Would your response be different if the question was thus: "I have two children, one of which was a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that my other child was born on a Tuesday?"
This brings up an interesting point. If we can use gene therapy to cure colorblindness or extend our senses, couldn't we also use it to give us certain disabilities to take advantage of handicapped laws? Or maybe we could change out our skin colors like the cool kids do with their ringtones. Or perhaps we could customize our abilities like we do our computers. Some of us may want a bare-bones system (literally?) or to be stripped of stuff we don't really need (like a complete vas deferns or Fallopian tube until we're ready to reproduce). I've seen a few commenters talking about a slippery slope, but what if you want to go skiing for a while (just to completely milk that metaphor)?
Well, the website you quote says it's cheaper than competing technologies, and Wikipedia says that the competing technologies (which still all seem to be in the beta phase) cost about $15k for the drive and $100-200 for the media. So I imagine this technology wouldn't be cheap.
Seriously, how did this get on the front page? I suppose it's an interesting article, to theoretical chemists, but that's about it. Here's the paper from PNAS (heh).
You may notice a few things if you read it. First, it's an MD (molecular dynamics) simulation. Read: classical equations of motion with an empirically-derived force field (just to head off the quantum gibberish). Second, you'll notice that the paper doesn't mention anything about agriculture or cancer (or much in between), but instead seems to focus on topics as vital to our way of life as orientational entropy and the Widom temperature of water. Third, if you read the last few paragraphs (if you can make it that far), you'll see that a referee brought to the authors' attention that the work presented in their paper had essentially already been done about 15 years ago. Fourth, and perhaps most telling, is that this study is published in PNAS. This journal has an interesting quirk in that if you're a member of the Academy, you get to choose who referees your paper. Trust me, I've seen first-hand how some ancient Academy members use this policy to publish some serious garbage in that journal.
Now I'm not saying that Kumar et al's paper is not an important contribution to the field of theoretical water chemistry. I am, however, saying that it's not nearly interesting enough to be on the front page of Slashdot. Not sure why ScienceDaily picked it up either. I keep telling myself that when I have time, I'm going to start a lit review blog in this field so that the general (geeky) public has a little better handle on the stuff going on in physical chemistry that's actually interesting. Well see if it ever happens.
Minor point, but that's the wrong paper. Here's the paper you want (may require subscription to Nature Methods). You're still correct, by the way. The researchers don't directly state conversion efficiency in their paper. They mention that above-bandgap photon absorption is roughly 85%, which is on par with current commercial PV's. They also mention that the quantum efficiency is 0.89 for the array. Unfortunately, conversion of photoelectrons to actual usable electricity is the main efficiency bottleneck in solar energy. Electron-hole pair recombination and parasitic absorption by impurities, among other things, chew away the efficiency of a solar cell in a hurry.
The take-home message from the paper, as far as I can tell, is that the researchers showed that one can achieve performance comparable to commercial solar cells by using 1% of the expensive ultrapure silicon used in current PV's.
The energy of a carbon bond is a few electron volts. IOW, that much energy is needed to cause a chemical change in the molecule.
While I have a hard time believing that low-intensity microwave/RF signals have any biological effect, this statement is not quite accurate. Just to clarify, the energy you're looking for is the activation energy of the reaction, not the bond energy. If you had to overcome the total bond energy directly every time you wanted to do a reaction, simple chemical processes like dissolving salt in water would be impossible. It doesn't take the input of a photon with energy x to break a bond with energy x. It just takes a photon with enough energy to excite the molecule into a chemical transition state (or more technically a state which can access a transition state), which may not be very high at all. In this case, however, if a chemical change is in fact occurring, it's much more likely to be happening because of thermal excitation than some sort of electronic or vibrational excitation.
Aside from pure physics experiments like measuring a potential variation in the fine structure constant since the beginning of the universe and such, I don't know how practical application of a clock this accurate could be achieved.
I was thinking maybe for a near-term application you could look for prospecting or seismographic uses of this. You know, place a widely-spaced array of clocks on a large section of land and use the extreme precision to measure gravitational anomalies. May tell you something about density changes of material in the Earth. I dunno; the most obvious application is probably to shoot a few of these into space and look for gravity waves, but if by 'practical application' you mean actually practical, prospecting was the best I could come up with off the top of my head.
Grammar != syntax. Grammar is a social construct. The grammar of African-American vernacular English is every bit as consistent as the grammar of the Queen's English. The only reason we consider one to be 'correct' is because of socioeconomic considerations. Bad grammar results in sentences that may not sound right but are still intelligible. Bad syntax results when the logical structure of a sentence is in error or not present. 'I be working' is an example of what would normally be considered bad grammar. 'I to ball the you threw' is an example of bad syntax. And then there's Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,' which boasts correct grammar and syntax and is still semantically meaningless.
Sorry, I know this isn't the first time I've ranted on this, but grammar has much more to do with upbringing than it does with intelligence, and I tend think of people as snobby and elitist when they judge others' grammar (especially considering how few people know how to correctly use a semicolon, or conjugate a gerund, or use the word 'whom'). Unfortunately, the bias against a certain grammar is pretty deeply ingrained, especially in hiring situations. But it's pretty arbitrary. And douchey. Arbitrary and douchey. Here's an exercise: the next time you ask 'who's there,' if someone responds 'it's me,' call them on their incorrect use of nominative pronouns used in conjunction with linking verbs (correct: It's I). See if you still count them among your friends.
I wouldn't recommend Spartan to high-school students. They can't possibly understand what the software is calculating without a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics, thus relegating the software to a toy with no practical application.
You could say the same thing about many synthetic organic chemists, but they still seem to get something out of using quantum chem programs. In my high school chem class, we definitely hit the basics of QM, so it might be elucidative for the students to see that you can predict spectroscopic and thermochemical molecular properties ab initio from QM laws.
One effective use of computers in the classroom that I've seen was from my advisor in grad school, who used the web to find videos of all sorts of dangerous or complicated reactions that he couldn't do in the classroom (stuff like large scale thermite reactions, or suspending liquid oxygen in a magnet). I do agree with most of the rest of the people here that actually doing the reactions will be much more enjoyable and eye-opening than watching a video of them. But I know that today's safety-obsessed culture probably doesn't permit you to do a lot of the reactions you want to do in the classroom.
Mr. Anissimov (author of TFA) has either dumbed the science down too much or simply doesn't understand what's going on. I'll try to give a summary of the Nature Nanotechnology paper as clearly and concisely as possible.
First, the researchers made a nanodevice with two slots that could accommodate so-called "DNA cassettes" in a programmable way. The DNA cassettes themselves have free ends that can only bond with complementary DNA. Each of the DNA cassettes has an 'A' end (that can only bond with other A-type molecules) and a 'B' end (I'm simplifying this greatly; 'A' has nothing to do with adenine). The cassettes can be inserted into the two slots with either the 'A' end up or the 'B' end up. So this means there are a total of four states for the device: (1) first slot: A up, B down; second slot: A up, B down; (2) first slot: A down, B up; second slot: A up, B down, etc. The researchers were then able to take four target molecules (one for each of the four programmable states) and show that they bonded to their complementary state. Further, by developing an error-correcting scheme, they were able to get the fidelity of the bonding to 'apparently flawless' levels (quoting FTA, more on this in a sec).
A little more explanation is in order. All of the target molecules have an 'A' and 'B' marker on both ends of their strand. Now, say for example the nanodevice is in state 2: 1A down, 1B up, 2A up, 2B down. The complementary molecule to bind this state would have four markers with 'A' oriented downward and 'B' oriented upward on one end of the strand, and 'A' orented upward and 'B' oriented downward on the other end of the strand. The problem with this is that other target molecules which aren't complementary can still bind. For example, the target for the 1A up, 1B down, 2A down, 2B up would fit equally well into this binding pocket upside down. Also, any of the target molecules can bind with half of the binding pocket, leaving the non-complementary end either dangling or only loosely bound. The researchers get around these two problems using their error-correction scheme. It turns out that the correct target molecules bind more tightly to their complements than the incorrect ones. By heating the devices slightly, the researchers can dissociate the incorrect binding while keeping the correct binding intact. This is, I believe, what was meant by the phrase '100% accuracy.' So, in short, it's still exciting research, at least from my point of view, but no one's moving individual atoms with 100% accuracy or any of the hyper-exaggerated nonsense that I've been reading here.
Technically, you can take the Fourier transform of any Lebesgue-integrable function, which all of these seem to be. Unfortunately, the simplest non-integrable functions tend to infinite values at some points (think integral of 1/x from 0 to 3), which would probably be pretty hard on the ears. So yeah, I'm gonna go with country music.
Because I can explain special relativity in terms simple enough that anyone can understand, and climate science is no more complex than that.
Oh.
Oh my.
For someone with a supposed penchant for appeal to evidence, you fail spectacularly in backing up this claim. Perhaps you meant to say that you can explain a watered-down version of a few of Einstein's ideas in terms simple enough that anyone can understand. But that's not really the part of your quote that I take issue with. In reality, special relativity is actually rather straightforward (though that certainly doesn't diminish Einstein's insight). You have two inertial reference frames in motion relative to each other, you assume Maxwell's equations hold simultaneously in both of them, you derive that it takes a Lorentz transformation to get the measurements of one frame to agree with another. Boom, done. With climate models where you want any sort of insight beyond the most basic level, you have to look at the energy transfer to the Earth, the energy reflected away, the energy absorbed by various components (sea and atmosphere, at the very least), the fluid dynamics and heat transfer dynamics associated with each of those components, the coupling of the components to each other via heat transfer and phase change dynamics, and if you want to get really technical, you try to tie this in with, e.g., solubilities of various greenhouse gases in water at different temperatures; effects of changing dimensions of ice sheets, deserts, and forests on Earth's albedo; trying to find a way to tie cloud formation in with all the rest of this; etc.
And herein lies the problem: climate science is vastly more complicated than most people make it out to be. There is no easy watered-down explanation that you can give to your grandmother that will do the field any justice, which is what makes it so frustrating when the science is politicized in this vein.
And as for your use of the Phil Jones email, read it a little more closely. You'll see that he was clearly reviewing a paper for a journal (you know, the whole peer review thing that you were talking about), and had little control, beyond his review, over whether it finally got accepted to GRL (Geophysical Research Letters). Note his use of the word 'hopefully.' Very revealing.
Climate Science is a STUDY, much like Social Studies, Political "Science", and most (but not all) fields of Psychology. You cannot experiment on Climate on the timeframes or scales these "scientists" are suggesting. You cannot produce a hypothesis, alter variables, and confirm or deny your ideas.
Sounds like someone took 'Guns, Germs and Steel' a little too seriously. And in a way you're right. We can't create the earth's atmosphere in a lab to tinker with it, just as we can't create a star in a lab to play around with it. But we can get damn close. What you seem to overlook is that soft sciences like political science are almost entirely dominated by surveys and the correlations that those surveys find. Hard psychology, climate science, and astronomy, on the other hand, consist of theories that are backed up by experiment. (Overly simple) example: The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering of sunlight by N2 and O2 in the atmosphere. I can't create something as big as the Earth's atmosphere in the lab, with all its characteristics, and do experiments on it, but I can damn sure examine Rayleigh scattering of different mixtures of gases in the lab and compare the 80% N2 / 20 % O2 mixture's scattering properties with that of the atmosphere. Hell, if I did the same experiment using a totally different composition of gases and claimed that a planet with an atmosphere composed of those gases would have a sky with color x, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to deny me (at least not without a different explanation that was also backed up by experimental evidence).
The real problem with your (and Jared Diamond's) argument is not so much the premise (that fields like climate science and astronomy are different from fields like chemistry and physics) as the way the premise is presented. Saying 'Climate science isn't science' is disingenuous. More accurate would be something like 'Climate science isn't only experimental science.' It's more accurate and it meshes better with the intuition about the position that a field like climate science holds in our epistemic space
The way it sounded to me from TFA, this is fraud. Here's the legal definition (not TFA):
To establish a claim of fraud, plaintiffs must show by clear and convincing evidence (1) a representation; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) knowledge of its falsity or a reckless disregard for its truth or falsity; (5) intent that the plaintiff act upon the representation; (6) the hearer’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the hearer’s reliance on its truth; (8) the hearer’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the hearer’s consequent and proximate injury. King v. Oxford, 282 S.C. 307, 311, 318 S.E.2d 125, 127 (Ct. App. 1984).
Since relatively little is known about young people’s views about writing in the UK, the key
objectives of this survey were: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of
writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are and what they think about writing.
The survey wasn't meant to find out how good kids are at writing. It was meant to find out if kids are engaging in writing. The article points out that a vast majority of children ages 9-16 write regularly and that most enjoy the task when they can choose the topic. The self-evaluation part that everyone seems to be denigrating is meant to highlight the fact that about half of the children surveyed have confidence in their writing skills. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that they're objectively good writers. That's not the point of the study. But it does mean that a majority of them are comfortable with writing, which is extremely important. I know some of you are going to throw out the old hackneyed standby, "Correlation is not causation," and that's fine. If you want to claim that practicing the skill of written communication on a regular basis is merely correlated to being more effective at communicating via the written word, then that's your prerogative. And for you grammar nazis out there, to frantically fret over split infinitives and to avoid prepositions to end your clauses with are practices just as arbitrary as choosing to spell 'later' as 'l8r' (perhaps more so, as the latter at least has efficiency on its side). Grammar is a social phenomenon, not a linguistic one. Is you understanding what I be saying? The syntax is there, and that's all that matters for effective communication (for all you linguists, I freely admit that my grasp of AAVE is less than stellar). The rest is fluorish (I understand that speaking AAVE in, say, a job interview may be somewhat of a turn-off to potential employers, but that really is just a prejudice of the employers). Alright, lecture over.
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
Could be lots of reasons. For instance, we've witnessed accelerating melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Melting ice absorbs a lot of heat. More heat being used to melt large ice sheets means the temperature increase may stall until the ice sheets are fully melted. Also, 10 years worth of stalled heating isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It could just be natural climate fluctuations superimposed on a large slow rise in temperature. The five-year average shows little to buck the warming trend.
Even the Climate Change Congress now acknowledges this (quote: "temperature has plateaud"). Why?
Because its main motivation is to understand exactly what's going on with the climate. It doesn't have a political agenda. The best data right now suggests that the climate is getting warmer and that a probable reason for that is anthropogenic CO2. If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it.
And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?
You say that as if they've responded thus far. As far as I can tell, the developing world is completely exempt from any decision on climate change, and various other efforts to get world leaders to acknowledge and act on climate change have garnered meager changes in policy at best. Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you've never heard the term 'fluorine martyr.'
Would your response be different if the question was thus: "I have two children, one of which was a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that my other child was born on a Tuesday?"
Linear momentum, not angular momentum.
Just a technical aside: You need two photons to produce a particle-antiparticle pair (conservation of angular momentum).
I thought that was the recipe for Apple iPie.
Oh jeez, I in no way meant to imply that different skin colors were genetic disorders. Let's just put that flame out before it catches...
This brings up an interesting point. If we can use gene therapy to cure colorblindness or extend our senses, couldn't we also use it to give us certain disabilities to take advantage of handicapped laws? Or maybe we could change out our skin colors like the cool kids do with their ringtones. Or perhaps we could customize our abilities like we do our computers. Some of us may want a bare-bones system (literally?) or to be stripped of stuff we don't really need (like a complete vas deferns or Fallopian tube until we're ready to reproduce). I've seen a few commenters talking about a slippery slope, but what if you want to go skiing for a while (just to completely milk that metaphor)?
Wasn't this a plot device in Demolition Man?
If students are able to not pay attention, and still do well (enough) in classes, then make the classes more difficult.
Two words: grade inflation.
No idea how much it costs.
Well, the website you quote says it's cheaper than competing technologies, and Wikipedia says that the competing technologies (which still all seem to be in the beta phase) cost about $15k for the drive and $100-200 for the media. So I imagine this technology wouldn't be cheap.
This is ucking ridiculous. I'm a ullerene chemist, or uck's sake!
Seriously, how did this get on the front page? I suppose it's an interesting article, to theoretical chemists, but that's about it. Here's the paper from PNAS (heh).
You may notice a few things if you read it. First, it's an MD (molecular dynamics) simulation. Read: classical equations of motion with an empirically-derived force field (just to head off the quantum gibberish). Second, you'll notice that the paper doesn't mention anything about agriculture or cancer (or much in between), but instead seems to focus on topics as vital to our way of life as orientational entropy and the Widom temperature of water. Third, if you read the last few paragraphs (if you can make it that far), you'll see that a referee brought to the authors' attention that the work presented in their paper had essentially already been done about 15 years ago. Fourth, and perhaps most telling, is that this study is published in PNAS. This journal has an interesting quirk in that if you're a member of the Academy, you get to choose who referees your paper. Trust me, I've seen first-hand how some ancient Academy members use this policy to publish some serious garbage in that journal.
Now I'm not saying that Kumar et al's paper is not an important contribution to the field of theoretical water chemistry. I am, however, saying that it's not nearly interesting enough to be on the front page of Slashdot. Not sure why ScienceDaily picked it up either. I keep telling myself that when I have time, I'm going to start a lit review blog in this field so that the general (geeky) public has a little better handle on the stuff going on in physical chemistry that's actually interesting. Well see if it ever happens.
The take-home message from the paper, as far as I can tell, is that the researchers showed that one can achieve performance comparable to commercial solar cells by using 1% of the expensive ultrapure silicon used in current PV's.
The energy of a carbon bond is a few electron volts. IOW, that much energy is needed to cause a chemical change in the molecule.
While I have a hard time believing that low-intensity microwave/RF signals have any biological effect, this statement is not quite accurate. Just to clarify, the energy you're looking for is the activation energy of the reaction, not the bond energy. If you had to overcome the total bond energy directly every time you wanted to do a reaction, simple chemical processes like dissolving salt in water would be impossible. It doesn't take the input of a photon with energy x to break a bond with energy x. It just takes a photon with enough energy to excite the molecule into a chemical transition state (or more technically a state which can access a transition state), which may not be very high at all. In this case, however, if a chemical change is in fact occurring, it's much more likely to be happening because of thermal excitation than some sort of electronic or vibrational excitation.
Aside from pure physics experiments like measuring a potential variation in the fine structure constant since the beginning of the universe and such, I don't know how practical application of a clock this accurate could be achieved.
I was thinking maybe for a near-term application you could look for prospecting or seismographic uses of this. You know, place a widely-spaced array of clocks on a large section of land and use the extreme precision to measure gravitational anomalies. May tell you something about density changes of material in the Earth. I dunno; the most obvious application is probably to shoot a few of these into space and look for gravity waves, but if by 'practical application' you mean actually practical, prospecting was the best I could come up with off the top of my head.
Sorry, I know this isn't the first time I've ranted on this, but grammar has much more to do with upbringing than it does with intelligence, and I tend think of people as snobby and elitist when they judge others' grammar (especially considering how few people know how to correctly use a semicolon, or conjugate a gerund, or use the word 'whom'). Unfortunately, the bias against a certain grammar is pretty deeply ingrained, especially in hiring situations. But it's pretty arbitrary. And douchey. Arbitrary and douchey. Here's an exercise: the next time you ask 'who's there,' if someone responds 'it's me,' call them on their incorrect use of nominative pronouns used in conjunction with linking verbs (correct: It's I). See if you still count them among your friends.
I wouldn't recommend Spartan to high-school students. They can't possibly understand what the software is calculating without a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics, thus relegating the software to a toy with no practical application.
You could say the same thing about many synthetic organic chemists, but they still seem to get something out of using quantum chem programs. In my high school chem class, we definitely hit the basics of QM, so it might be elucidative for the students to see that you can predict spectroscopic and thermochemical molecular properties ab initio from QM laws.
One effective use of computers in the classroom that I've seen was from my advisor in grad school, who used the web to find videos of all sorts of dangerous or complicated reactions that he couldn't do in the classroom (stuff like large scale thermite reactions, or suspending liquid oxygen in a magnet). I do agree with most of the rest of the people here that actually doing the reactions will be much more enjoyable and eye-opening than watching a video of them. But I know that today's safety-obsessed culture probably doesn't permit you to do a lot of the reactions you want to do in the classroom.
First, the researchers made a nanodevice with two slots that could accommodate so-called "DNA cassettes" in a programmable way. The DNA cassettes themselves have free ends that can only bond with complementary DNA. Each of the DNA cassettes has an 'A' end (that can only bond with other A-type molecules) and a 'B' end (I'm simplifying this greatly; 'A' has nothing to do with adenine). The cassettes can be inserted into the two slots with either the 'A' end up or the 'B' end up. So this means there are a total of four states for the device: (1) first slot: A up, B down; second slot: A up, B down; (2) first slot: A down, B up; second slot: A up, B down, etc. The researchers were then able to take four target molecules (one for each of the four programmable states) and show that they bonded to their complementary state. Further, by developing an error-correcting scheme, they were able to get the fidelity of the bonding to 'apparently flawless' levels (quoting FTA, more on this in a sec).
A little more explanation is in order. All of the target molecules have an 'A' and 'B' marker on both ends of their strand. Now, say for example the nanodevice is in state 2: 1A down, 1B up, 2A up, 2B down. The complementary molecule to bind this state would have four markers with 'A' oriented downward and 'B' oriented upward on one end of the strand, and 'A' orented upward and 'B' oriented downward on the other end of the strand. The problem with this is that other target molecules which aren't complementary can still bind. For example, the target for the 1A up, 1B down, 2A down, 2B up would fit equally well into this binding pocket upside down. Also, any of the target molecules can bind with half of the binding pocket, leaving the non-complementary end either dangling or only loosely bound. The researchers get around these two problems using their error-correction scheme. It turns out that the correct target molecules bind more tightly to their complements than the incorrect ones. By heating the devices slightly, the researchers can dissociate the incorrect binding while keeping the correct binding intact. This is, I believe, what was meant by the phrase '100% accuracy.' So, in short, it's still exciting research, at least from my point of view, but no one's moving individual atoms with 100% accuracy or any of the hyper-exaggerated nonsense that I've been reading here.
Or you could just use tiny atoms...but have you priced those lately? I'm not made of money!
Technically, you can take the Fourier transform of any Lebesgue-integrable function, which all of these seem to be. Unfortunately, the simplest non-integrable functions tend to infinite values at some points (think integral of 1/x from 0 to 3), which would probably be pretty hard on the ears. So yeah, I'm gonna go with country music.
Because I can explain special relativity in terms simple enough that anyone can understand, and climate science is no more complex than that.
Oh.
Oh my.
For someone with a supposed penchant for appeal to evidence, you fail spectacularly in backing up this claim. Perhaps you meant to say that you can explain a watered-down version of a few of Einstein's ideas in terms simple enough that anyone can understand. But that's not really the part of your quote that I take issue with. In reality, special relativity is actually rather straightforward (though that certainly doesn't diminish Einstein's insight). You have two inertial reference frames in motion relative to each other, you assume Maxwell's equations hold simultaneously in both of them, you derive that it takes a Lorentz transformation to get the measurements of one frame to agree with another. Boom, done. With climate models where you want any sort of insight beyond the most basic level, you have to look at the energy transfer to the Earth, the energy reflected away, the energy absorbed by various components (sea and atmosphere, at the very least), the fluid dynamics and heat transfer dynamics associated with each of those components, the coupling of the components to each other via heat transfer and phase change dynamics, and if you want to get really technical, you try to tie this in with, e.g., solubilities of various greenhouse gases in water at different temperatures; effects of changing dimensions of ice sheets, deserts, and forests on Earth's albedo; trying to find a way to tie cloud formation in with all the rest of this; etc.
And herein lies the problem: climate science is vastly more complicated than most people make it out to be. There is no easy watered-down explanation that you can give to your grandmother that will do the field any justice, which is what makes it so frustrating when the science is politicized in this vein.
And as for your use of the Phil Jones email, read it a little more closely. You'll see that he was clearly reviewing a paper for a journal (you know, the whole peer review thing that you were talking about), and had little control, beyond his review, over whether it finally got accepted to GRL (Geophysical Research Letters). Note his use of the word 'hopefully.' Very revealing.
Climate Science is a STUDY, much like Social Studies, Political "Science", and most (but not all) fields of Psychology. You cannot experiment on Climate on the timeframes or scales these "scientists" are suggesting. You cannot produce a hypothesis, alter variables, and confirm or deny your ideas.
Sounds like someone took 'Guns, Germs and Steel' a little too seriously. And in a way you're right. We can't create the earth's atmosphere in a lab to tinker with it, just as we can't create a star in a lab to play around with it. But we can get damn close. What you seem to overlook is that soft sciences like political science are almost entirely dominated by surveys and the correlations that those surveys find. Hard psychology, climate science, and astronomy, on the other hand, consist of theories that are backed up by experiment. (Overly simple) example: The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering of sunlight by N2 and O2 in the atmosphere. I can't create something as big as the Earth's atmosphere in the lab, with all its characteristics, and do experiments on it, but I can damn sure examine Rayleigh scattering of different mixtures of gases in the lab and compare the 80% N2 / 20 % O2 mixture's scattering properties with that of the atmosphere. Hell, if I did the same experiment using a totally different composition of gases and claimed that a planet with an atmosphere composed of those gases would have a sky with color x, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to deny me (at least not without a different explanation that was also backed up by experimental evidence).
The real problem with your (and Jared Diamond's) argument is not so much the premise (that fields like climate science and astronomy are different from fields like chemistry and physics) as the way the premise is presented. Saying 'Climate science isn't science' is disingenuous. More accurate would be something like 'Climate science isn't only experimental science.' It's more accurate and it meshes better with the intuition about the position that a field like climate science holds in our epistemic space
The way it sounded to me from TFA, this is fraud. Here's the legal definition (not TFA):
To establish a claim of fraud, plaintiffs must show by clear and convincing evidence (1) a representation; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) knowledge of its falsity or a reckless disregard for its truth or falsity; (5) intent that the plaintiff act upon the representation; (6) the hearer’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the hearer’s reliance on its truth; (8) the hearer’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the hearer’s consequent and proximate injury. King v. Oxford, 282 S.C. 307, 311, 318 S.E.2d 125, 127 (Ct. App. 1984).
Could be an interesting case to argue in court.
FTFA:
Since relatively little is known about young people’s views about writing in the UK, the key objectives of this survey were: to explore how much young people enjoy writing, what type of writing they engage in, how good at writing they think they are and what they think about writing.
The survey wasn't meant to find out how good kids are at writing. It was meant to find out if kids are engaging in writing. The article points out that a vast majority of children ages 9-16 write regularly and that most enjoy the task when they can choose the topic. The self-evaluation part that everyone seems to be denigrating is meant to highlight the fact that about half of the children surveyed have confidence in their writing skills. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that they're objectively good writers. That's not the point of the study. But it does mean that a majority of them are comfortable with writing, which is extremely important. I know some of you are going to throw out the old hackneyed standby, "Correlation is not causation," and that's fine. If you want to claim that practicing the skill of written communication on a regular basis is merely correlated to being more effective at communicating via the written word, then that's your prerogative. And for you grammar nazis out there, to frantically fret over split infinitives and to avoid prepositions to end your clauses with are practices just as arbitrary as choosing to spell 'later' as 'l8r' (perhaps more so, as the latter at least has efficiency on its side). Grammar is a social phenomenon, not a linguistic one. Is you understanding what I be saying? The syntax is there, and that's all that matters for effective communication (for all you linguists, I freely admit that my grasp of AAVE is less than stellar). The rest is fluorish (I understand that speaking AAVE in, say, a job interview may be somewhat of a turn-off to potential employers, but that really is just a prejudice of the employers). Alright, lecture over.
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
Could be lots of reasons. For instance, we've witnessed accelerating melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Melting ice absorbs a lot of heat. More heat being used to melt large ice sheets means the temperature increase may stall until the ice sheets are fully melted. Also, 10 years worth of stalled heating isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It could just be natural climate fluctuations superimposed on a large slow rise in temperature. The five-year average shows little to buck the warming trend.
Even the Climate Change Congress now acknowledges this (quote: "temperature has plateaud"). Why?
Because its main motivation is to understand exactly what's going on with the climate. It doesn't have a political agenda. The best data right now suggests that the climate is getting warmer and that a probable reason for that is anthropogenic CO2. If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it.
And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?
You say that as if they've responded thus far. As far as I can tell, the developing world is completely exempt from any decision on climate change, and various other efforts to get world leaders to acknowledge and act on climate change have garnered meager changes in policy at best. Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior.