I mean, would you really think it is most benificial sending food to starving children living in an area incapable of supporting life (like s desert) over moving them to a place that could? 1. Deserts aren't incapable of supporting life. 2. Most starving children don't live in places as hostile as deserts. 3. Where would you like to move them? How many tens of millions of refugees would you like to support in your home country, give land to, find jobs for, and so on? If it's not a majority, which other countries would you prefer take on the task of relocating entire nations? 4. In short, have you considered the social, political, and economic implications of a mass relocation project?
Such a device has never been built, how do these guys prove they have one? As Scott Aaronson said, they could prove it by producing the prime factors of a 463-digit composite number.
Quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson wrote some good anti-hype pieces about the D-Wave PR here and here, focusing on their incorrect marketing claims to be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. The first link also has an update with comments from Lawrence Ip of Google, who clarifies what the D-Wave people are really claiming.
I'm sick to death about hearing all the arguments about "Global Warming" Fine. Stop reading Slashdot threads about it.
Quite frankly I think that the enviromental movement are IDIOTS for putting all their efforts SOLELY on the "Global Warming" argument. You obviously are unfamiliar with the environmental movement if you believe that they are only concerned with global warming.
It is absurd to argument for reall immediate chnage on what your models show will PROBABLLY" happen over the next 50 to 150+ years. It is not absurd. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries. If we want to change what will happen to the climate in 100 years, starting now is much, much easier than starting after the warming has continued.
NOBODY really cares. Speak for yourself. This Slashdot thread, not to mention the discussion of global warming at high policy levels including Congressional testimony, proves otherwise.
People percieve the weather as someting to endure, not something to change. Weather cannot be changed substantially. Climate can be; we already have changed the climate. That's what global warming is.
WHY ARE WE ARGUING ABOUT THE WEATHER (Global warming) when we should be crying for breathable air. Global warming is climate, not weather, although it will influence the weather.
Environmentalists "cry for" global warming, air pollution, water pollution, biodiversity, land conservation, energy conservation, and many other topics.
Good grief, its like arguing cigerates will weaken the enamal on you teath and lead to tooth decay and eventual starvation. BTW it also will most likely cause cancer and heart disease. On the average you will die 20+ years earlier. Oui, that tooth decay, that's what to worry about. That's a stupid argument. Global warming is a longer term issue, but that doesn't mean it is unimportant. And, incidentally, pollution is not nearly as severe a problem as it once was. Smog is much better than in the 1960s, we no longer have rivers that are on fire like in Cleveland, etc.
First off, (and someone please prove me wrong on this one [with links]), I have heard reports that the IPCC is tailoring the report to fit the summary. They are editing the use of language to be consistent with the summary. Things like, they have a specific definition of what "likely" and "very likely" means, and they're making sure that all of the chapters use the same definition (they were written by different people). They are not actually editing the scientific content. More here.
Secondly, their best theories still do not account for all the evidence, especially the evidence that would (to a person with no scientific background) prove them wrong. I don't know what you are referring to. Their theories are not perfect — no theory is — but I would like to know what evidence you think they are ignoring which disproves the major conclusions from the IPCC report.
All RealClimate did was claim that the cloud condensation "building blocks" weren't necessarily large enough and that further research was required. They pointed out about five or six major gaps in the chain of reasoning necessary to conclude that cosmic rays are responsible for global warming, as well as reasons to believe that they are not.
That's hard to do when nobody will publish your work Well, except for the ones who publish your work (link).
Ok. Have you read the paper? I've skimmed it.
Have you found anything in the paper that would suggest it was not up to snuff? As I said, we have not seen any drafts that they submitted to other journals. After receiving several rejections, they may well have revised it upon submitting to the journal that eventually accepted it. (e.g., removing overbroad conclusions) As I also said, even "up to snuff" papers get rejected from journals when the journal itself is not the most appropriate venue for the paper.
What exactly was wrong with their paper that made it not worthy of publishing? I never said that the paper, as published, was not worthy of publishing. I merely said that different journals have different standards, and that the submitted drafts may differ substantially from what was finally published. Conspiracy theories about persecuted scientists are easy to come by, but as I also said, it is not at all uncommon for practicing scientists to accumulate some rejections for a wide variety of reasons.
No, but it does mean that those that state that the entire scientific community agrees with the IPCC and the concept of human-induced global warming are either wrong or intentionally lying. Few people make statements about "every single member" of the scientific community. If someone says that "the climatology community" supports AGW, that can be reasonably be interpreted to refer to the vast majority of the community, and not every last single member.
Some people--especially on sites like this--would have you believe that only oil company stooges don't accept these two things and that all legitimate science supports it. While not everyone agrees with the IPCC on every issue, there is virtually zero published literature supporting the idea that global warming is not largely anthropogenic in nature. Not even the study being discussed here supports that idea.
That, frankly, is a silly rebuttal. The IPCC did no new science, but merely summarized findings of the scientific literature, which certainly does investigate both anthropogenic and natural contributions to climate change. Prominently in the IPCC summary of policymakers you can find comparisons of the relative contributions of anthropogenic and natural radiative forcings.
Some have pointed out that we already are geoengineering the planet with our greenhouse gas emissions, so we might as well geoengineer more intelligently. Others have pointed out the negative side effects of geoengineering (e.g., more atmospheric pollutants), or the unpredictability of side effects.
One point I have not seen raised is the long-term commitment necessary for geoengineering to combat global warming.
Suppose we continue emitting CO2 at a great rate, but we cancel its warming effects out with, say, the cooling effects of aerosol emissions. Suppose we do that for a century. What happens if, for some reason — lack of political will, economic crisis, etc. — we happen to stop the aerosol emissions? Aerosols drop out of the atmosphere within a few years, but in the meantime we've been building up CO2, which takes decades or centuries to be removed.
Without a guaranteed sustained commitment to geoengineering, we could potentially get a century's worth of global warming in the span of a few years, once the system is unbalanced and there's nothing left canceling the CO2. That would be much, much worse than even the worst-case warming scenarios currently under consideration; that rate of warming is probably totally unprecedented in the known history of the planet.
My mind is open, but I think solar makes more sense to explain the warming before the modern era. Solar probably does explain much of the climate changes over the last few thousand years, before the modern era. However, CO2 explains the warming in the modern era much better than solar possibly can; the solar variations just haven't been large enough.
Also, the sulphates that you are referring to are primarily the product of volcanoes. Man makes a lot, but not a lot compared to that. No, that's not correct. Human particulate and aerosol emissions were easily large enough to produce the observed cooling mid-century. See, e.g., Meehl et al., J. Climate 17, 3721 (2004), for a comparison of models with various emissions included to observational data; the mid-century cooling is largely (but not wholly) attributable to anthropogenic pollution.
Besides, it's gone up in the last few decades. What has gone up in the last few decades?
Most of the warming was in the early part of the century followed by that cooling period from about 46-75ish, and then some warming again after that. That cooling period is well explained by sulphate aerosols (pollution); it agrees in magnitude and timing with aerosol concentrations.
Also, there seems to be a pause in the warming since 2000 where AGT hasn't done much other than fluctuate a bit. The observed variability is not much different than over any other 6-year period, e.g. here. You can't really conclude "global warming has stopped", or even that it has slowed, on that basis.
Also, the deep ocean data doesn't seem to fit with the models either. None of the recent work of the Argosy project was included in the report. I'm not familiar with the deep ocean data or the Argosy project. Do you have references?
Also, this article, and the work behind it, which I heard about back in October, has experimental proof of how their cloud formation works. They have a laboratory demonstration, but they haven't established a correlation between cosmic ray flux and actual cloud formation patterns, nor do they have an estimate of the magnitude of that effect on the climate. There are a number of reasons to believe that the effect is small.
Solar intensity is increasing, and has increased over the last few decades, as we've been able to confirm directly with the satellites. Yes, but it hasn't increased that much, compared to the increase in forcing due to anthropogenic CO2.
The Solar theory has enough merit to question the CO2 theory in my mind; at least for a few more years. Solar contributions are not a credible alternative to CO2 as far as explaining existing warming trends. They might become more important to future warming if solar intensity continues to increase.
The brutal fact is that most of your post is nonsense.
There is labortory evidence that the excess CO2 we have been putting into the atmosphere "ought" to affect the climate. The empirical data doesn't support this. Other than, um, the global warming we've observed. Are you really claiming that global warming hasn't happened at all?
The hockey stick curve is an artifact of data analysis and dependent upon data sets that are not correlated with temperature anyway. 1. Whether Mann's study is flawed is quite open to debate. 2. Mann's study (the one whose data analysis has been contested) is not the only reconstruction which leads to a hockey stick curve. In fact, reconstructions do, to one extent or another, and many of them use quite different methods of analysis. 3. Paleoproxies are indeed correlated with temperature, and there is a large literature on this subject. 4. You don't need a "hockey stick" reconstruction at all to see that there has been global warming; you can look at the instrumental record.
Between 1950 and 2000 the empirical data indicates that the amount of light reaching the ground decreased immensely; more than enough to explain the missing CO2 signal. The empirical data indicates no such thing. There have been solar variations, but they are quite small. Stott et al. and Foukal et al. are the usual references. Similarly, the Earth's albedo (determining how much light gets reflected back into space instead of reaching the ground) has not changed to an extent that can account for global warming. I am also puzzled as to how a decrease in light reaching the ground can lead to a warming trend.
Now the Danes have shown an alternative source of climatic effects in the incidence of cosmic rays, mediated by solar weather. They haven't shown any such thing. They've demonstrated an influence of cosmic rays on condensation in a laboratory. They have not given observational evidence that this effect is correlated with actual cloud formation in the atmosphere, and they have not demonstrated that this effect drives climate change.
The short conclusion is, we have NO CLUE how the climate really works, nor do we know the full list of inputs that drive it nor their relative importance. You are confusing your personal ignorance with that of the scientific community. The existence and relative importance of different drivers of climate have been studied for over a century. While there are uncertainties, they are not on the level of "whoops, insolation effects are really 5x bigger than we thought they were" or whatever. Further, if you want to propose hitherto-unknown non-anthropogenic driver of global warming, you have to also propose an even larger unknown source of cooling to explain why the known large amounts of anthropogenic CO2 haven't been warming the Earth even more than your proposed natural warming driver. It is not credible.
It may well be that CO2 warming is all that is keeping us from a particulate driven cooling and ice age. That's possible, but it still doesn't mean that we want global warming, either. If CO2 is staving off an ice age, then what we want is not necessarily "business as usual", but probably reduced CO2 emissions which warm us, but not too much.
For example, talk to some actual global warming scientists. I have, and I'm still stunned by the number of them who think that "insolation is a constant." Really? What fraction? Who?
At best, they tend to underestimate its effects, or assume (!) that it's not important. Stott et al. found that climate models do underestimate its effects, but only by 15% to at most 30% (and more likely the former than the latter). Foukal et al. found that its effects have been measurable but not particularly important over the last century. It may become more important in the future, but it's hard to predict.
If the Cosmic Ray flux has changed substantially over a few thousand year period, there should be some way to test for it's effects. I once attended a talk by Richard Alley in which he said that there was a period of time when there was a significant increase in cosmic ray flux which is detectable in the paleo data, but no corresponding significant change in climate could be detected in the data (either warming or cooling). Unfortunately, I don't have the reference.
I read the whole thing, and I saw that the earth is not quite absorbing all man's CO2, but what you're missing is the point that this information is buried deep, not in the link, but in all the global warming propaganda out there. If you don't believe me try to find it from a source that is not anti-global warming. Don't be ridiculous. You can find it in any scientific discussion of the carbon cycle, even in undergraduate textbooks. It's not mentioned in the media because it's not that important to global warming. Anthropogenic CO2 is a minority of the total CO2 in the atmosphere, but that's not what is really relevant: the natural CO2 in the atmosphere sets the baseline for temperature (e.g. pre-industrial climate). But when you're talking about global warming, you are looking at what's responsible for the increase of temperature above that baseline. For that, you need to look at what is responsible for the increase of CO2 above the CO2 baseline. The vast majority of that increase is due to anthropogenic sources.
"What about all the nitrogen?" Nitrogen contributes as a GHG, but it's much smaller than the CO2 contribution. If you look at the latest IPCC summary, you'll find that the radiative forcing of CO2 is about 1.66 W/m^2, whereas the forcing of N2O is only about 0.16 W/m^2.
The carbon fixing role of nitrogen is a different matter, though. I am not too familiar with that. However, I do know that the terrestrial carbon cycle (which is mostly where the nitrogen carbon-fixing effects come in) is not as significant as the oceanic carbon cycle as far as CO2 sinking is concerned.
Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. That may be, but when you look at the actual amounts of CO2 vs. methane that have been added to the atmosphere (which is what is relevant to temperature change), anthropogenic CO2 dominates methane increases. Methane isn't insignificant, but it still doesn't outweigh CO2. (Total methane radiative forcing is estimated at about 0.48 W/m^2.)
Those 5 sentences say soooo much that so many people would like to ignore. That there is a very major factor involved in cloud formation that, if anything, the IPCC is paying less attention to. Those 5 sentences do not actually establish that cosmic rays are a "very major factor" involved in cloud formation, let alone climate change. Others have already referred you to disputes of that claim; I can dig up journal references too if you like.
2) That the "peer reviewed" journals are indeed rejecting valid research that contradicts the herd mentality of human-induced global warming. It is actually possible for a paper to be rejected from a journal for legitimate reasons, you know. Pretty much every scientist has had a paper rejected at one point or another. We don't know what the drafts looked like, or what the rejection letters said. It could be, for instance, that the original version of the paper made speculative claims that were broader than what could be supported by the evidence. Or perhaps it was submitted to journals that specialize in different topics; sometimes you have to guess which topics the editors of a particular journal are most interested in, and resubmit to a different journal when you guess wrong.
3) Contrary to what some people would like to believe, not all real scientists agree with the IPCC version of global warming. That's true, but that also doesn't imply that the IPCC version is wrong.
4) These three things combined really DO undermine a heck of a lot of what the IPCC and their ilk is campaigning behind. By "a heck of a lot" you mean "very little", right? All that Svensmark et al. claimed in their paper was an effect studied in a laboratory. They did not provide evidence supporting the important of this mechanism in actual cloud formation in the atmosphere, nor did they provide evidence that this mechanism is is influencing climate change. (Or at least, they didn't in their paper. What they claimed in their press releases is a different matter.)
That's only true in Mann's data with that hockey stick, and that was shown to be rubbish. That's incorrect. In fact, the most dramatic correlations between CO2 levels and temperature come from the Vostok ice core data, not Mann's "hockey stick".
Incidentally, the "hockey stick" was not shown to be rubbish; McIntyre & McKitrick's work itself has plenty of flaws. You can read Mann's rebuttal, or Tim Lambert's independent analysis. And even if Mann's work was flawed, there are other reconstructions, performed by completely different methods, which also show a "hockey stick" shape. (In fact, all of them have a noticeable upswing in recent times, they just differ on when that upswing starts: 1800 vs. 1900.) I don't know why everyone singles out Mann's work in this respect.
The other problem is that it doesn't explain the other cold and warm periods in the last 2000 years. How is that a problem? CO2 is not the only driver of climate change. Solar variations, for instance, have played a greater role in the past.
I'm not saying that Global Warming isn't happening, but I'm not convinced that CO2 is the sole and main cause. CO2 definitely is not the sole cause. It is, however, the main cause of the warming in the 20th century, particularly in the last 40 years. See, for instance, Fig. SPM-2 in the IPCC AR4 SPM (PDF). At different points in history, different factors have been the primary drivers of climate change. Right now, it happens to be CO2, largely due to anthropogenic emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
By itself that doesn't prove anything. Given only the correlation, you couldn't rule out that temperature increases cause increased CO2 levels. Indeed, it is likely that temperature increases cause increased CO2 levels. A more significant cause than accelerated organic decay is the reduced ability of oceans to take up atmospheric CO2.
However: increased CO2 levels also cause temperature increases. There is a positive feedback mechanism at work.
The basic idea is that some effect causes a temperature increase, which in turn causes CO2 levels to increase, but those increased CO2 levels force the warming to continue where it otherwise would have leveled out. This warming/CO2/warming cycle continues until you hit other negative feedbacks which stop the warming.
We have had global warming and global cooling alarms every 10-30 years since documented news history. Go back and read old newspapers. Nonsense. You go back and read old newspapers. There was a famous Newsweek story about global cooling in 1975, which did not reflect the scientific opinion of the time, and pretty much nothing before that.
P.S. Documented news history goes back hundreds of years.
There are leftist groups using the environment as a front against capitalism. I've already offered proof of that. Even if true, it is irrelevant to the point under discussion, which was the fact that the actual funding for climate science does not originate in any significant way from your leftist conspiracy.
No, Chirac's response was to tax America. Non sequitur. We were talking about typographical errors in the IPCC AR4. Perhaps you would like to stick to the points being discussed, instead of launching into an irrelevant anti-leftist tirade every time you're proven wrong.
This is false. Science makes no statements about "the meaning of life", which is a philosophical question, not a scientific one subject to experimentation.
If there were no meaning to life, then science would be, well, meaningless.
That may be, but science itself does not make any claims about whether science is "meaningful".
There is no reason why the universe should be comprehensible.
Who said the universe is comprehensible?
Anyone who thinks that it is "obvious" that the universe should be comprehensible is complacent and shallow and does not peer very deeply at the universe.
That depends on what you mean by "comprehensible". One may take it more or less as a matter of definition that an intelligent being should find the universe "comprehensible" to some extent or another. Of course, it far from obvious whether the universe "should" have intelligent life in it.
The same type of person, for the same reason, would say that there is no meaning in the universe. That meaning exists only because we want it to be there.
Frankly, that is more than a little condescending, not to mention entirely unsupported by argumentation. Believing that meaning is something made by humans does not make one shallow.
You really believe that all that there is worth knowing can be known through science?
The original poster never said that. He/she was merely stating what he/she felt the "fundamental purpose" of life was in the absence of human-determined meaning.
On what grounds can one insist that numbers should have any relevance to anything in the physical universe? They are the pure invention of human folly.
You have a constructivist view of mathematics. The Platonists would say you're wrong, that numbers exist independently from humans or sentience. It is a philosophical argument which cannot be proven one way or the other.
Wow. Someone on Slashdot thinks only of sex and eating. Now, that's a surprise. I am underwhelmed by its profundity.
Once again, the original poster went on to add that there are greater purposes to life than "sex and eating", only that this meaning is something we make for ourselves, not something external to us.
Are you sure about that? What is intelligence. Where did it come from.
Your response is a non sequitur. The origin of intelligence is irrelevant to the fact that we can use our intelligence to give our lives "greater" purposes.
According to your theory, everything is just random mutations and natural selection, just atoms randomly bumping into each other. How does this produce intelligence?
How does random mutation and natural selection produce anything? Or are you arguing that evolution doesn't happen?
Meaning is embedded in the fabric of the universe itself. It is not our job to invent meaning. It is our job to discover the meaning that is already there.
That is your personal philosophical opinion, not a fact. You may not like relativism, but you're a fool if you believe that you can logically prove from universally acceptable axioms that "meaning is embedded in the fabric of the universe itself". Thousands of years of philosophical debate and nobody can even agree on what the question is, let alone the answer.
It is interesting, by the way, how you believe that numbers are a human invention but "meaning" is built into the universe.
Haven't you heard that obesity is an illness that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year? What about science. This is a scientific fact? Shouldn't you be adjusting your life at least to the facts of science?
Science is a descriptive discipline, not a normative or prescriptive one. Science tells us that obesity kills people. It does not tell us whether that outcome is "right", "wrong", or otherwise de
Part of the PEAR project's problem was their use of statistics. A classical p-test is guaranteed to eventually reject the null hypothesis (no ESP) if enough data is collected. This is related to the famous Lindley's paradox. A criticism of a particular PEAR analysis on these grounds may be found here from astrostatistician Bill Jefferys. There was a response from the study's author, which I don't have a link to, and a counterresponse here.
Jefferys advocates the Bayesian approach as an alternative to their p-value test (as do I), but even non-Bayesians admit such problems with p-values can happen (they just think the alternatives are worse); see here for some references, and here for some criticisms of and non-Bayesian alternatives to classical accept/reject significance testing. This paper (PDF) is an opinion piece which reviews the issue from a medical research perspective.
Yes, which opens up a whole new can of worms about having to keep the welfare (funding) coming in. So you have people with an agenda using research by people who need to keep funding going. The situation in climatology isn't any different from any other field of science. Most of the funding is regularly supplied by neutral government agencies like NSF, DoE, etc. You might as well rant about the liberal carbon nanotube agenda.
And of course, the SPM is starting to reveal errors: Wow, a draft made a typographical error in units.
Sane person's response: Guess I need to print out the revised draft. (Which is what I did last week.) The New Stan Price's response: IT'S A LIBRUL CONSPIRACY!!!1!!
Indeed, Orson Scott Card had one of his characters poke some fun at the idea, either in Speaker for the Dead or Xenocide. One of the characters claims that some idea is the best explanation by invoking Occam's Razor, and the other responds, "Occam was a medieval old fart. The simplest explanation is always, God did it. Or, the woman next door is a witch: she did it." (Quotes aren't exact.)
Slashdot Mirror
2. Most starving children don't live in places as hostile as deserts.
3. Where would you like to move them? How many tens of millions of refugees would you like to support in your home country, give land to, find jobs for, and so on? If it's not a majority, which other countries would you prefer take on the task of relocating entire nations?
4. In short, have you considered the social, political, and economic implications of a mass relocation project?
Quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson wrote some good anti-hype pieces about the D-Wave PR here and here, focusing on their incorrect marketing claims to be able to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. The first link also has an update with comments from Lawrence Ip of Google, who clarifies what the D-Wave people are really claiming.
Environmentalists "cry for" global warming, air pollution, water pollution, biodiversity, land conservation, energy conservation, and many other topics. Good grief, its like arguing cigerates will weaken the enamal on you teath and lead to tooth decay and eventual starvation. BTW it also will most likely cause cancer and heart disease. On the average you will die 20+ years earlier. Oui, that tooth decay, that's what to worry about. That's a stupid argument. Global warming is a longer term issue, but that doesn't mean it is unimportant. And, incidentally, pollution is not nearly as severe a problem as it once was. Smog is much better than in the 1960s, we no longer have rivers that are on fire like in Cleveland, etc.
That's a nice conspiracy theory, but the fact is, you don't know why it was rejected.
That, frankly, is a silly rebuttal. The IPCC did no new science, but merely summarized findings of the scientific literature, which certainly does investigate both anthropogenic and natural contributions to climate change. Prominently in the IPCC summary of policymakers you can find comparisons of the relative contributions of anthropogenic and natural radiative forcings.
Some have pointed out that we already are geoengineering the planet with our greenhouse gas emissions, so we might as well geoengineer more intelligently. Others have pointed out the negative side effects of geoengineering (e.g., more atmospheric pollutants), or the unpredictability of side effects.
One point I have not seen raised is the long-term commitment necessary for geoengineering to combat global warming.
Suppose we continue emitting CO2 at a great rate, but we cancel its warming effects out with, say, the cooling effects of aerosol emissions. Suppose we do that for a century. What happens if, for some reason — lack of political will, economic crisis, etc. — we happen to stop the aerosol emissions? Aerosols drop out of the atmosphere within a few years, but in the meantime we've been building up CO2, which takes decades or centuries to be removed.
Without a guaranteed sustained commitment to geoengineering, we could potentially get a century's worth of global warming in the span of a few years, once the system is unbalanced and there's nothing left canceling the CO2. That would be much, much worse than even the worst-case warming scenarios currently under consideration; that rate of warming is probably totally unprecedented in the known history of the planet.
2. Mann's study (the one whose data analysis has been contested) is not the only reconstruction which leads to a hockey stick curve. In fact, reconstructions do, to one extent or another, and many of them use quite different methods of analysis.
3. Paleoproxies are indeed correlated with temperature, and there is a large literature on this subject.
4. You don't need a "hockey stick" reconstruction at all to see that there has been global warming; you can look at the instrumental record. Between 1950 and 2000 the empirical data indicates that the amount of light reaching the ground decreased immensely; more than enough to explain the missing CO2 signal. The empirical data indicates no such thing. There have been solar variations, but they are quite small. Stott et al. and Foukal et al. are the usual references. Similarly, the Earth's albedo (determining how much light gets reflected back into space instead of reaching the ground) has not changed to an extent that can account for global warming. I am also puzzled as to how a decrease in light reaching the ground can lead to a warming trend. Now the Danes have shown an alternative source of climatic effects in the incidence of cosmic rays, mediated by solar weather. They haven't shown any such thing. They've demonstrated an influence of cosmic rays on condensation in a laboratory. They have not given observational evidence that this effect is correlated with actual cloud formation in the atmosphere, and they have not demonstrated that this effect drives climate change. The short conclusion is, we have NO CLUE how the climate really works, nor do we know the full list of inputs that drive it nor their relative importance. You are confusing your personal ignorance with that of the scientific community. The existence and relative importance of different drivers of climate have been studied for over a century. While there are uncertainties, they are not on the level of "whoops, insolation effects are really 5x bigger than we thought they were" or whatever. Further, if you want to propose hitherto-unknown non-anthropogenic driver of global warming, you have to also propose an even larger unknown source of cooling to explain why the known large amounts of anthropogenic CO2 haven't been warming the Earth even more than your proposed natural warming driver. It is not credible. It may well be that CO2 warming is all that is keeping us from a particulate driven cooling and ice age. That's possible, but it still doesn't mean that we want global warming, either. If CO2 is staving off an ice age, then what we want is not necessarily "business as usual", but probably reduced CO2 emissions which warm us, but not too much.
I have, and I'm still stunned by the number of them who think that "insolation is a constant." Really? What fraction? Who? At best, they tend to underestimate its effects, or assume (!) that it's not important. Stott et al. found that climate models do underestimate its effects, but only by 15% to at most 30% (and more likely the former than the latter). Foukal et al. found that its effects have been measurable but not particularly important over the last century. It may become more important in the future, but it's hard to predict.
The carbon fixing role of nitrogen is a different matter, though. I am not too familiar with that. However, I do know that the terrestrial carbon cycle (which is mostly where the nitrogen carbon-fixing effects come in) is not as significant as the oceanic carbon cycle as far as CO2 sinking is concerned. Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. That may be, but when you look at the actual amounts of CO2 vs. methane that have been added to the atmosphere (which is what is relevant to temperature change), anthropogenic CO2 dominates methane increases. Methane isn't insignificant, but it still doesn't outweigh CO2. (Total methane radiative forcing is estimated at about 0.48 W/m^2.)
Incidentally, the "hockey stick" was not shown to be rubbish; McIntyre & McKitrick's work itself has plenty of flaws. You can read Mann's rebuttal, or Tim Lambert's independent analysis. And even if Mann's work was flawed, there are other reconstructions, performed by completely different methods, which also show a "hockey stick" shape. (In fact, all of them have a noticeable upswing in recent times, they just differ on when that upswing starts: 1800 vs. 1900.) I don't know why everyone singles out Mann's work in this respect. The other problem is that it doesn't explain the other cold and warm periods in the last 2000 years. How is that a problem? CO2 is not the only driver of climate change. Solar variations, for instance, have played a greater role in the past. I'm not saying that Global Warming isn't happening, but I'm not convinced that CO2 is the sole and main cause. CO2 definitely is not the sole cause. It is, however, the main cause of the warming in the 20th century, particularly in the last 40 years. See, for instance, Fig. SPM-2 in the IPCC AR4 SPM (PDF). At different points in history, different factors have been the primary drivers of climate change. Right now, it happens to be CO2, largely due to anthropogenic emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
However: increased CO2 levels also cause temperature increases. There is a positive feedback mechanism at work.
The basic idea is that some effect causes a temperature increase, which in turn causes CO2 levels to increase, but those increased CO2 levels force the warming to continue where it otherwise would have leveled out. This warming/CO2/warming cycle continues until you hit other negative feedbacks which stop the warming.
P.S. Documented news history goes back hundreds of years. There are leftist groups using the environment as a front against capitalism. I've already offered proof of that. Even if true, it is irrelevant to the point under discussion, which was the fact that the actual funding for climate science does not originate in any significant way from your leftist conspiracy. No, Chirac's response was to tax America. Non sequitur. We were talking about typographical errors in the IPCC AR4. Perhaps you would like to stick to the points being discussed, instead of launching into an irrelevant anti-leftist tirade every time you're proven wrong.
Well, science, for one.
This is false. Science makes no statements about "the meaning of life", which is a philosophical question, not a scientific one subject to experimentation.
If there were no meaning to life, then science would be, well, meaningless.
That may be, but science itself does not make any claims about whether science is "meaningful".
There is no reason why the universe should be comprehensible.
Who said the universe is comprehensible?
Anyone who thinks that it is "obvious" that the universe should be comprehensible is complacent and shallow and does not peer very deeply at the universe.
That depends on what you mean by "comprehensible". One may take it more or less as a matter of definition that an intelligent being should find the universe "comprehensible" to some extent or another. Of course, it far from obvious whether the universe "should" have intelligent life in it.
The same type of person, for the same reason, would say that there is no meaning in the universe. That meaning exists only because we want it to be there.
Frankly, that is more than a little condescending, not to mention entirely unsupported by argumentation. Believing that meaning is something made by humans does not make one shallow.
You really believe that all that there is worth knowing can be known through science?
The original poster never said that. He/she was merely stating what he/she felt the "fundamental purpose" of life was in the absence of human-determined meaning.
On what grounds can one insist that numbers should have any relevance to anything in the physical universe? They are the pure invention of human folly.
You have a constructivist view of mathematics. The Platonists would say you're wrong, that numbers exist independently from humans or sentience. It is a philosophical argument which cannot be proven one way or the other.
Wow. Someone on Slashdot thinks only of sex and eating. Now, that's a surprise. I am underwhelmed by its profundity.
Once again, the original poster went on to add that there are greater purposes to life than "sex and eating", only that this meaning is something we make for ourselves, not something external to us.
Are you sure about that? What is intelligence. Where did it come from.
Your response is a non sequitur. The origin of intelligence is irrelevant to the fact that we can use our intelligence to give our lives "greater" purposes.
According to your theory, everything is just random mutations and natural selection, just atoms randomly bumping into each other. How does this produce intelligence?
How does random mutation and natural selection produce anything? Or are you arguing that evolution doesn't happen?
Meaning is embedded in the fabric of the universe itself. It is not our job to invent meaning. It is our job to discover the meaning that is already there.
That is your personal philosophical opinion, not a fact. You may not like relativism, but you're a fool if you believe that you can logically prove from universally acceptable axioms that "meaning is embedded in the fabric of the universe itself". Thousands of years of philosophical debate and nobody can even agree on what the question is, let alone the answer.
It is interesting, by the way, how you believe that numbers are a human invention but "meaning" is built into the universe.
Haven't you heard that obesity is an illness that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year? What about science. This is a scientific fact? Shouldn't you be adjusting your life at least to the facts of science?
Science is a descriptive discipline, not a normative or prescriptive one. Science tells us that obesity kills people. It does not tell us whether that outcome is "right", "wrong", or otherwise de
Part of the PEAR project's problem was their use of statistics. A classical p-test is guaranteed to eventually reject the null hypothesis (no ESP) if enough data is collected. This is related to the famous Lindley's paradox. A criticism of a particular PEAR analysis on these grounds may be found here from astrostatistician Bill Jefferys. There was a response from the study's author, which I don't have a link to, and a counterresponse here.
Jefferys advocates the Bayesian approach as an alternative to their p-value test (as do I), but even non-Bayesians admit such problems with p-values can happen (they just think the alternatives are worse); see here for some references, and here for some criticisms of and non-Bayesian alternatives to classical accept/reject significance testing. This paper (PDF) is an opinion piece which reviews the issue from a medical research perspective.
Sane person's response: Guess I need to print out the revised draft. (Which is what I did last week.)
The New Stan Price's response: IT'S A LIBRUL CONSPIRACY!!!1!!
Indeed, Orson Scott Card had one of his characters poke some fun at the idea, either in Speaker for the Dead or Xenocide. One of the characters claims that some idea is the best explanation by invoking Occam's Razor, and the other responds, "Occam was a medieval old fart. The simplest explanation is always, God did it. Or, the woman next door is a witch: she did it." (Quotes aren't exact.)