Humans always have good luck introducing a new species into an untested environment
Sounds like these bacteria are already in the ocean, eating naturally occouring oil leaking out of the earth. I suspect that the reason you don't find these bacteria already out there in the gulf of mexico would be that their food usually ISN'T there, not that these or similar bacteria haven't ever been introduced there.
Having said that, it takes remarkable arrogance to suggest testing that theory on a massive scale. Who are these people using the environment as a lab anyway... oh right, it's the oil company that dumped it there in the first place, one of the ones trying to convince us to continue testing climate change theories.
Anyway, look at the title of the article. "Can we save the beaches." Pretty clear the focus here is on keeping the problem from getting into people's backyards, people who will then sue. The focus is -not- on preventing any further harm in the gulf.
As numerous commenters, some above you, have pointed out, this is not a new finding. We weren't wrong. Your media is just really good at glossing over technical issues. Actually, it's just not really good at doing much of anything besides getting advertisers. I digress. This was known in the 60's. The fact that many non-scientists don't know anything about it is not our fault and is the public's shortcoming, not ours.
Hiring a PR firm is an interesting idea, but again nothing really new. Most universities have PR departments. They're not exactly madison-avenue caliber, but they do some work. It's not like science organizations are rolling in cash with little else to spend it on. -Most- of us try to make the tax dollars we get go the furthest toward getting results. Hiring a PR firm to educate the public as to our results, especially ones from the '60s, doesn't feel like our jobs and probably violates many grant stipulations anyway.
And we don't all decide collective policy. I mean, I could have guessed "the dangers of publishing a single report that purportedly negates all previous recommendations" but no one asked me about it.
Sincerely, A scientist (one who does not work on any type of environmental science though)
There's so much confusion about global warming now I feel like just telling people to shut up for 10 years until they get their stories straight.
THEY DID! Here is a paper about this very phenomenon from 1991. Almost two decades.
Furthermore, most of us don't actually find it that confusing. "Some pollutants actually cool down instead of warm, but they don't last as long as the ones that warm" is something a child could understand. If you are confused, then take your own advice and wait to comment on climate issues for 10 years until you understand them.
Climate change scientists have now resorted to trolling us.
Seriously. Cleaner air is bad for the planet? Shut up.
It would be nice if it were simple, wouldn't it? If we could just say "pollution bad, stopping pollution all good effects."
Grow up. Reality is often quite a bit more complicated than we'd like it. Wshat seem like mixed messages mirror that. Cholesterol can be good and bad, different types. People shouldn't use heroin, but for a small subset of users, sudden withdrawal can actually cause death. Antibiotics kill bacteria in an infected patient, but if you dump in enough drugs to kill all the bugs at once the patient could also die because of an immune response to a chemical released by the dying bacteria.
It's entirely possible that some pollutants are currently having good effects, and when we clean up our act things will get worse before they get better. Shooting the messengers is an immature response.
Anyway, this business about this pollutant countering global warming has been known since the early 90's at least. It's not like the scientists just suddenly made this up, you just weren't paying attention until it showed up on slashdot.
'We've got to do some work about having them believe and feel that printing isn't a sort of environmental negative.'
But it is an environmental negative.
What's the confusion over? It often requires work to convince people of lies. The RIAA, coal, pharmecutical and other industries only make it -look- easy.
environmentalists are just messed up and confused, they've got so many cruisades on these days they are bound to conflict.
Can you point to a group of people united in a cause that this is not true for? Open source or linux crowds? Moral crusaders? Liberals? Conservatives? Religious fundamentalists? You really shouldn't knock a cause based off of it's weakest links. Except for humor, like the whole "living in our parent's basement" thing we have going on here.
Speaking of, I think I heard the microwave upstairs tell me my hotpocket is done. Gonna eat it and talk trash on ubuntu now.
You're pretty ignorant if you believe they offended "every religion in the world"
Sure, not specifically, but just the episode where Mel Gibson craps on cartman's face, to pick one at random might have offended some Zoroastrian out there.
Anyway, let's reserve "pretty ignorant" for when we're not talking about a show on comedy central. Most of us don't consider "pretty ignorant" to mean "havent' watched every single southpark episode." It's an easy generalization to make.
The media needs to learn that about the Muslims as well. They aren't a special group any more than Christians or Atheists or anyone else. If they want to get whiny about people making fun of them the answer needs to be "Shut up, nobody cares," and then go back to making fun.
As an agnostic I'm possibly offended that agnostics weren't specifically mentioned in that statement at all. Maybe offended. I mean, I have no real proof one way or the other.
They only have, what, 3 shows that are really big? The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and South Park.
What would you expect? This is the same network that sucessfully pressured Dave Chappelle until he quit. The same network that had reruns of SNL and then decided to instead pick up Mad TV reruns. And that was in just the two or three years I had cable.
Ah, comedy central has made it clear that in response to death threats, they'll censor themselves. I'm sure that will be the last time religious nuts get their panties in a twist and threaten them with violence because they're angry. After all, religious fundamentalism goes hand in hand with being reasonable.
Wonder if we'll ever see Colbert gagged because some right-wing "hutatree" terrorist realized they were being made fun of...
So, we're supposed to believe that your selection of 10 supporting cases out of your sample of 3000 is correct just because you're an "expert"?
More or less. I was the one capturing the data. If I rejected the other 2990, I probably had a reason, one that may not be obvious to someone not manning the microscope or someone who has not stared at millions of those cells for hours at a time.
If I were to publish a paper saying "These 10 cells out of 3000 are the only ones that matter" then I'd have to support that claim. If, on the other hand, I'm publishing a paper that doesn't explicitly claim that those 10 out of 3000 cells are the only ones relevant, then I'm not going to explicitly show why those other 2990 cells aren't relevant. The data is incomplete without supporting figures showing what was obvious to me.
To make it a little more concrete, say I'm saying "Cells condense their DNA before dividing" and looked at cancer cells in a dish (all vertebrate cells I'm famililar with do in fact condense their DNA before dividing). I look at the 3000 cells and see that only 100 are dividing, based on what the cells look like. I'm not going to prove that the other 2900 are not dividing, it should be obvious to anyone familiar with that cell line. Of the 100 that are dividing, lets say 50 aren't marked properly with the signal I'm looking at, could be a DNA marker, so they get thrown out. Of the 50 that are dividing and are marked properly, maybe 30 are on top of one another preventing good analysis, and 10 of the ones remaining are cells that look unhealthy, like they're dying. That leaves 10 cells out of 3000.
If you're not a cell biologist, most of that wouldn't be obvious to you, some of those criteria wouldn't even be obvious to you unless you were a cell biologist familiar with that specific cell line.
To be convinced that the rejections were appropriate, either you could become an expert in that cell line, which I find unlikely, or I could write up 5 or 6 supporting figures demonstrating that non-dividing cells looked like this etc. That's a lot of wasted time that I'd rather be wasting on slashdot.
Creationists regularly mangle papers, taking quotes out of context and all.
Get ready for an onslaught of mangled data analysis, with data being taken out of context, the results published to some blog, and people making policy decision based on those blog postings.
Hmm... I think you've brought up another valid point: some researchers might take the data, rehash it and publish it as their own, getting credit for it, much as you have taken my point, restated it with a minor additions, and got all the mod points for it.
some meteorologist will think that running a data set through an excel curve fitting algorithm is science.
Nope -- it's only science if you adjust and filter the data first to make it match your truth.
I don't think that's what he was saying. He's saying this will lend itself to overly simplistic interpretations. Which is a good prediction in climatology, considering what people got out of "climategate."
But with the data public, it'll be easier to shoot them down for picking, choosing, skewing, and what else.
Not sure what regulations are on "release all data to the public" but seems like there are loopholes big enough to drive a bus through. For instance, in my field, no one but me knows how many cells I looked at. Maybe that thing I said happens in these cells happens in all those cells. Maybe I looked at 300 before seeing one doing what I said, took a picture of that one, and that was that. All my data would be that one cell I cherrypicked.
Even if I did take pictures of all 300, no one knows but me. Those other 299 can dissapear.
If I'm -not- evil though, this could hurt me. If I looked at say 3000 cells, and 10 were doing a thing that I thought was significant, I could have my reasons. Maybe the other 2990 were the wrong cell type or something. Being the expert, that might be obvious to me just from looking at them. A non expert looking at them might not see that. They would just see that out of 3000 cells, I chose the 10 that supported my data. They might call foul without bothering to have me explain myself.
There's no reason the data should be secret, but most data doesn't stand on it's own, and writing up supporting information to -all data gathered- just isn't going to happen.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
I'm sure people with a dogmatic axe to grind will prove an annoying if minor fault. Creationists regularly mangle papers, taking quotes out of context and all. I can't imagine them being pacified by the messy data.
Oil companies and people who are dead set against thinking we -might- be changing the atmosphere will undoubtedly cherry pick out from the data, take things out of context from studies supporting climate change as a theory, and those people whose support of climate change is based more off of religion than science will do the same to studies that reach opposite conclusions. It will be extremely annoying to those of us who aren't convinced one way or the other, and rather than focus on good science, the media will focus on the new controversies this will spawn, making even fewer people care one way or the other.
I take a dim view of the public's ability to do anything useful with raw data, but I recognize I'm a bit of an elitist jerk. I think this might help a few cases of where one researcher gets opposite conclusions based on their own data, and this will allow direct comparison of the two data sets, and that's really all the good this will accomplish.
In still other news, a sex tape has surfaced, allegedly of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Jobs reportedly says at one point "Man, if this sex tape ever gets out, and those hipsters learn what we're doing with these iphones..." to which Gates replies "Whoa, you'd have to try to convince them not to look at porn or something!"
(Note so I don't get sued: this is 100% false, obviously)
Slashdot Mirror
Humans always have good luck introducing a new species into an untested environment
Sounds like these bacteria are already in the ocean, eating naturally occouring oil leaking out of the earth. I suspect that the reason you don't find these bacteria already out there in the gulf of mexico would be that their food usually ISN'T there, not that these or similar bacteria haven't ever been introduced there.
Having said that, it takes remarkable arrogance to suggest testing that theory on a massive scale. Who are these people using the environment as a lab anyway... oh right, it's the oil company that dumped it there in the first place, one of the ones trying to convince us to continue testing climate change theories.
Anyway, look at the title of the article. "Can we save the beaches." Pretty clear the focus here is on keeping the problem from getting into people's backyards, people who will then sue. The focus is -not- on preventing any further harm in the gulf.
...into my TV because I wasn't wearing the protective...
your forgetting the failed "education revolution", where the taxer payer was footing bills of 1.5 mil for demountable dongers worth 100k.
Wait... what are dongers? Are mountable ones less expensive? What does this have to do with education?
I mean, students mounting "dongers" sounds like you might have bigger problems with your education system than whether they're demountable.
Dear BonquiquiShiquavius,
As numerous commenters, some above you, have pointed out, this is not a new finding. We weren't wrong. Your media is just really good at glossing over technical issues. Actually, it's just not really good at doing much of anything besides getting advertisers. I digress. This was known in the 60's. The fact that many non-scientists don't know anything about it is not our fault and is the public's shortcoming, not ours.
Hiring a PR firm is an interesting idea, but again nothing really new. Most universities have PR departments. They're not exactly madison-avenue caliber, but they do some work. It's not like science organizations are rolling in cash with little else to spend it on. -Most- of us try to make the tax dollars we get go the furthest toward getting results. Hiring a PR firm to educate the public as to our results, especially ones from the '60s, doesn't feel like our jobs and probably violates many grant stipulations anyway.
And we don't all decide collective policy. I mean, I could have guessed "the dangers of publishing a single report that purportedly negates all previous recommendations" but no one asked me about it.
Sincerely,
A scientist (one who does not work on any type of environmental science though)
There's so much confusion about global warming now I feel like just telling people to shut up for 10 years until they get their stories straight.
THEY DID! Here is a paper about this very phenomenon from 1991. Almost two decades.
Furthermore, most of us don't actually find it that confusing. "Some pollutants actually cool down instead of warm, but they don't last as long as the ones that warm" is something a child could understand. If you are confused, then take your own advice and wait to comment on climate issues for 10 years until you understand them.
Climate change scientists have now resorted to trolling us.
Seriously. Cleaner air is bad for the planet? Shut up.
It would be nice if it were simple, wouldn't it? If we could just say "pollution bad, stopping pollution all good effects."
Grow up. Reality is often quite a bit more complicated than we'd like it. Wshat seem like mixed messages mirror that. Cholesterol can be good and bad, different types. People shouldn't use heroin, but for a small subset of users, sudden withdrawal can actually cause death. Antibiotics kill bacteria in an infected patient, but if you dump in enough drugs to kill all the bugs at once the patient could also die because of an immune response to a chemical released by the dying bacteria.
It's entirely possible that some pollutants are currently having good effects, and when we clean up our act things will get worse before they get better. Shooting the messengers is an immature response.
Anyway, this business about this pollutant countering global warming has been known since the early 90's at least. It's not like the scientists just suddenly made this up, you just weren't paying attention until it showed up on slashdot.
'We've got to do some work about having them believe and feel that printing isn't a sort of environmental negative.'
But it is an environmental negative.
What's the confusion over? It often requires work to convince people of lies. The RIAA, coal, pharmecutical and other industries only make it -look- easy.
environmentalists are just messed up and confused, they've got so many cruisades on these days they are bound to conflict.
Can you point to a group of people united in a cause that this is not true for? Open source or linux crowds? Moral crusaders? Liberals? Conservatives? Religious fundamentalists? You really shouldn't knock a cause based off of it's weakest links. Except for humor, like the whole "living in our parent's basement" thing we have going on here.
Speaking of, I think I heard the microwave upstairs tell me my hotpocket is done. Gonna eat it and talk trash on ubuntu now.
You can still dig up readable newspapers from the 1800's.
Yeah, but then it's stinky. You should probably just read today's news, it's more current anyway.
So you're of the Heisenberg sect?
Hmm... "The determination of whether or not there is an afterlife necessarily disturbs the investigator's life, and vice versa"?
Hence the "wondering about some right wing terrorist realizing it" part of my post...
You're pretty ignorant if you believe they offended "every religion in the world"
Sure, not specifically, but just the episode where Mel Gibson craps on cartman's face, to pick one at random might have offended some Zoroastrian out there.
Anyway, let's reserve "pretty ignorant" for when we're not talking about a show on comedy central. Most of us don't consider "pretty ignorant" to mean "havent' watched every single southpark episode." It's an easy generalization to make.
The media needs to learn that about the Muslims as well. They aren't a special group any more than Christians or Atheists or anyone else. If they want to get whiny about people making fun of them the answer needs to be "Shut up, nobody cares," and then go back to making fun.
As an agnostic I'm possibly offended that agnostics weren't specifically mentioned in that statement at all. Maybe offended. I mean, I have no real proof one way or the other.
They only have, what, 3 shows that are really big? The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and South Park.
What would you expect? This is the same network that sucessfully pressured Dave Chappelle until he quit. The same network that had reruns of SNL and then decided to instead pick up Mad TV reruns. And that was in just the two or three years I had cable.
Ah, comedy central has made it clear that in response to death threats, they'll censor themselves. I'm sure that will be the last time religious nuts get their panties in a twist and threaten them with violence because they're angry. After all, religious fundamentalism goes hand in hand with being reasonable.
Wonder if we'll ever see Colbert gagged because some right-wing "hutatree" terrorist realized they were being made fun of...
So, we're supposed to believe that your selection of 10 supporting cases out of your sample of 3000 is correct just because you're an "expert"?
More or less. I was the one capturing the data. If I rejected the other 2990, I probably had a reason, one that may not be obvious to someone not manning the microscope or someone who has not stared at millions of those cells for hours at a time.
If I were to publish a paper saying "These 10 cells out of 3000 are the only ones that matter" then I'd have to support that claim. If, on the other hand, I'm publishing a paper that doesn't explicitly claim that those 10 out of 3000 cells are the only ones relevant, then I'm not going to explicitly show why those other 2990 cells aren't relevant. The data is incomplete without supporting figures showing what was obvious to me.
To make it a little more concrete, say I'm saying "Cells condense their DNA before dividing" and looked at cancer cells in a dish (all vertebrate cells I'm famililar with do in fact condense their DNA before dividing). I look at the 3000 cells and see that only 100 are dividing, based on what the cells look like. I'm not going to prove that the other 2900 are not dividing, it should be obvious to anyone familiar with that cell line. Of the 100 that are dividing, lets say 50 aren't marked properly with the signal I'm looking at, could be a DNA marker, so they get thrown out. Of the 50 that are dividing and are marked properly, maybe 30 are on top of one another preventing good analysis, and 10 of the ones remaining are cells that look unhealthy, like they're dying. That leaves 10 cells out of 3000.
If you're not a cell biologist, most of that wouldn't be obvious to you, some of those criteria wouldn't even be obvious to you unless you were a cell biologist familiar with that specific cell line.
To be convinced that the rejections were appropriate, either you could become an expert in that cell line, which I find unlikely, or I could write up 5 or 6 supporting figures demonstrating that non-dividing cells looked like this etc. That's a lot of wasted time that I'd rather be wasting on slashdot.
In other words, regardless of what facts might actually be contained in this data you've already made up your mind.
I don't think that's an accurate summary of what I said, no.
You don't exactly sound like a neutral undecided to me.
I was giving my opinion on the subject, so that inherently isn't neutral...
Um, no, I don't think he was confused. You, on the other hand ... (Hint: look at the user ID numbers before you insert foot into mouth ... :)
So he's been on slashdot longer, he's less likely to be wrong than I am?
Nice try, eviloverlordx!
I think this is taking the joke a bit far, but I never said they -didn't- actually do it, just that a sex tape with that on it has not come up.
Creationists regularly mangle papers, taking quotes out of context and all.
Get ready for an onslaught of mangled data analysis, with data being taken out of context, the results published to some blog, and people making policy decision based on those blog postings.
Hmm... I think you've brought up another valid point: some researchers might take the data, rehash it and publish it as their own, getting credit for it, much as you have taken my point, restated it with a minor additions, and got all the mod points for it.
Which is to say, I see what you did there ;)
some meteorologist will think that running a data set through an excel curve fitting algorithm is science.
Nope -- it's only science if you adjust and filter the data first to make it match your truth.
I don't think that's what he was saying. He's saying this will lend itself to overly simplistic interpretations. Which is a good prediction in climatology, considering what people got out of "climategate."
But with the data public, it'll be easier to shoot them down for picking, choosing, skewing, and what else.
Not sure what regulations are on "release all data to the public" but seems like there are loopholes big enough to drive a bus through. For instance, in my field, no one but me knows how many cells I looked at. Maybe that thing I said happens in these cells happens in all those cells. Maybe I looked at 300 before seeing one doing what I said, took a picture of that one, and that was that. All my data would be that one cell I cherrypicked.
Even if I did take pictures of all 300, no one knows but me. Those other 299 can dissapear.
If I'm -not- evil though, this could hurt me. If I looked at say 3000 cells, and 10 were doing a thing that I thought was significant, I could have my reasons. Maybe the other 2990 were the wrong cell type or something. Being the expert, that might be obvious to me just from looking at them. A non expert looking at them might not see that. They would just see that out of 3000 cells, I chose the 10 that supported my data. They might call foul without bothering to have me explain myself.
There's no reason the data should be secret, but most data doesn't stand on it's own, and writing up supporting information to -all data gathered- just isn't going to happen.
So responding to an AC is trolling?
By responding you give them what they want. I'm probably needing to take my own advice, but there's always a chance you actually were confused.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
I'm sure people with a dogmatic axe to grind will prove an annoying if minor fault. Creationists regularly mangle papers, taking quotes out of context and all. I can't imagine them being pacified by the messy data.
Oil companies and people who are dead set against thinking we -might- be changing the atmosphere will undoubtedly cherry pick out from the data, take things out of context from studies supporting climate change as a theory, and those people whose support of climate change is based more off of religion than science will do the same to studies that reach opposite conclusions. It will be extremely annoying to those of us who aren't convinced one way or the other, and rather than focus on good science, the media will focus on the new controversies this will spawn, making even fewer people care one way or the other.
I take a dim view of the public's ability to do anything useful with raw data, but I recognize I'm a bit of an elitist jerk. I think this might help a few cases of where one researcher gets opposite conclusions based on their own data, and this will allow direct comparison of the two data sets, and that's really all the good this will accomplish.
I'm not in the UK, nor am I a climatologist.
In still other news, a sex tape has surfaced, allegedly of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Jobs reportedly says at one point "Man, if this sex tape ever gets out, and those hipsters learn what we're doing with these iphones..." to which Gates replies "Whoa, you'd have to try to convince them not to look at porn or something!"
(Note so I don't get sued: this is 100% false, obviously)