effort into cleaning up their own state. The problem is that the Bush administration is keeping the states from passing laws requiring cleaner cars. As TFA says,
"The legal move by the states to sue the Environmental Protection Agency is aimed at prodding the Bush administration to remove obstacles to more than a dozen states seeking to regulate global warming emissions from cars and trucks. In 2005, California sought a waiver from the E.P.A. that would allow it to implement the first regulation in the United States requiring reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from cars. The E.P.A. has not yet granted the waiver, keeping the regulation from taking effect.
New York, Massachusetts and a number of other states have since moved to adopt California's measure. They cannot proceed until the E.P.A. moves on the waiver."
Furthermore, even if the states could pass the laws they wanted, the other states which don't are still a problem: CO2 produced in "dirtier" states still affects the welfare of people in "cleaner" states, through climate change. This is Hardin's infamous "Tragedy of the Commons". Arguably your neighbor doesn't have an unlimited right to create environmental hazards which affect you, just because they're on the other side of some political boundary.
Wow, I totally screwed up the formatting on that last comment. Should have previewed.
I am just saying "maybe all the efforts done to fight the hatred of science are going in the exactly wrong direction". This is sociological and psychological, hardly scientific indeed. You are saying it, but you don't have any social or psychological EVIDENCE for it.
I agree that by symmetry you can deduce the existence of the displacment current, but from that how do you deduce the existence of electromagnetic waves without writing down and solving Maxwell's equations ? You can't actually derive a linear wave equation without solving Maxwell's equations, but you can argue that if time-varying magnetic fields support electric fields and time-varying electric fields support magnetic fields, then there plausibly can be self-supporting wave solutions with the electric and magnetic fields continuously varying.
Qualitative and phenomenological physics indeed works to some extent (non-linearities, second order effects please ?), but I find it a shame to go back to middle-ages like thinking and teaching. We have not gone back to the middle ages in thinking and teaching. Studenst are still taught mathematical physics in science classes. Popular science is intended to communicate further science to "the common man" who is done with his education, or to inspire students who have not yet reached high levels of mathematics. This is far BETTER than in the middle ages, in which the common man didn't know anything about science.
Why do not you teach Arisotelician physics, which, without equations, describes perfectly the macroscopic world we live in ? Because it's wrong.
Maybe the problem is societal, with the huge comeback of religion and myths enforced by people who have an interest in it in order to dumb the bigger part of the population, when in between the 1850s and the 1990s the same politicians had an interest in having the best scientists emerging from the people in order to develop the best weapons. Much I doubt religion and myth has anything to do with it (not that I favor them). If I may engaged in my own unfounded speculation, I'd guess it's simply much more likely that science careers are simply viewed by prospective students as less rewarding than they once did, for economic and lifestyle reasons.
I am just saying "maybe all the efforts done to fight the hatred of science are going in the exactly wrong direction". This is sociological and psychological, hardly scientific indeed. You are saying it, but you don't have any social or psychological EVIDENCE for it.
I agree that by symmetry you can deduce the existence of the displacment current, but from that how do you deduce the existence of electromagnetic waves without writing down and solving Maxwell's equations ? You can't actually derive a linear wave equation without solving Maxwell's equations, but you can argue that if time-varying magnetic fields support electric fields and time-varying electric fields support magnetic fields, then there plausibly can be self-supporting wave solutions with the electric and magnetic fields continuously varying.
Qualitative and phenomenological physics indeed works to some extent (non-linearities, second order effects please ?), but I find it a shame to go back to middle-ages like thinking and teaching. We have not gone back to the middle ages in thinking and teaching. Studenst are still taught mathematical physics in science classes. Popular science is intended to communicate further science to "the common man" who is done with his education, or to inspire students who have not yet reached high levels of mathematics. This is far BETTER than in the middle ages, in which the common man didn't know anything about science.
Why do not you teach Arisotelician physics, which, without equations, describes perfectly the macroscopic world we live in ?
Because it's wrong.
Maybe the problem is societal, with the huge comeback of religion and myths enforced by people who have an interest in it in order to dumb the bigger part of the population, when in between the 1850s and the 1990s the same politicians had an interest in having the best scientists emerging from the people in order to develop the best weapons.
Much I doubt religion and myth has anything to do with it (not that I favor them). If I may engaged in my own unfounded speculation, I'd guess it's simply much more likely that science careers are simply viewed by prospective students as less rewarding than they once did, for economic and lifestyle reasons.
then please explain why science enrollment is going down I don't know why science enrollment is going down, but what you're saying is essentially, "My idea is right because I can't think of an alternative", which is an attitude unbecoming a scientist.
I think the "common view" which you dismissed is far more likely to be a valid factor than your proposal.
and it obviously does not work since it only appeals to the non-scientifically minded, the others smelling a rat in the material That is not at all obvious. I would contend the exact opposite: popular science books inspire students to go into science who otherwise wouldn't.
The current remedy is to present pretty pictures of science to the youth, and it obviously does not work since it only appeals to the non-scientifically minded, the others smelling a rat in the material. You seem to be under the impression that pop-science books have replaced science education, which is not the case.
All the concepts that you explain to the layman "on the conceptual level" without equations do not hold water from a scientific point of view since you can just hammer them down and not demonstrate them You don't need to be able to rederive all of the laws of physics from first principles in order to learn something about how they work.
If you say "electromagnetic waves have this strange structure" and in the best case experimentally demonstrate it, isn't it normal that people ask, consciously or not, how you came to this counterintuitive postulate ? Almost every popular science book discusses the history of how scientists arrived at whatever conclusion. It is not that difficult, for instance, to explain that Faraday found experimentally that time-varying magnetic fields produce electric fields, and Maxwell postulated that by symmetry time-varying electric fields should produce magnetic fields. You don't need partial differential equations to grasp that point, even if the symmetry is not as manifest without seeing the equations. And you don't need math to see the experimental reality of those terms.
This all-or-nothing attitude of yours is absurd. You are seemingly incapable of conceding that it's possible to have some legitimate knowledge of a subject without having a perfect understanding of it.
Hell, there are studies which have compared "conceptual" introductory physics students to "quantitative" introductory physics students and shown that the former can do better than the latter when it comes to qualitative problem solving. (e.g., give them a circuit diagram and ask them whether the light bulb gets brighter or dimmer if you remove a circuit element.) You can get quite far in reasoning about physical systems at a conceptual level. But no doubt they must be faking their answers with their knowledge of "taxonomy".
"exploitation" in the sense that some people make a fortune selling books about it It's not exploitation to sell someone a book on the subject they're interested in. Geesh.
and in securing funding at the national and european level. Again, boo hoo. They get funding for studying subjects that physicists and the lay public are interested in. This has nothing to do with "exploitation", it just has to do with the fact that you, personally, would rather see the money go elsewhere.
When you brutally explain to people that there are different kind of particles, you are just doing what I said : taxonomy. Don't give me that Rutherford "stamp collecting" crap. There's nothing wrong with taxonomy. And you can introduce dynamics, not just taxonomy. You don't need to explain fiber bundles to discuss concepts like color charge, asymptotic freedom, etc.
This "if it's not mathematical it's not worth learning" attitude is condescending bullshit.
About electricity and magnetism, people in general just understand Ohm's law in the best case, even induction is foreign to people without a scientific education, not speaking about the structure of electromagnetic waves. It is possible to explain electromagnetic waves on a conceptual level, and many books do.
To do anything useful with physics, you certainly do not need differential geometry, but at least highschool calculus and trigonometry, You don't need any math at all to understand something about the concepts involved.
However I think that by teaching science in highschool and in popular science books only with pretty experiments and statement of facts, without real mathematization, we disgust scientifically minded people who see modern science as a joke Don't make me laugh. The very idea that students think that physics doesn't involve real math is absurd.
Could you read my whole comment before taking out the first sentence ? I did. The first sentence made no sense to me. I replied to the rest.
My point is that astrophysicists, cosmologists and the like exploit the desire of a non-scientific public for dreams and answers about nature. How is that "exploitation"? The public is interested in these things, so are the scientists, what is the problem?
How can you honestly explain the standard model without explaining first quantum mechanics, second quantification and relativity ? You can get pretty far without explaining any of those things. You don't need any of that to understand that there are different types of particles, different types of interactions, and what some of their physical properties are. We're not talking about deriving the spin-statistics theorem here.
For an approach that implicitly incorporates both quantum theory and relativity, I refer you again to Feynman's book.
And how can you do this without first explaining electromagnetism and classical mechanics ? People know basic things about electricity and magnetism already. They don't need Maxwell's equations. They don't need to know Lagrangians either.
Geeze, how would you explain to the public anything in condensed matter physics by these criteria? You obviously don't have a problem with astrophysicists or particle physicists.
So you can explain modern science by transforming it into some kind of taxonomy and fairy tales, but the real beauty of it, which lies in its mathematization, hence its predictive power, Oh boo hoo, you don't get to teach them differential geometry. The claim that you have to have a full mathematical understanding of physics to learn anything useful about it is absurd.
On my opinion this is why science enrolment in universities is falling except for Chinese and Indians. Go ahead, explain to me how Chinese and Indian enrollment has surged because they don't have any popular science books in those countries. What a joke.
I am actually disgusted by the quest of absolute and religiosity by the 80-90% of humans who actually do not have a scientific mind. I don't know quite what you mean by that, but what does that have to do with particle vs. condensed matter physics?
And particle physicists and especially cosmologists exploit that shamefully. ... what?
Many non scientists are simply very interested in the fundamental building blocks of matter, the origins and fate of the universe, etc. This is not a failing, or an absence of a "scientific mind". It's not "exploitation" to teach people about things they're interested in.
How can you explain standard model to someone whose mind blocks on the concept of electron spin ? It's not really harder to explain the basics of particle physics to such a person than it is to explain how giant magnetoresistance works. But even if it was harder, so what? What has that got to do with anything? It might be harder, but you can still communicate the basic concepts.
By cheating. Piffle. Any time a physicist invokes Newton's laws, they're "cheating" too: they've been superseded by quantum theory and relativity. For that matter, if you want to explain anything in condensed matter, you necessarily have to simplify some of the details of quantum mechanics, band structure, etc. You're not constructing an argument against particle physics, you're constructing one against all of physics. Is that what you really want to do?
Read Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter for a good example of how to explain particle physics with a minimum of "cheating". Other than ignoring photon polarization, he almost literally described the path integral formulation of quantum electrodynamics, leaving nothing out.
I basically agree however with the rest of your post but remind persuaded that small is beautiful. Small is beautiful, but so is large.
I recall an explosion on Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines, in 1991. It was the single largest release of greenhouse gases in recorded history. It's generated more pollution by itself than the sum total of ALL man-made pollution, EVER.
Like most of your "facts", that's dead wrong.
Pinatubo threw up a bunch of sulfates which produced aerosols which, in turn, led to a COOLING effect for a few years. However, the aerosols, being short-lived, precipitated out of the atmosphere quickly and Pinatubo's climate effect went away. Volcanoes are known to produce short term cooling, but it would take a sustained change in volcanic activity for that to add up to a real trend.
As for greenhouse gases, Pinatubo did NOT release an enormous amount of them. The CO2 released by all the volcanoes in the world doesn't amount to more than a percent or two of what humans emit every year.
Before that, 30 yrs ago, all the liberal media (Time, Newsweek, et al) were trying to spread doomsday drivel about the "pending ice age".
I could care less what the media says. The scientific literature was not full of predictions of a "pending ice age"; almost all of that talk can be traced back to a single paper by Rasool and Schneider. Panels on climate change analogous to today's IPCC studies, such as the National Academy of Science, openly stated that it was impossible at the time to draw such conclusions. That is a far cry from the situation today, when there is enormously more evidence and broad agreement on the trend and its cause.
Now it's the ice caps melting, and we need to tax (or otherwise regulate, if not outright outlaw) all "carbon emissions" out of existence.
We are not going to eliminate all carbon emissions, but thanks for bringing a new strawman into play.
Based on junk science from so-called researchers,
Big talk. Why don't you point out the errors in this so-called "junk science", then?
publishing postion papers funded by groups that "support" the "findings" based on their own agenda.
Oh, you mean funding groups with liberal agendas like the National Science Foundation? Give me a break. It only shows the paucity of your own position that you have to eschew all scientific arguments in favor of vague allegations of conspiracy. Sorry, the science is not based on "position papers" funded by activist groups, it's based on peer reviewed scientific journal publications funded by neutral government entities. (If anything, places like the NSF have to toe the conservative line with this administration, not the other way around.)
Tell me something... how are you going to outlaw volcanoes?
We don't need to outlaw volcanoes. More volcanoes would help. In fact, some have suggested producing artificial volcanoes to produce a cooling that offsets global warming (which has its own set of problems).
Or a herd of cattle, making their own special "contribution" to the environment?
We don't have to outlaw cattle; it's not possible to reduce GHG emissions to zero and we don't want to anyway; by the time we managed to do that, we would have adapted to a mildly warmer climate anyway. The point is to cut them enough that the warming doesn't reach the most damaging levels. But as for cattle, we can cut back on beef consumption in favor of other meats, or give them different feedstock which produces less methane instead of what we feed them now.
When I read about the fact that a single volcano eruption, A NATURAL PHENOMENA, did more damage than all of mankind ever did in it's entire history,
Which is an obvious lie, but being a total tool, you bought it hook line and sinker. You'd rather believe that every climatologist in the world is unaware of the climate effects of volcanoes, just to justify your self-validating belief that global warming isn't a real problem.
If you want to equate the importance of physics with technological applications, fine, but that's not the only reason to do physics. Learning about the fundamental building blocks of the universe has intellectual merit of its own, and face it, a lot of ordinary people are really interested what physicists learn about such things. You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't be interested in particle physics or whatever, just because condensed matter is more practical. That's a value judgement.
By the way, it's a fallacy to think that if not for Big Particle Physics, condensed matter physics would be enormously more fruitful. If the money wasn't going to accelerators, that doesn't mean it would be going to condensed matter physicists instead; it might just go to biologists.
And just dumping money on condensed matter doesn't guarantee breakthroughs. There are already far more condensed matter physicists than particle physicists; if you try to buy even more of them, you're necessarily going to start scraping the bottom of the talent barrel, and you get diminishing returns. Unless you're arguing that the money should go to existing condensed matter physicists without expanding the talent pool, to fund work that they currently can't afford to do. Well, I don't buy that either: the guys most likely to make breakthroughs are almost certainly already well funded.
Gas guzzler taxes, environmental and recycling fees...
All of those are perfectly sensible, mainstream economic responses to negative externalities. The market can't work if there's no mechanism to make it aware of the true cost of carbon. Why do you hate the free market?
and this concept of buying so-called "carbon offsets"? Biggest scam of the young century thus far.
I agree with you there. Offsets are a silly response even if they had proper oversight, which they don't.
Why is it that a hybrid vehicle costs more than it's conventional sibling, anyway?
Because it costs more to make.
Shouldn't the former be cheaper to encourage thier use, and additional purchases?
Are you advocating subsidies? There have already been tax deductions for hybrid cars.
And I don't know what "science" you seem to be citing, but there is no credible scientific PROOF that human beings are destroying this planet, nor it's environment.
You don't "prove" things in science, you merely amass evidence for or against them. Right now, there is a quite large amount of credible evidence that human beings are largely responsible for the recent climate change. You can find it summarized, with references to the literature, in the latest IPCC report.
No, but I'm sure that's what you and your demagogue friends will claim anyway. Just the fact that I challenge the notion that "going green" is less than 100% altruism
Ha. Yeah, way to revise your position after the fact. No, you did not merely challenge the notion that going green is "less than 100%" altruism. You flat out stated that a justification for increasing taxes is ALL that going green has ever been about.
and garner the label of an "anti-environmentalist", when you don't even know the full extent of my position on the subject...
Uh, sorry, when you accuse environmentalists of only being after your tax dollars, that is by definition an "anti-environmentalist" position.
it just goes to show that socialists like you have no interest in honest debate... or opposing viewpoints.
Wow, what an enormous hypocrite you are. First you accuse me of labeling you when I don't know your position (when in fact you have clearly stated an anti-environmentalist position), and then you turn around and call me a socialist, and tell me all about my "demagogue friends". Please, tell me, which of my friends are demagogues?
You all would rather jam your agenda down other people's throats, no matter how wrong-headed it is.
Ok, where in this thread have I "jammed an agenda" down someone's throat? And I could equally well accuse you of jamming a wrong-headed anti-environmentalist or anti-socialist agenda down people's throats. Enough of the biased political framing: disagreeing with someone does not equal "having an agenda" or stubbornly holding a wrong-headed opinion in the absence of evidence or whatever dumb position you want to accuse me of having.
God forbid you accept the well-known fact that animals, volcanoes and other natural-borne phenomena are responsible for far more of the greenhouse gases and the effects thereof than any human activity...
God forbid you spend more than three seconds reasoning about the implications of that fact, or else you'd realize how totally irrelevant it is to the global warming debate.
Natural sources of CO2 are greater than anthropogenic sources. However, until the last few hundred years, they have been largely balanced by natural sinks of CO2. Human emissions have overwhelmed the capacity of natural sinks: they can take up about half of the excess we've been generating, but that leaves the other half to build up in the atmosphere year after year.
Over the last 150 years or so, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased 35%, and almost all of that increase is due to human activity, as determin
No, I think your not think about this. Or you just aren't looking. No, really. Give an example of a real person who is "closed to the evidence" and "everything is how they say it is".
Just because you failed to make a convincing argument doesn't mean someone is "closed to the evidence", you know.
Going to the library isn't the problem. It is the paying for a copy or getting something 10 years old that is. By the time you can get the information, it has already been corrected by another article.
Again, boo hoo. You're complaining that progress is made, as if this is some conspiracy of scientists to keep information from the public.
And no, Not all of them are available from the library. Pretty much any university library can get a copy of any article for you.
Sure libraries keep old copies. But something they don't do is constantly go back and reference the incorrect stuff to prove points. If you think this is acceptable, then I don't think you would see a problem with Realclimate or whatever it is. Please give an example of RealClimate knowingly referring to incorrect stuff to prove points.
Does it? My understanding is that the hockey has a few bruises now which makes it look a little different. It changed some when the statistics were fixed, but not much.
But the bigger point was that they supposedly threw out data that didn't fit their working model. In other words, they cherry picked the data. I think you are confusing the selection of paleoproxies with "cherry picking". When you pick a proxy, you have to use one that shows a known correlation with climate, and you discard the ones that don't. Otherwise, you're not using anything useful.
and yet we cannot get the data being used to find this out. As I already noted, both the GISTEMP data and the source code are available.
So do I take your word for it or some one else's word who is pushing an agenda? Gee, now all scientists are "pushing agendas". Real unbiased of you.
And yet, the most recent disclosed problem was with the way they treated the data that was being put into the models. You see, it is the handling errors, the formula errors, and the math errors that created the wrong temperatures. In both cases, the temperature was the output, not the input. So in both cases, the same errors could create the same exaggerated effect after being compounded by scale. As I already noted, the temperature data is used in correlation and regression analyses — not climate models — which are not chaotic. You could exaggerate the error without chaos if you tried to do something like a regression on a regression or something weird like that, but I've never seen anybody do that: they always go back to the original time series.
There is no butterfly effect, and how do we know this without going back with proper and accurate data? The sensitivity of the model is a property of the model; it is not inherent to the data.
You don't have to look far, just stick around here and wait for someone to talk about it. there are a few people that always come in and correct any talk other then the "approved" theory. I have never taken the time to mark their names down but I have a feeling you know what I am talking about. No, I think you're projecting your prejudices onto other people. There are plenty of people, including myself, who correct talk about alternative theories which are wrong.
You have seen papers primarily because you (or your employer) have paid the money to get access to them. For the rest of us, we have to sit back and listen to people saying trust me or fork up some dough. Oh give me a break. Journal articles are not secret. USE A LIBRARY. There are plenty of journals that I don't have convenient Internet access to. There are even journals I can't get at the local university library. I have to use the interlibrary loan. That's what scientists themselves did all the time for centuries before the Internet was invented, and even the ones with access to the best libraries still have to do it sometimes. But it's not good enough for you?
Perhaps I wasn't clear in what I meant. They have a lot of in dated stuff but they keep the outdated stuff readily available as if it is the current and accurate information. Boo hoo. Libraries keep old journal articles readily available, too — even though most of them have been superseded by newer publications. It's a feature, not a bug. Your problem is not with RealClimate, but that people on Slashdot don't always point you to the most recent material.
Lets take on loosely remembered example so you will know what I am talking about. This was about 6 months after the Mann Hockey stick graph was shown to have flaws in it as well as the data being cherry picked in order to product the graph. I was pointed to an analysis of why someone claiming it was wrong was wrong because the data (that had the problems making the graph wrong) showed what was in the hockey stick. What is your point? The data does show what is in the hockey stick.
There are some who have presented it as deliberate deception. There are some who have presented the Apollo moon program as a deliberate deception. What is the evidence? Proving deception over simple mistakes is rather hard to do.
Congress references the hockey stick as discredited. Inhofe refers to it as discredited, but the independent review panels that he and Barton helped create refer to it as valid — once you fix the statistical error. Funny, that. Almost as if he made up his mind regardless of the facts.
Well, that is true as far as we have to trust measurements, data sets and calculations that are somewhat hidden from the rest of the world. You mean the data and source code that you can download from NASA GISS?
Sure, but can you say that with certainty when some studies are built off the results of others, When models are adjusted for new data built on top of old unreliable data? The change in data is utterly negligible on the world scale, and is small and limited even on the U.S. scale. It may affect the most recent studies of particular regions in the U.S.
There is always the possibility of a butterfly effect where a small mistake early on could be a drastic difference later in the process. There is no butterfly effect. Such data is used in regression and correlation analysis, where a small shift in data produces a small shift in the regression or correlation coefficient, which in turn is used as a conclusion. You're not feeding it in as initial data to a chaotic system simulation. Even climate models are not calibrated to the surface temperature record; they are much more fine grained than that. (e.g., their cloud model is calibrated to cloud data, their carbon model is calibrated to CO2 data, etc.... temperature is an output of the model, not a calibration input.)
To hear some talk, the issue is close. It is how they say it is and it can never be different. Oh yeah? Who?
But "if" they have been explored and we are not exploring them again, I am sure that there are way that haven't been explored. I've seen papers on the subject as recently as last year; I'm sure it's still under some investigation.
With new data, there most certainly "could" be a way not yet explored. That is certainly true.
If the variations in the hole are effecting the wind patterns and bring warmer air to the poles more frequently then in the past, then not only could there be a warming effect at the poles, but the cooling effect of the wind patters moving there could be effected too. Yes, wind patterns are affected by the ozone hole. It causes a cooling effect in the stratosphere, and has not been found to have much of an effect in the troposphere.
Plus, the Ozone basically filters certain radiation from the sun before it hits the lower levels of the atmosphere and the ground. This extra radiation could be contributing more then we think. I cannot seem to find any studies or synopsis of studies with a few quick google searches so it leads me to believe there aren't many. Here is one starting point; look at the papers it cites and the ones that cite it.
Have they been shown to be wrong? Mostly, yes. There are certainly debates over how strong the CO2 contribution is, but the idea that it's not a major contributor isn't really credible anymore.
All I usually see if people getting pointed to sites like real science and stuff where they show something to be wrong with old outdated information. RealClimate, you mean, and they are not outdated; indeed, some of their analyses have later become published comments.
Things like the famous Mann hockey stick graph had been shown to be cherry picking data to get the graph to look the way it did That's not really true. You say it as if there was a deliberate deception, for instance. Mann had an error which, when fixed, led to pretty much the same hockey stick shape — as verified by independent panels of scientists and statisticians... not to mention the other researchers who, using different statistical methods, also got hockey stick graphs.
and the math error that had the warmest period on the last century in the last few years instead of 30, 50 and 80 years ago. The warmest period in the last century is still in the last few decades, worldwide. You're referring to the U.S. trend, and there the most recent decades were pretty much tied both before and after the correction.
But all the studies using data from these flaws would have a margin of error too. The studies using those data are not much changed, if you look at what the changes actually are.
So it is difficult to tell who is creditable and who is not. I think you need to read more about what actually happened.
Proof you are wrong, the 30% reduction in the hole this year doesn't correlate with solar output but with weather.
Uh, no, that is not "proof I am wrong". I never claimed that the ozone reduction correlated with solar output. In fact, I argued that solar data do not explain ozone trends.
The Ozone Hole is not related (Or considered to be) to Global Climate Change... Different topic. There are some relationships, but climate change is not a dominant cause of the ozone hole, and the ozone hole is not a dominant cause of climate change.
But still there is the question of how to reduce it. Saying Americans cant use cars is out of the option, Who is saying that?
or just focusing on Cars and not on homes which admit more CO2 then Cars do on the average. Power generation and industry are the largest contributors to CO2, so solutions should focus on those.
Perhaps we should focus less on our increasing carbon use and more on Carbon Reduction Like Tree Planting. [...] I know where I am right now there are acres of field that can be replaced with trees and a lot of abandoned farm fields that could be reforested. Might be helpful in the tropics, but probably not in temperate regions. See, e.g., here.
I think terrestrial vegetation only takes up 1/4 of human CO2 emissions — and that's for all the vegetation in the world. You'd need a lot of reforestation to really make a dent (and it only takes the carbon out of the air temporarily until the trees die).
Everybody does it. Not only is that not true, it's not an excuse either. You're simply announcing that you're intentionally biased and uninterested in scientific arguments, and you think that's just fine. Ok, but that has nothing to do with the validity of the arguments found on RealClimate, and you know it.
I didn't invent ad-hominem. I didn't popularize it. You just use it, even while knowing that it's fallacious. And that's supposed to be a defense of your position? What a joke.
I was angry with Bungie when, just a few months before Halo was to be released as a Mac exclusive, Microsoft bought them out and put them to work. IIRC, Halo was never intended to be a Mac exclusive: it was slated to be a Mac/PC release. In the public announcement at Steve Jobs' 1999 keynote address, they might have said it would come out on the Mac first, but I know they definitely had a PC prototype running at the time (that's what they ported the Mac demo from).
there are multiple overlapping solar cycles, with periods from decades to centuries and more. Way to totally miss the point.
It doesn't matter whether or not there are 10, 100, or 1000 year solar cycles. The attribution of ozone hole depletion to non-solar causes has nothing to do with that: it does not rely on historical correlation between solar and ozone trends. Rather, it has to do with measurement of the effects of the Sun on atmospheric chemistry: they do not account for the observed changes in ozone. If the Sun can't account for ozone trends during the measurement period, it doesn't matter what solar trends were doing before that period.
And the data we have focuses mostly on electromagnetic output of sun, when considering levels of particles other than photons (which are KNOWN to affect upper atmosphere) from the sun there a great lack of data for the last 30+ years. The effect of solar wind on atmospheric ozone has been studied for at least 15 years. No study has ever found evidence that the solar wind can account for the observed ozone trend. Many studies have found that CFC emissions can account for that trend. If you want to argue that the Sun is responsible (through direct irradiance, solar wind, or whatever), you need to both find a mechanism by which that is physically possible (nobody has yet), as well as explain why CFC emissions did not contribute.
MillionthMonkey, who you responded to, was talking about the effects of the Montreal Protocol on the ozone hole trend. PastaLover thinks that you were instead talking about the 2006-2007 drop discussed in TFA. If so, I apologize for the wording of my response. As stated in the summary, this latest drop is due to natural variations, not our behavior. I do take exception to the claim of "a half-assed guess that is tailored to not conflict with the current position". You don't need to invoke conspiracies mantain the status quo in order to attribute the drop to natural variations, given the observed interannual variability in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
The author made an argument about how a lot of specific events would have to happen simultaneously for life to arise. Creationists picked up on this; it's one of their own standard arguments. But it's a wrong argument, and the author realized that after being reminded of it.
He says he no longer believes the arguments in that paper:
"Things grew worse when he reread his paper, he said, because he discovered errors. [...] Another assertion in the paper, about what would have had to occur simultaneously for living matter to arise, is just plain wrong, he said, adding, "It was a dumb mistake, but nobody ever caught me on it.""
(Not that CO2 fertilization is such a huge benefit anyway; commonly plants are limited by nitrogen or water, not CO2, so extra CO2 doesn't necessarily help much; C4 plants don't benefit from CO2 fertilization in the first place; and agriculturally CO2 fertilization may lead to bigger plants but sometimes less nutritious ones. Elevated CO2 helps plants some, but not as much as people think — and that's before factoring climate change into the mix as well.)
"The legal move by the states to sue the Environmental Protection Agency is aimed at prodding the Bush administration to remove obstacles to more than a dozen states seeking to regulate global warming emissions from cars and trucks. In 2005, California sought a waiver from the E.P.A. that would allow it to implement the first regulation in the United States requiring reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from cars. The E.P.A. has not yet granted the waiver, keeping the regulation from taking effect.
New York, Massachusetts and a number of other states have since moved to adopt California's measure. They cannot proceed until the E.P.A. moves on the waiver."
Furthermore, even if the states could pass the laws they wanted, the other states which don't are still a problem: CO2 produced in "dirtier" states still affects the welfare of people in "cleaner" states, through climate change. This is Hardin's infamous "Tragedy of the Commons". Arguably your neighbor doesn't have an unlimited right to create environmental hazards which affect you, just because they're on the other side of some political boundary.
Your link gives a good explanation: because instead of a hurricane, you get a radioactive hurricane. That doesn't sound like an improvement.
Qualitative and phenomenological physics indeed works to some extent (non-linearities, second order effects please ?), but I find it a shame to go back to middle-ages like thinking and teaching. We have not gone back to the middle ages in thinking and teaching. Studenst are still taught mathematical physics in science classes. Popular science is intended to communicate further science to "the common man" who is done with his education, or to inspire students who have not yet reached high levels of mathematics. This is far BETTER than in the middle ages, in which the common man didn't know anything about science.
Why do not you teach Arisotelician physics, which, without equations, describes perfectly the macroscopic world we live in ?
Because it's wrong. Maybe the problem is societal, with the huge comeback of religion and myths enforced by people who have an interest in it in order to dumb the bigger part of the population, when in between the 1850s and the 1990s the same politicians had an interest in having the best scientists emerging from the people in order to develop the best weapons.
Much I doubt religion and myth has anything to do with it (not that I favor them). If I may engaged in my own unfounded speculation, I'd guess it's simply much more likely that science careers are simply viewed by prospective students as less rewarding than they once did, for economic and lifestyle reasons.
I think the "common view" which you dismissed is far more likely to be a valid factor than your proposal. and it obviously does not work since it only appeals to the non-scientifically minded, the others smelling a rat in the material That is not at all obvious. I would contend the exact opposite: popular science books inspire students to go into science who otherwise wouldn't. The current remedy is to present pretty pictures of science to the youth, and it obviously does not work since it only appeals to the non-scientifically minded, the others smelling a rat in the material. You seem to be under the impression that pop-science books have replaced science education, which is not the case. All the concepts that you explain to the layman "on the conceptual level" without equations do not hold water from a scientific point of view since you can just hammer them down and not demonstrate them You don't need to be able to rederive all of the laws of physics from first principles in order to learn something about how they work. If you say "electromagnetic waves have this strange structure" and in the best case experimentally demonstrate it, isn't it normal that people ask, consciously or not, how you came to this counterintuitive postulate ? Almost every popular science book discusses the history of how scientists arrived at whatever conclusion. It is not that difficult, for instance, to explain that Faraday found experimentally that time-varying magnetic fields produce electric fields, and Maxwell postulated that by symmetry time-varying electric fields should produce magnetic fields. You don't need partial differential equations to grasp that point, even if the symmetry is not as manifest without seeing the equations. And you don't need math to see the experimental reality of those terms.
This all-or-nothing attitude of yours is absurd. You are seemingly incapable of conceding that it's possible to have some legitimate knowledge of a subject without having a perfect understanding of it.
Hell, there are studies which have compared "conceptual" introductory physics students to "quantitative" introductory physics students and shown that the former can do better than the latter when it comes to qualitative problem solving. (e.g., give them a circuit diagram and ask them whether the light bulb gets brighter or dimmer if you remove a circuit element.) You can get quite far in reasoning about physical systems at a conceptual level. But no doubt they must be faking their answers with their knowledge of "taxonomy".
This "if it's not mathematical it's not worth learning" attitude is condescending bullshit. About electricity and magnetism, people in general just understand Ohm's law in the best case, even induction is foreign to people without a scientific education, not speaking about the structure of electromagnetic waves. It is possible to explain electromagnetic waves on a conceptual level, and many books do. To do anything useful with physics, you certainly do not need differential geometry, but at least highschool calculus and trigonometry, You don't need any math at all to understand something about the concepts involved. However I think that by teaching science in highschool and in popular science books only with pretty experiments and statement of facts, without real mathematization, we disgust scientifically minded people who see modern science as a joke Don't make me laugh. The very idea that students think that physics doesn't involve real math is absurd.
For an approach that implicitly incorporates both quantum theory and relativity, I refer you again to Feynman's book. And how can you do this without first explaining electromagnetism and classical mechanics ? People know basic things about electricity and magnetism already. They don't need Maxwell's equations. They don't need to know Lagrangians either.
Geeze, how would you explain to the public anything in condensed matter physics by these criteria? You obviously don't have a problem with astrophysicists or particle physicists. So you can explain modern science by transforming it into some kind of taxonomy and fairy tales, but the real beauty of it, which lies in its mathematization, hence its predictive power, Oh boo hoo, you don't get to teach them differential geometry. The claim that you have to have a full mathematical understanding of physics to learn anything useful about it is absurd. On my opinion this is why science enrolment in universities is falling except for Chinese and Indians. Go ahead, explain to me how Chinese and Indian enrollment has surged because they don't have any popular science books in those countries. What a joke.
Many non scientists are simply very interested in the fundamental building blocks of matter, the origins and fate of the universe, etc. This is not a failing, or an absence of a "scientific mind". It's not "exploitation" to teach people about things they're interested in. How can you explain standard model to someone whose mind blocks on the concept of electron spin ? It's not really harder to explain the basics of particle physics to such a person than it is to explain how giant magnetoresistance works. But even if it was harder, so what? What has that got to do with anything? It might be harder, but you can still communicate the basic concepts. By cheating. Piffle. Any time a physicist invokes Newton's laws, they're "cheating" too: they've been superseded by quantum theory and relativity. For that matter, if you want to explain anything in condensed matter, you necessarily have to simplify some of the details of quantum mechanics, band structure, etc. You're not constructing an argument against particle physics, you're constructing one against all of physics. Is that what you really want to do?
Read Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter for a good example of how to explain particle physics with a minimum of "cheating". Other than ignoring photon polarization, he almost literally described the path integral formulation of quantum electrodynamics, leaving nothing out. I basically agree however with the rest of your post but remind persuaded that small is beautiful. Small is beautiful, but so is large.
Blah, blah, blah.
What an insightful response.
I recall an explosion on Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines, in 1991. It was the single largest release of greenhouse gases in recorded history. It's generated more pollution by itself than the sum total of ALL man-made pollution, EVER.
Like most of your "facts", that's dead wrong.
Pinatubo threw up a bunch of sulfates which produced aerosols which, in turn, led to a COOLING effect for a few years. However, the aerosols, being short-lived, precipitated out of the atmosphere quickly and Pinatubo's climate effect went away. Volcanoes are known to produce short term cooling, but it would take a sustained change in volcanic activity for that to add up to a real trend.
As for greenhouse gases, Pinatubo did NOT release an enormous amount of them. The CO2 released by all the volcanoes in the world doesn't amount to more than a percent or two of what humans emit every year.
Before that, 30 yrs ago, all the liberal media (Time, Newsweek, et al) were trying to spread doomsday drivel about the "pending ice age".
I could care less what the media says. The scientific literature was not full of predictions of a "pending ice age"; almost all of that talk can be traced back to a single paper by Rasool and Schneider. Panels on climate change analogous to today's IPCC studies, such as the National Academy of Science, openly stated that it was impossible at the time to draw such conclusions. That is a far cry from the situation today, when there is enormously more evidence and broad agreement on the trend and its cause.
Now it's the ice caps melting, and we need to tax (or otherwise regulate, if not outright outlaw) all "carbon emissions" out of existence.
We are not going to eliminate all carbon emissions, but thanks for bringing a new strawman into play.
Based on junk science from so-called researchers,
Big talk. Why don't you point out the errors in this so-called "junk science", then?
publishing postion papers funded by groups that "support" the "findings" based on their own agenda.
Oh, you mean funding groups with liberal agendas like the National Science Foundation? Give me a break. It only shows the paucity of your own position that you have to eschew all scientific arguments in favor of vague allegations of conspiracy. Sorry, the science is not based on "position papers" funded by activist groups, it's based on peer reviewed scientific journal publications funded by neutral government entities. (If anything, places like the NSF have to toe the conservative line with this administration, not the other way around.)
Tell me something... how are you going to outlaw volcanoes?
We don't need to outlaw volcanoes. More volcanoes would help. In fact, some have suggested producing artificial volcanoes to produce a cooling that offsets global warming (which has its own set of problems).
Or a herd of cattle, making their own special "contribution" to the environment?
We don't have to outlaw cattle; it's not possible to reduce GHG emissions to zero and we don't want to anyway; by the time we managed to do that, we would have adapted to a mildly warmer climate anyway. The point is to cut them enough that the warming doesn't reach the most damaging levels. But as for cattle, we can cut back on beef consumption in favor of other meats, or give them different feedstock which produces less methane instead of what we feed them now.
When I read about the fact that a single volcano eruption, A NATURAL PHENOMENA, did more damage than all of mankind ever did in it's entire history,
Which is an obvious lie, but being a total tool, you bought it hook line and sinker. You'd rather believe that every climatologist in the world is unaware of the climate effects of volcanoes, just to justify your self-validating belief that global warming isn't a real problem.
and I see all you so-called "environmen
If you want to equate the importance of physics with technological applications, fine, but that's not the only reason to do physics. Learning about the fundamental building blocks of the universe has intellectual merit of its own, and face it, a lot of ordinary people are really interested what physicists learn about such things. You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't be interested in particle physics or whatever, just because condensed matter is more practical. That's a value judgement.
By the way, it's a fallacy to think that if not for Big Particle Physics, condensed matter physics would be enormously more fruitful. If the money wasn't going to accelerators, that doesn't mean it would be going to condensed matter physicists instead; it might just go to biologists.
And just dumping money on condensed matter doesn't guarantee breakthroughs. There are already far more condensed matter physicists than particle physicists; if you try to buy even more of them, you're necessarily going to start scraping the bottom of the talent barrel, and you get diminishing returns. Unless you're arguing that the money should go to existing condensed matter physicists without expanding the talent pool, to fund work that they currently can't afford to do. Well, I don't buy that either: the guys most likely to make breakthroughs are almost certainly already well funded.
Disclosure: I did my PhD in condensed matter.
Gas guzzler taxes, environmental and recycling fees...
All of those are perfectly sensible, mainstream economic responses to negative externalities. The market can't work if there's no mechanism to make it aware of the true cost of carbon. Why do you hate the free market?
and this concept of buying so-called "carbon offsets"? Biggest scam of the young century thus far.
I agree with you there. Offsets are a silly response even if they had proper oversight, which they don't.
Why is it that a hybrid vehicle costs more than it's conventional sibling, anyway?
Because it costs more to make.
Shouldn't the former be cheaper to encourage thier use, and additional purchases?
Are you advocating subsidies? There have already been tax deductions for hybrid cars.
And I don't know what "science" you seem to be citing, but there is no credible scientific PROOF that human beings are destroying this planet, nor it's environment.
You don't "prove" things in science, you merely amass evidence for or against them. Right now, there is a quite large amount of credible evidence that human beings are largely responsible for the recent climate change. You can find it summarized, with references to the literature, in the latest IPCC report.
No, but I'm sure that's what you and your demagogue friends will claim anyway. Just the fact that I challenge the notion that "going green" is less than 100% altruism
Ha. Yeah, way to revise your position after the fact. No, you did not merely challenge the notion that going green is "less than 100%" altruism. You flat out stated that a justification for increasing taxes is ALL that going green has ever been about.
and garner the label of an "anti-environmentalist", when you don't even know the full extent of my position on the subject...
Uh, sorry, when you accuse environmentalists of only being after your tax dollars, that is by definition an "anti-environmentalist" position.
it just goes to show that socialists like you have no interest in honest debate... or opposing viewpoints.
Wow, what an enormous hypocrite you are. First you accuse me of labeling you when I don't know your position (when in fact you have clearly stated an anti-environmentalist position), and then you turn around and call me a socialist, and tell me all about my "demagogue friends". Please, tell me, which of my friends are demagogues?
You all would rather jam your agenda down other people's throats, no matter how wrong-headed it is.
Ok, where in this thread have I "jammed an agenda" down someone's throat? And I could equally well accuse you of jamming a wrong-headed anti-environmentalist or anti-socialist agenda down people's throats. Enough of the biased political framing: disagreeing with someone does not equal "having an agenda" or stubbornly holding a wrong-headed opinion in the absence of evidence or whatever dumb position you want to accuse me of having.
God forbid you accept the well-known fact that animals, volcanoes and other natural-borne phenomena are responsible for far more of the greenhouse gases and the effects thereof than any human activity...
God forbid you spend more than three seconds reasoning about the implications of that fact, or else you'd realize how totally irrelevant it is to the global warming debate.
Natural sources of CO2 are greater than anthropogenic sources. However, until the last few hundred years, they have been largely balanced by natural sinks of CO2. Human emissions have overwhelmed the capacity of natural sinks: they can take up about half of the excess we've been generating, but that leaves the other half to build up in the atmosphere year after year.
Over the last 150 years or so, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased 35%, and almost all of that increase is due to human activity, as determin
Just because you failed to make a convincing argument doesn't mean someone is "closed to the evidence", you know. Going to the library isn't the problem. It is the paying for a copy or getting something 10 years old that is. By the time you can get the information, it has already been corrected by another article.
Again, boo hoo. You're complaining that progress is made, as if this is some conspiracy of scientists to keep information from the public. And no, Not all of them are available from the library. Pretty much any university library can get a copy of any article for you. Sure libraries keep old copies. But something they don't do is constantly go back and reference the incorrect stuff to prove points. If you think this is acceptable, then I don't think you would see a problem with Realclimate or whatever it is. Please give an example of RealClimate knowingly referring to incorrect stuff to prove points. Does it? My understanding is that the hockey has a few bruises now which makes it look a little different. It changed some when the statistics were fixed, but not much. But the bigger point was that they supposedly threw out data that didn't fit their working model. In other words, they cherry picked the data. I think you are confusing the selection of paleoproxies with "cherry picking". When you pick a proxy, you have to use one that shows a known correlation with climate, and you discard the ones that don't. Otherwise, you're not using anything useful. and yet we cannot get the data being used to find this out. As I already noted, both the GISTEMP data and the source code are available. So do I take your word for it or some one else's word who is pushing an agenda? Gee, now all scientists are "pushing agendas". Real unbiased of you. And yet, the most recent disclosed problem was with the way they treated the data that was being put into the models. You see, it is the handling errors, the formula errors, and the math errors that created the wrong temperatures. In both cases, the temperature was the output, not the input. So in both cases, the same errors could create the same exaggerated effect after being compounded by scale. As I already noted, the temperature data is used in correlation and regression analyses — not climate models — which are not chaotic. You could exaggerate the error without chaos if you tried to do something like a regression on a regression or something weird like that, but I've never seen anybody do that: they always go back to the original time series. There is no butterfly effect, and how do we know this without going back with proper and accurate data? The sensitivity of the model is a property of the model; it is not inherent to the data.
Proof you are wrong, the 30% reduction in the hole this year doesn't correlate with solar output but with weather.
Uh, no, that is not "proof I am wrong". I never claimed that the ozone reduction correlated with solar output. In fact, I argued that solar data do not explain ozone trends.
I think terrestrial vegetation only takes up 1/4 of human CO2 emissions — and that's for all the vegetation in the world. You'd need a lot of reforestation to really make a dent (and it only takes the carbon out of the air temporarily until the trees die).
It doesn't matter whether or not there are 10, 100, or 1000 year solar cycles. The attribution of ozone hole depletion to non-solar causes has nothing to do with that: it does not rely on historical correlation between solar and ozone trends. Rather, it has to do with measurement of the effects of the Sun on atmospheric chemistry: they do not account for the observed changes in ozone. If the Sun can't account for ozone trends during the measurement period, it doesn't matter what solar trends were doing before that period. And the data we have focuses mostly on electromagnetic output of sun, when considering levels of particles other than photons (which are KNOWN to affect upper atmosphere) from the sun there a great lack of data for the last 30+ years. The effect of solar wind on atmospheric ozone has been studied for at least 15 years. No study has ever found evidence that the solar wind can account for the observed ozone trend. Many studies have found that CFC emissions can account for that trend. If you want to argue that the Sun is responsible (through direct irradiance, solar wind, or whatever), you need to both find a mechanism by which that is physically possible (nobody has yet), as well as explain why CFC emissions did not contribute.
MillionthMonkey, who you responded to, was talking about the effects of the Montreal Protocol on the ozone hole trend. PastaLover thinks that you were instead talking about the 2006-2007 drop discussed in TFA. If so, I apologize for the wording of my response. As stated in the summary, this latest drop is due to natural variations, not our behavior. I do take exception to the claim of "a half-assed guess that is tailored to not conflict with the current position". You don't need to invoke conspiracies mantain the status quo in order to attribute the drop to natural variations, given the observed interannual variability in the past.