Yes, it's true that a single volcanic eruption can put out more greenhouse gases than man does. No, that's not true. A volcanic eruption can put out a large amount of aerosol precursors, such as sulfur dioxide, which leads to temporary global cooling. But a single volcanic eruption, even a very large one, still does not come close to approaching man's greenhouse gas emissions (which lead to global warming).
The NASA article talks about this minimum, and the science article talks about the average Sun spot number increasing over the last 1000 years. This is surely interesting, as it explains quite a lot of the global warming. It doesn't explain "a lot" of the global warming, which is roughly the warming since 1850, and most notably in the last 40 years. Check out e.g. Fig 5b of this paper for the solar trend, and then look here for what the temperature has been doing. The solar model falls flat particularly in the last 40 years; it falls off just when the temperatures really ramp up. By contrast, the greenhouse gas models of temperature increase predict just such a ramp up due to increased emissions. For more on solar warming and how it falls short of explaining the observed temperature trends, you can see the review from last year by Foukal et al.
I think that debunking anything with the title Summary for Policymakers should be pretty simple. Really? Then why didn't you debunk it?
Anything that has a title that means, "The short version for politicians" can't be that accurate to begin with! A specious argument. When a scientist testifies before Congress, do you similarly think that everything he says is bunk because he's addressing politicians? A summary for policymakers is just that: expressed without jargon and addressing the issues that policymakers are interested in. You can do that without saying things that are wrong.
Incidentally, the IPCC is not making "doomsday predictions". There are serious impacts, but they're not going to wipe out our species or cause nations to collapse.
I must have missed the point at which proof was offered that anthropogenic global warming is distinguishable from solar warming. Temperature increases don't come with big signs on them saying what they're "due" to. You can, however, measure the increase in solar output, and when you do, you find it that it is much smaller than the increase in warming that the greenhouse effect produces. You can do better when you do direct data assimilation — finding, e.g., that the late 20th century warming trend does not correlate well with what the Sun was doing over the same time period. (Solar trends do correlate better with temperatures in earlier, pre-industrial periods.)
Also, if it's not too much, trouble could you include how the effects of solar global warming are accounted for in computerized global climate models? Are there predictions about solar output? How are those arrived at? What's their record? For the past, they use observations of solar output. For relatively recent times, they use direct instrumental data. For earlier times, they use sunspot records as well as radioisotope measurements as proxies (the same methods used in the study being discussed here). For future projections, it depends on the particular study, but until recently it has been fairly common to just hold the solar output fixed at current levels.
Incidentally, the Publishers Weekly review in the very Amazon link cited states,
"And while the book attempts to debunk the conventional notion that ARPANET was devised primarily as a communications link that could survive nuclear war (essentially it was not), pioneer developers like Paul Baran (who, along, with British Scientist Donald Davies devised the Internet's innovative packet-switching message technology) recognized the importance of an indestructible message medium in an age edgy over the prospects of global nuclear destruction."
While I haven't read that book, I have read several reviews which cite it as debunking the notion that ARPANET was originally created to produce a nuclear-resistant network. So I am curious about you citing it in the opposite context. As far as I can tell from Googling on that book and other sources, Paul Baran came up with the idea of packet switching to make a nuclear-strike resistant network, but that wasn't why ARPA decided to fund ARPANET.
In addition, I know an ex-DARPA program manager who asked one of the original ARPANET managers about it, who told him they were really more interested in the practical uses of packet switching than with "nuclear strikes".
I also don't know how the budget allocations are supposed to show anything.
you do realise the entire internet was designed as a hardened system to help communication in face of a massive nuclear strike. An urban legend. It was actually designed to allow ARPA contractors to efficiently share resources. See here and here.
Of course DARPA wants something with military applications — that's what the "D" in DARPA is for. But that doesn't mean that military technology can't have large civilian payoffs, either. (Need I remind anyone here of the Internet? That was back in the days of ARPA, but that organization has always been oriented towards the technological support of national security.)
If you assign lots of small writing assignments along with a term paper, for instance, you can pick up on your students' writing styles enough to catch a term paper that was clearly not written by them. Yeah, but in today's lawsuit-happy world, that's not good enough. You can be sure that they cheated on the basis of writing style discrepancies, but you can't prove it — you didn't catch them in the act. The university administration will very likely overturn the F you assigned, or otherwise exert great pressure for you to give them only a slap on the wrist. They often do that even when you can prove it. Professors don't get a lot of support on this point.
The regime in question is subatomic scale and smaller with considerable precision and gravity. We already know QCD as it is for starters, and most other QFTs don't apply at this scale especially when gravity is taken into account. QFT does too apply at those scales; you don't even need to do QFT in curved spacetime (which you can do if you want). The Planck scale of quantum gravity is not relevant for any of the questions you've mentioned; at best it could be relevant to very early-universe cosmology.
Perhaps when we've mapped out the full series of QCD (assuming the current perturbation theory approach to constructing QCD terms works) and glued it somehow to relativity, this will change. We know quite a bit about the nonperturbative regimes of QCD as well, by the way, and it is fully consistent with special relativity. Compatibility with general relativity, once again, is irrelevant: at very large scales, QCD is unimportant, and at very small scales, gravity is unimportant, unless you get all the way down to the Planck scale.
nfortunately, he only partially address my key concern. Namely, tthat we're too confident (at the moment and IMHO) in our understanding of the universe. This is not a concern that you've really justified. Some things we can be confident in, some things we can't, and you've done a poor job of delineating which is which.
For example, we don't need to be in a "giant but unknown" gravity well. We already know we're in a giant gravity well (the Virgo Supercluster, right?). The problem is that we may be wrong about how far down we are inside that well. You're being ridiculous. We don't even need to take the existence of the Virgo supercluster into account. Any significant redshift due to that would require very obvious zeroth-order modifications to gravity which would show up, basically, everywhere we look. That, or completely ridiculous modifications to the masses of galaxies which would, again, change all the orbital dynamics we see.
If you want to propose that we don't know everything about the universe around us, you need to come up with much less absurd proposals.
And the concept of "dark energy" is subsumed into the cosmological constant. So what? The cosmological constant is one of many proposals for dark energy; we cannot yet constrain them to one alternative.
Let me go way back to a quote from your original post. I never wrote that. You're quoting someone else.
We are almost certain that gravity has to propagate at the speed of light because that is an implication of general relativity which fits quite well at the macroscopic scale. Yet 90 or so years after the creation of the general relativity theory, you don't see similar claims of certainty despite 90 years of no proof to the contrary and plenty of confirmation in the theory of general relativity and no genuine violation of the speed of light (ie, as of yet no information propagates faster than the speed of light). You do too see similar claims of certainty that gravity propagates at the speed of light, and you see those claims because of (not "despite") the confirmation of GR and lack of violation of the speed of light. In fact, the speed of gravity has been experimentally tested and agrees to the speed of light within a few percent (see the 1993 Nobel prize). I've worked in the gravity community, and I can assure you, there is no doubt there about the speed of gravity. This is a false analogy.
In comparison, we are claiming after a decade or two of observation, that we are confident that the universe has positive cosmological constant or that the neutrino has nonzero mass. Yes, we are confident. Not as confident as we are about GR, but still confident. So?
It's also easy to point to any number of new theories which were well-accepted within less than a decade of observation or experimentation, and remain accepted today.
I'm surprised the Wired article didn't reference the earlier Wired story on the guy who implanted magnets in his fingertips and could "feel" magnetism (see this Slashdot story).
I think I'm going way overboard as a devil's advocate here, but my point is that I don't think we have good reason to be so confident about phenommena either that we haven't directly observed, is based on very recent data, or depends on models that we already know aren't entirely valid in the regime in which the phenomena are observed. Which models do we know aren't valid in the regime in which they're being applied?
By the way, here is a blog post with a slide from a talk by Roger Blanford listing "radical possibilities" for ways in which our cosmological inferences could be wrong. (I think most of them are very unlikely, although still more likely than "we're in a giant but unknown gravitational well".)
No "weird mechanism" (aside from some sort of NASA hoax) is going to change the fact that the observation was made and very precise data was collected. Nor does that statement depend on any observer biases that might be present. You can say the same about the CMBR temperature. Yet you propose some kind of global gravity well that distorts our measurements and causes us to infer the wrong things from it. The same can be said of the CMBR angular power spectrum: there could be some astrophysical phenomenon out there distorting everything in some unknown way. You can't criticize CMBR temperature measurements for being potentially distorted by unknown processes, and at the same time insist that the CMBR angular power spectrum is a "true observation".
The deeping in the well you are, the hotter the rest of the universe appears because it is blue-shifted by the drop down the gravity well. This would be an easy way to underestimate the age of the universe, for example, and the distance of things that are outside the gravity well. Like I said, I can't imagine what kind of "gravity well" you could think that we were in, that would distort all our measurements of distant galaxies equally and in all directions, without simultaneously distorting local observations. And it would screw up redshift-luminosity curves to make them inconsistent with the CMBR, barring fine-tuning — but they are consistent.
Furthermore, the age of the universe is not determined by the CMBR temperature.
Well, quantum mechanics (via quantum field theory) is a crude approximation on the scale of subatomic physics that grows worse as the scale shrinks. And general relativity doesn't apply at all. So that isn't a stretch. No, it is a stretch. A large stretch.
Quantum theory is not a "crude approximation" which "grows worse as the scale shrinks". Quantum theory holds exactly at every scale we have tested. All proposed replacements for quantum field theory that I can think of (e.g., string theory) are also quantum theories. General relativity is irrelevant; you don't need it in order to derive mass/flavor uncertainty relations. You only need the Lorentz causal structure of special relativity.
For example, the mass of the neutrino may not be described sufficiently well by the mass operator in quantum chromodynamics (eg, maybe due to curvature of space which does modify the d'Alembert operator (I assume you mean electroweak theory, not QCD.) QFT in curved spacetime has been worked out and doesn't change flavor oscillations.
or an unknown interaction between the neutrino and the graviton). The graviton couples universally to all mass-energy; there's really only one way it can consistently couple.
I will concede that it might be possible to have some weird coupling of neutrinos to matter that can mimic flavor oscillations. I have no idea how it could be done, though.
The original poster has a point: in English, creationists use the term "evolutionism" far more than non-creationists. Non-creationists just say "evolution". Some speculate that the creationist terminology originated from an attempt to make evolution seem less scientific, since the "-ism" suffix is often used to refer to ideologies or belief systems (such as "creationism"!). This is especially apparent when creationists refer to evolutionary biologists as "Darwinists". Try here (halfway down) and here and here.
This is the only statement that is correct since it is the only conclusion derived directly from observation. No, you could introduce weird mechanisms that distort the true spectrum of the CMBR, which is about as plausible as the other scenarios you put forth.
perhaps Type IA supernovas are different in the early universe than they are now (even though physical law is the same, there are substantial differences like elemental composition) You would then have to explain how these different supernovas still manage to produce the same characteristic light curves as modern supernovas. Possible in principle, but not plausible.
perhaps we're incorrect about our local gravity environment (eg, we're deeper in a gravity well) and this effects our perception of the temperature of the cosmic background The temperature of the cosmic background isn't really that important in this context, and moreover, I can't imagine what kind of "gravity well" you could think that we were in that would distort all our measurements of distant galaxies equally and in all directions, without simultaneously distorting local observations.
or perhaps a more accurate model of the universe involves oscillating yet massless neutrinos Only if you want to basically throw out all of relativity and quantum mechanics, since you can't get flavor oscillations without mass in any theory that obeys both; flavor and mass are complementary observables.
However, there are some physicists who don't like the idea of dark matter, and in order to explain how galaxies orbit, introduced a new version of newton's second law. F = m * f(a/a0)*a, where a0 is a new fundamental constant describing a small acceleration level where these new Newtonian dynamics hold. You're describing Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which can equally (and more justifiably) be interpreted as a new version of Newton's law of gravity (see here). In particular, relativistic versions of MOND are interpretable as modified gravity and not as modified inertia.
A lot of fans will argue with you about DS9. That aside, the existence of DS9 doesn't really disagree with my point. A series can survive a spinoff, and SG:Atlantis is doing okay. It's when you get greedy and start piling on spinoff after spinoff that people start losing interest. It's like Hollywood and their love of making 5 sequels to a blockbuster. Even when the sequels don't suck, you just get tired of them. The same goes for stretching out a single series for too long. Making a spinoff supposedly injects "freshness", but along with it you have to differentiate from the original series and often lose the quirky elements and character chemistry that made the original so likable. Ultimately, fans feel like they have to start a new habit in regularly watching the spinoff (even if the old one ends), to commit to a new show they want it to be more different than a spinoff can be, and the audience trickles away.
After the success of ST:TNG, the whole franchise got run into the ground. Arguably the later Star Trek series weren't as good, but I think they just oversaturated the market with spinoff after spinoff. Too much of a good thing and people will just get tired of it, and Stargate on television has been going on in one form or another for 10 years already. Maybe it's better to focus on just one series at a time, and end each series gracefully before it jumps the shark.
I saw an interview with him and some Christian fundamentalist type on a talk show. The latter really got into the whole fire-and-brimstone thing, shouting at him, telling him he was the devil's servant, a corrupter, and "You read the Satanic Bible, but not the real Bible!" Manson replied very calmly, "Well, I've read both, and I think that they both have some good points in them,...", and came across as actually rather thoughtful.
Category theorist John Baez has a summary of this work from a mathematician's perspective. Unfortunately, you need at least an undergraduate math degree to make full sense of it, but it gives more flavor of what's really going on than a news story, and he at least defines mathematically what E8 and KLV polynomials are.
He begins by noting, "You may hear some hype about this soon, because it's a really big calculation, and the American Institute of Mathematics has coaxed a lot of science reporters to write about it -- in part by comparing it to the human genome project. Computing the Kazhdan-Lusztig-Vogan polynomials for E 8 is certainly nowhere nearly as important as the human genome project, nor as hard! But the final result involves more data, in a sense."
I've read enough stories like this one, written by a candian newspaper, to at least consider myself extremely skeptical of claims that the earth is getting warmer, humans are to blame, and that drastic changes are necessasry. If you look further into the NAS study mentioned in that newspaper article, you will find that although they did not agree that you can prove that the 1990s were the hottest decade in a millennium, they did conclude that 20th century warming is unprecedented in the last 400 years at least, and that it is plausible that the late-20th century warming is unprecedented in the last 1000 years. (Note also that these conclusions discuss merely which periods were warmest, and don't discuss the evidence concerning the unprecedented rate of warming.)
That the Earth has gotten warmer since 1850 (roughly, the industrial revolution) is by now very well established, and it is also well established that it has gotten warmer since times earlier than that. There isn't grounds for "extreme skepticism" on that matter anymore; the debate has moved on. Nor is there much room to deny that humans have been responsible for a large part of that warming, if not all of it. There is, however, still plenty of room to argue about what will happen in the future and whether "drastic changes are necessary".
Therefore, Until I read a series of papers about global climate change, papers that publish all of their source data, algorithms used in simulations, justifications for the use of those algorithms, and statistical analysis by qualified statisticians, I will refrain from forming a solid opinion one way or the other. Well, get reading then, because the literature is vast. Every paper gives methods and justifications. As for data, some of them publish source data as supplemental material, some of them put it on web sites, and some you have to write to to get it. This, by the way, is no different from any other field of science.
You generally will not find statistical analysis by professional statisticians, since pretty much every field of science does their own statistical analysis. For the most part, statistics in physics is done by physicists, statistics in biology is done by biologists, and so on. Only rarely do they contract statisticians do to analyses for them.
Of course, the chances of that happening are exactly zero, because I don't have time to spend doing something like that. So I'll remain skeptical. That's kind of silly. It amounts to "I will ignore the existence of arbitrarily large amounts of evidence just because I have not personally reviewed all of it in detail." Would you apply the default position of "extreme skepticism" to an announcement of the discovery of, say, a new kind of elementary particle in a particle accelerator?
If you remove the bristlecone pines from Mann's reconstruction then the hockeystick disappears.
Says McKitrick. When Mann et al. removed one or even several proxies from the reconstruction, they still got the hockey stick. And, as I may remind you again, the NRC and NAS both found that the hockey stick is a robust feature of the data even when they did not agree with Mann's methods.
I wondered about error bars on the temperature data, you responded by pointing out the "error bars" on the model predictions.
On the contrary, you merely stated that climate models "do not calculate error bars". Of course they do not calculate error bars on data; they are models. They do calculate error bars on their predictions. Instrumental records and proxy reconstructions are what calculate error bars on data.
I questioned the utility of a summary document made by and for policy makers and pointed out that the actual assessment report has, amazingly, not even been released. You said I should go and read the literature, but the point is that the relevant literature (AR4) is not available.
Everything in AR4 is based on literature published in or before 2006. It does not produce new research, it only summarizes the existing literature. The relevant literature is there for your reading pleasure. You can either look for it yourself, or wait for the other AR4 chapters to be published which cite that literature.
I claim that doing a relatively small number of GCM runs on a small sample of the possible parameter settings is not statistically significant (the number of possible parameter settings is enormous, the number of experiments you can do in a reasonable amount of time is very small). Your response was just a flat denial.
It's worthy of your flat claim, which was backed up by no facts or tests of statistical significance. But to amplify, GCMs have many parameters but their projections are dominated by relatively few of these, as demonstrated by sensitivity analysis. And, as I have also noted before, for better understanding of the probability distribution you can turn to EMICs, which are computationally simpler but are rapidly becoming competitive with GCMs for practical purposes.
I wondered about the accuracy of temperature readings taken over the last century or so. You seemed to suggest that the time of day at which they are read makes little difference (surely I must have misunderstood you here?) and claimed that the errors pretty much all cancel out. The point is that changing the time at which a reading occurs introduces a systematic error into the data.
The point is that (a) changing the time at which the data is read does cancel out if it is merely random deviation from the standard time (assuming it's not like a 12 hour difference or something), and that (b) if it is a consistent day-to-day bias which makes a significant difference to the data instead of a random deviation, it will likely show up as an outlier and be discarded from the analysis as untrustworthy, unless (c) you are prepared to claim that a substantial number of stations all made substantial time errors all in the same reinforcing direction.
You state that dendroproxy data contains useful information, without justification, and that dendro reconstructions don't use the linearity assumption. As I understand it, that is exactly the assumption used in such reconstructions. If you can point me to a document correcting me I would be very grateful.
I did not say that dendro reconstructions don't use the linearity assumption; I said that the assumption is not necessary, i.e. linearity can be tested, not assumed. But to return to the point, I contest your claim that tree rings are not linearly related to temperature. Jones found just that, and Hughes has found that introducing nonlinearities has a small effect on the reconstructions. Of course they are not perfectly linear — nothing is — bu
In Wen's theory phonons remain quantized; his theory is fundamentally quantum in nature (his work is based on ordinary quantum spin lattices). I don't know this experiment should have anything to do with the quantization of phonons.
Inventing a new particle every time an unexplained observation occurs is hardly thinking out of the box. A strawman argument. Very few unexplained observations in astrophysics have been solved by "inventing a new particle". Particle physics is, of course, most relevant to early universe cosmology.
When you see a flashing object and conclude that it *must* be spinning, that's hardly out-of-the-box thinking. No one has concluded it "must" be spinning. The evidence, however, is greatly in its favor.
Incidentally, once upon a time, the idea of pulsars as rapidly spinning dense objects was an "out of the box" idea — the originally proposed explanation was extraterrestrial signals! Criticizing it for being "unoriginal" simply because it has by now been supported by decades of evidence is ridiculous.
It's always interesting to me to see that as evidence mounts in support of EU Theory and Thornhill's Electric Sun Hypothesis, people continue on as if it's business as usual. That's because evidence has not mounted in support of those theories, which have long been falsified.
It's oftentimes stated that the Electric Sun Hypothesis is absurd because we've never seen any flow of electricity into the Sun. Another strawman.
In any other science, a flow of protons and electrons is called "electricity". In astrophysics, that continues to be blasphemy. As has been pointed out to you before, many astrophysicists study plasma physics and electromagnetic effects for a living. It is not "blasphemy". It has been well known for decades that charged particles propagate in the vicinity of the Sun. It is equally well known the energy those charged particles contain is totally insignificant compared to the Sun's power output, not to mention the direct evidence of vast solar fusion and the total failure of any electric theory to model correctly model the emission spectrum, structure, and stability of any star.
The Sun is not powered by "electricity". Get over it and pick some other crackpot theory to cling to.
But, much to the consternation of people who don't like EU Theory, our observations increasingly support the statements being made by the EU Theorists. That statement is false, which explains why there is no actual consternation among people who "don't like" EU theory (by which I mean "realize that it has been empirically falsified").
As in the past, I continue to recommend Don Scott's book "The Electric Sky". The guy who still thinks solar neutrinos pose a challenge for stellar physics? Yeah, that would be real "enlightening".
Anyway, having argued with you in the past, I know the futility of continuing to do so for days and weeks long past the story has dropped off the main page, as your EU ideology is the whole reason why you're on Slashdot in the first place. So I'll let you get in your usual last words about how "mainstream astrophysicists" don't back up their refutations of EU theory (as if anyone who argues with you here is an astrophysicist), and you may declare yourself the persecuted victor again.
The fad term "global warming" is applied to al the evil things mankind does to the environment. No, it isn't.
Does the earth go through cyclic changes in temperature? Absolutrely. Is global warming a natural cyclic change in temperature? Absolutely not.
Is it the end of the world as ascribed by the eco people? Of course not (and that's why I call GW BS) Environmentalists generally do not claim that global warming will "end the world".
Even if they did, that has nothing to do with the fact that GW is real.
And there was an interesting study I heard on the radio that the glariers melting were a natural part of offsetting the rise in temps, that occur naturally. The current rise in temperature is not natural. Glaciers will melt either way, of course. Melting glaciers have several feedbacks. The main feedback is to accelerate warming by decreasing the Earth's reflectivity. There are probably other feedbacks that act to slow the warming, but they are not as strong (barring a freshwater flux that shuts down the North Atlantic circulation, and even that won't really offset global warming — it will cool the Northern Hemisphere but warm the Southern.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, the IPCC is not making "doomsday predictions". There are serious impacts, but they're not going to wipe out our species or cause nations to collapse.
Incidentally, the Publishers Weekly review in the very Amazon link cited states,
"And while the book attempts to debunk the conventional notion that ARPANET was devised primarily as a communications link that could survive nuclear war (essentially it was not), pioneer developers like Paul Baran (who, along, with British Scientist Donald Davies devised the Internet's innovative packet-switching message technology) recognized the importance of an indestructible message medium in an age edgy over the prospects of global nuclear destruction."
which agrees with what I wrote.
While I haven't read that book, I have read several reviews which cite it as debunking the notion that ARPANET was originally created to produce a nuclear-resistant network. So I am curious about you citing it in the opposite context. As far as I can tell from Googling on that book and other sources, Paul Baran came up with the idea of packet switching to make a nuclear-strike resistant network, but that wasn't why ARPA decided to fund ARPANET.
In addition, I know an ex-DARPA program manager who asked one of the original ARPANET managers about it, who told him they were really more interested in the practical uses of packet switching than with "nuclear strikes".
I also don't know how the budget allocations are supposed to show anything.
Of course DARPA wants something with military applications — that's what the "D" in DARPA is for. But that doesn't mean that military technology can't have large civilian payoffs, either. (Need I remind anyone here of the Internet? That was back in the days of ARPA, but that organization has always been oriented towards the technological support of national security.)
If you want to propose that we don't know everything about the universe around us, you need to come up with much less absurd proposals. And the concept of "dark energy" is subsumed into the cosmological constant. So what? The cosmological constant is one of many proposals for dark energy; we cannot yet constrain them to one alternative. Let me go way back to a quote from your original post. I never wrote that. You're quoting someone else. We are almost certain that gravity has to propagate at the speed of light because that is an implication of general relativity which fits quite well at the macroscopic scale. Yet 90 or so years after the creation of the general relativity theory, you don't see similar claims of certainty despite 90 years of no proof to the contrary and plenty of confirmation in the theory of general relativity and no genuine violation of the speed of light (ie, as of yet no information propagates faster than the speed of light). You do too see similar claims of certainty that gravity propagates at the speed of light, and you see those claims because of (not "despite") the confirmation of GR and lack of violation of the speed of light. In fact, the speed of gravity has been experimentally tested and agrees to the speed of light within a few percent (see the 1993 Nobel prize). I've worked in the gravity community, and I can assure you, there is no doubt there about the speed of gravity. This is a false analogy. In comparison, we are claiming after a decade or two of observation, that we are confident that the universe has positive cosmological constant or that the neutrino has nonzero mass. Yes, we are confident. Not as confident as we are about GR, but still confident. So?
It's also easy to point to any number of new theories which were well-accepted within less than a decade of observation or experimentation, and remain accepted today.
I'm surprised the Wired article didn't reference the earlier Wired story on the guy who implanted magnets in his fingertips and could "feel" magnetism (see this Slashdot story).
By the way, here is a blog post with a slide from a talk by Roger Blanford listing "radical possibilities" for ways in which our cosmological inferences could be wrong. (I think most of them are very unlikely, although still more likely than "we're in a giant but unknown gravitational well".)
Furthermore, the age of the universe is not determined by the CMBR temperature. Well, quantum mechanics (via quantum field theory) is a crude approximation on the scale of subatomic physics that grows worse as the scale shrinks. And general relativity doesn't apply at all. So that isn't a stretch. No, it is a stretch. A large stretch.
Quantum theory is not a "crude approximation" which "grows worse as the scale shrinks". Quantum theory holds exactly at every scale we have tested. All proposed replacements for quantum field theory that I can think of (e.g., string theory) are also quantum theories. General relativity is irrelevant; you don't need it in order to derive mass/flavor uncertainty relations. You only need the Lorentz causal structure of special relativity. For example, the mass of the neutrino may not be described sufficiently well by the mass operator in quantum chromodynamics (eg, maybe due to curvature of space which does modify the d'Alembert operator (I assume you mean electroweak theory, not QCD.) QFT in curved spacetime has been worked out and doesn't change flavor oscillations. or an unknown interaction between the neutrino and the graviton). The graviton couples universally to all mass-energy; there's really only one way it can consistently couple.
I will concede that it might be possible to have some weird coupling of neutrinos to matter that can mimic flavor oscillations. I have no idea how it could be done, though.
The original poster has a point: in English, creationists use the term "evolutionism" far more than non-creationists. Non-creationists just say "evolution". Some speculate that the creationist terminology originated from an attempt to make evolution seem less scientific, since the "-ism" suffix is often used to refer to ideologies or belief systems (such as "creationism"!). This is especially apparent when creationists refer to evolutionary biologists as "Darwinists". Try here (halfway down) and here and here.
A lot of fans will argue with you about DS9. That aside, the existence of DS9 doesn't really disagree with my point. A series can survive a spinoff, and SG:Atlantis is doing okay. It's when you get greedy and start piling on spinoff after spinoff that people start losing interest. It's like Hollywood and their love of making 5 sequels to a blockbuster. Even when the sequels don't suck, you just get tired of them. The same goes for stretching out a single series for too long. Making a spinoff supposedly injects "freshness", but along with it you have to differentiate from the original series and often lose the quirky elements and character chemistry that made the original so likable. Ultimately, fans feel like they have to start a new habit in regularly watching the spinoff (even if the old one ends), to commit to a new show they want it to be more different than a spinoff can be, and the audience trickles away.
After the success of ST:TNG, the whole franchise got run into the ground. Arguably the later Star Trek series weren't as good, but I think they just oversaturated the market with spinoff after spinoff. Too much of a good thing and people will just get tired of it, and Stargate on television has been going on in one form or another for 10 years already. Maybe it's better to focus on just one series at a time, and end each series gracefully before it jumps the shark.
I saw an interview with him and some Christian fundamentalist type on a talk show. The latter really got into the whole fire-and-brimstone thing, shouting at him, telling him he was the devil's servant, a corrupter, and "You read the Satanic Bible, but not the real Bible!" Manson replied very calmly, "Well, I've read both, and I think that they both have some good points in them, ...", and came across as actually rather thoughtful.
Category theorist John Baez has a summary of this work from a mathematician's perspective. Unfortunately, you need at least an undergraduate math degree to make full sense of it, but it gives more flavor of what's really going on than a news story, and he at least defines mathematically what E8 and KLV polynomials are.
He begins by noting, "You may hear some hype about this soon, because it's a really big calculation, and the American Institute of Mathematics has coaxed a lot of science reporters to write about it -- in part by comparing it to the human genome project. Computing the Kazhdan-Lusztig-Vogan polynomials for E 8 is certainly nowhere nearly as important as the human genome project, nor as hard! But the final result involves more data, in a sense."
That the Earth has gotten warmer since 1850 (roughly, the industrial revolution) is by now very well established, and it is also well established that it has gotten warmer since times earlier than that. There isn't grounds for "extreme skepticism" on that matter anymore; the debate has moved on. Nor is there much room to deny that humans have been responsible for a large part of that warming, if not all of it. There is, however, still plenty of room to argue about what will happen in the future and whether "drastic changes are necessary". Therefore, Until I read a series of papers about global climate change, papers that publish all of their source data, algorithms used in simulations, justifications for the use of those algorithms, and statistical analysis by qualified statisticians, I will refrain from forming a solid opinion one way or the other. Well, get reading then, because the literature is vast. Every paper gives methods and justifications. As for data, some of them publish source data as supplemental material, some of them put it on web sites, and some you have to write to to get it. This, by the way, is no different from any other field of science.
You generally will not find statistical analysis by professional statisticians, since pretty much every field of science does their own statistical analysis. For the most part, statistics in physics is done by physicists, statistics in biology is done by biologists, and so on. Only rarely do they contract statisticians do to analyses for them. Of course, the chances of that happening are exactly zero, because I don't have time to spend doing something like that. So I'll remain skeptical. That's kind of silly. It amounts to "I will ignore the existence of arbitrarily large amounts of evidence just because I have not personally reviewed all of it in detail." Would you apply the default position of "extreme skepticism" to an announcement of the discovery of, say, a new kind of elementary particle in a particle accelerator?
If you remove the bristlecone pines from Mann's reconstruction then the hockeystick disappears.
Says McKitrick. When Mann et al. removed one or even several proxies from the reconstruction, they still got the hockey stick. And, as I may remind you again, the NRC and NAS both found that the hockey stick is a robust feature of the data even when they did not agree with Mann's methods.
I wondered about error bars on the temperature data, you responded by pointing out the "error bars" on the model predictions.
On the contrary, you merely stated that climate models "do not calculate error bars". Of course they do not calculate error bars on data; they are models. They do calculate error bars on their predictions. Instrumental records and proxy reconstructions are what calculate error bars on data.
I questioned the utility of a summary document made by and for policy makers and pointed out that the actual assessment report has, amazingly, not even been released. You said I should go and read the literature, but the point is that the relevant literature (AR4) is not available.
Everything in AR4 is based on literature published in or before 2006. It does not produce new research, it only summarizes the existing literature. The relevant literature is there for your reading pleasure. You can either look for it yourself, or wait for the other AR4 chapters to be published which cite that literature.
I claim that doing a relatively small number of GCM runs on a small sample of the possible parameter settings is not statistically significant (the number of possible parameter settings is enormous, the number of experiments you can do in a reasonable amount of time is very small). Your response was just a flat denial.
It's worthy of your flat claim, which was backed up by no facts or tests of statistical significance. But to amplify, GCMs have many parameters but their projections are dominated by relatively few of these, as demonstrated by sensitivity analysis. And, as I have also noted before, for better understanding of the probability distribution you can turn to EMICs, which are computationally simpler but are rapidly becoming competitive with GCMs for practical purposes.
I wondered about the accuracy of temperature readings taken over the last century or so. You seemed to suggest that the time of day at which they are read makes little difference (surely I must have misunderstood you here?) and claimed that the errors pretty much all cancel out. The point is that changing the time at which a reading occurs introduces a systematic error into the data.
The point is that (a) changing the time at which the data is read does cancel out if it is merely random deviation from the standard time (assuming it's not like a 12 hour difference or something), and that (b) if it is a consistent day-to-day bias which makes a significant difference to the data instead of a random deviation, it will likely show up as an outlier and be discarded from the analysis as untrustworthy, unless (c) you are prepared to claim that a substantial number of stations all made substantial time errors all in the same reinforcing direction.
You state that dendroproxy data contains useful information, without justification, and that dendro reconstructions don't use the linearity assumption. As I understand it, that is exactly the assumption used in such reconstructions. If you can point me to a document correcting me I would be very grateful.
I did not say that dendro reconstructions don't use the linearity assumption; I said that the assumption is not necessary, i.e. linearity can be tested, not assumed. But to return to the point, I contest your claim that tree rings are not linearly related to temperature. Jones found just that, and Hughes has found that introducing nonlinearities has a small effect on the reconstructions. Of course they are not perfectly linear — nothing is — bu
In Wen's theory phonons remain quantized; his theory is fundamentally quantum in nature (his work is based on ordinary quantum spin lattices). I don't know this experiment should have anything to do with the quantization of phonons.
Incidentally, once upon a time, the idea of pulsars as rapidly spinning dense objects was an "out of the box" idea — the originally proposed explanation was extraterrestrial signals! Criticizing it for being "unoriginal" simply because it has by now been supported by decades of evidence is ridiculous. It's always interesting to me to see that as evidence mounts in support of EU Theory and Thornhill's Electric Sun Hypothesis, people continue on as if it's business as usual. That's because evidence has not mounted in support of those theories, which have long been falsified. It's oftentimes stated that the Electric Sun Hypothesis is absurd because we've never seen any flow of electricity into the Sun. Another strawman. In any other science, a flow of protons and electrons is called "electricity". In astrophysics, that continues to be blasphemy. As has been pointed out to you before, many astrophysicists study plasma physics and electromagnetic effects for a living. It is not "blasphemy". It has been well known for decades that charged particles propagate in the vicinity of the Sun. It is equally well known the energy those charged particles contain is totally insignificant compared to the Sun's power output, not to mention the direct evidence of vast solar fusion and the total failure of any electric theory to model correctly model the emission spectrum, structure, and stability of any star.
The Sun is not powered by "electricity". Get over it and pick some other crackpot theory to cling to. But, much to the consternation of people who don't like EU Theory, our observations increasingly support the statements being made by the EU Theorists. That statement is false, which explains why there is no actual consternation among people who "don't like" EU theory (by which I mean "realize that it has been empirically falsified"). As in the past, I continue to recommend Don Scott's book "The Electric Sky". The guy who still thinks solar neutrinos pose a challenge for stellar physics? Yeah, that would be real "enlightening".
Anyway, having argued with you in the past, I know the futility of continuing to do so for days and weeks long past the story has dropped off the main page, as your EU ideology is the whole reason why you're on Slashdot in the first place. So I'll let you get in your usual last words about how "mainstream astrophysicists" don't back up their refutations of EU theory (as if anyone who argues with you here is an astrophysicist), and you may declare yourself the persecuted victor again.
Even if they did, that has nothing to do with the fact that GW is real. And there was an interesting study I heard on the radio that the glariers melting were a natural part of offsetting the rise in temps, that occur naturally. The current rise in temperature is not natural. Glaciers will melt either way, of course. Melting glaciers have several feedbacks. The main feedback is to accelerate warming by decreasing the Earth's reflectivity. There are probably other feedbacks that act to slow the warming, but they are not as strong (barring a freshwater flux that shuts down the North Atlantic circulation, and even that won't really offset global warming — it will cool the Northern Hemisphere but warm the Southern.