I'm not going to defend damn_registrars because that post said a lot more (the masters had to be in education and a Ph.D. didn't count as "equivalent coursework), so what damn_registrars said might well be BS.
But if you look at the text on p. 85 and figure 79 on p. 87, it looks to me as though the masters is required not for tenure, but to get a mandatory teaching license. Did I misunderstand that?
Ooops. I misread the GP post, so my answer did not address the real question of whether they would reject a Ph.D. as being equivalent. Sorry about posting an irrelevant answer.
One thing I will say is that getting a Ph.D. prepares a person for research, but most Ph.D. programs don't include anything about how to teach the material to high school students, so it's reasonable that a state would want to know not only do you know the technical material, but also do you know how to teach it, maintain classroom discipline, work with students who have learning disabilities, etc.
It's nice to be drawn to secondary teaching after getting a Ph.D., but there is an important step in actually getting training in how to teach before that Ph.D. will be useful to most high schools.
You've been asked twice already to say where this policy supposedly exists. What states are you talking about? I don't want to call BS on your post if some stupid state where liberals don't think about the consequences of their policies actually did something so dumb.
Since the commenter won't answer your question, here goes: Google points me to the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2013 State Teacher Quality Yearbook, which says that: "Connecticut, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New York and Oregon all require a master’s degree or coursework equivalent to a master’s degree" (p. 87).
So I'm curious: Since you have contempt for the way college educates kids, do you hire a lot of employees straight out of high school and provide the kind of real-world on-the-job learning that you extol? Or do you think that's just something OTHER employers ought to do?
What's the point of having your casino full of people if you are broke?
What casino would go broke from five or ten slot-machine jackpots? They actually do understand the statistics of payouts. That's why I mentioned the law of large numbers above.
Actually, no. If a machine hits jackpot twice even like that, they would yank the machine from the floor.
Why? Wouldn't a machine that happened to hit multiple jackpots in a row be a huge draw for customers? My impression is that Casinos want flashy payouts to get more people to come play because they damned well understand the law of large numbers.
Fascinating. We're talking about teaching scientific reasoning, yet this comment, its parent and its grandparent all infer principles about how to get better qualified teachers into a classroom on the basis of personal anecdotes.
No one cites systematic research on what produces effective teachers. None even says, "this is my experience, but it would take systematic research to tell whether it can be generalized." Instead, each one falls into exactly the fallacy identified in the article in the OP: using informal reasoning and thinking that it's principle-based scientific reasoning.
I had to acknowledge somewhere between 50 and 100 dialog boxes asking me if it was okay to do what I was doing. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's all explained in the The Antioch College Sexual Offense Prevention Policy
Consent is required each and every time there is sexual activity.
All parties must have a clear and accurate understanding of the sexual activity.
The person(s) who initiate(s) the sexual activity is responsible for asking for consent.
The person(s) who are asked are responsible for verbally responding.
Each new level of sexual activity requires consent.
Use of agreed upon forms of communication such as gestures or safe words is acceptable, but must be discussed and verbally agreed to by all parties before sexual activity occurs.
Consent is required regardless of the parties' relationship, prior sexual history, or current activity (e.g. grinding on the dance floor is not consent for further sexual activity).
At any and all times when consent is withdrawn or not verbally agreed to, the sexual activity must stop immediately.
Any regular/. reader knows that using Windows is a lot like taking a fist into your "even bigger hole," so it's only appropriate that Vista asks for consent every time. Just make sure Steve Ballmer knows your "safe word."
This is a very good point. Consider similarly, Dave Pritchard, the amazing MIT atomic physicist, who co-chaired a conference in 1992 on alien abduction. Weird stuff and a bit embarrassing to Pritchard's colleagues, but did not detract from his main work in atomic physics.
A more difficult case is Shockley, whose dabblings into eugenics and whose outright racism justly derailed his career but who undeniably was one of the crucial figures who set off the solid-state electronics revolution. Shockley is qualitatively different from Jahn or Pritchard because his private pet projects were noxious where theirs were innocuous.
But financially it was still a win of cosmic proportions - both for its owners and for humanity.
Basic research is REALLY good stuff economically. It's just that you can't say what the benefits will be until you actually make the discoveries... Perhaps that's why John Rowell, a major physicist and former director of Bell Labs, wrote in a 1992 Physics Today article, "Condensed Matter Physics in a Market Economy," that it's really important to have some industrial labs do basic research... but you'd be smart to let the other guy do it.
I agree with this in principle, as any encyclopedia is a tertiary source. But if a student wants to read and cite a primary source that the institution's library doesn't have an annual subscription to, what should the student do? Interlibrary loan is one of many good solutions for this problem. I'm always requesting books and articles via ILL and my reference librarians are happy to help. The downside is that this doesn't work well if the student waits until a few days before the assignment is due to start doing the research.
I'd love to see a study comparing the average IQ's of people from various ancestries.
US Immigration authorities tried this early in the 20th century. They gave IQ tests to large numbers of immigrants and found that those from English speaking countries tended to have much higher IQs than those from Italy and other non-angliphone places.
Of course, the political correctness police complained that the fact the tests were administered in English might have biased the results, but those bleeding hearts always find something to complain about.
Scientists have observed that there is a correlation between these two things (your second reference). However, evidence of correlation is not evidence of causation. It could be that rising CO2 levels cause global warming, or that global warming causes CO2 levels to rise, or that both of them are caused by some unknown third factor (and in the history of science, these things almost always turn out to be some unknown third factor
Actually, in studying the ice ages, there is no plausible explanation for the cycles of glaciation that does not include substantial greenhouse-modulation as a major part of the cycle. Ockham's razor recommends that this straightforward explanation is preferable to positing some "unknown third factor" which has no predictive or explanatory power.
Also, your notion that there is no rational reason to think CO2 is the cause rather than effect of Pleistocene climate change is a bit strange. There is a sound physical basis for connecting greenhouse gases to surface temperature and it's been tested by making predictions about variation of earth's weather as water-vapor mixing ratios vary and predicting properties of other planets' atmospheres. Moreover, you oversimplify when you posit a simple cause-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature. Actually there are well-known feedback relationships whereby increasing temperature tends to increase the concentration of greenhouse gases, which in turn raise the temperature, which then raises GHG levels further and so on.
Several of these loops have been tested against observations and confirmed. There are details that we don't understand yet, but the big picture is quite clear. Holding out for some mysterious unknown mechanism is a bit bizarre under the circumstances. Rather like arguing that maybe HIV doesn't cause AIDS, but some mysterious third-cause is responsible for both. Each of these hypotheses has a prominent scientist and member of the National Academy who supports the skeptical "third cause" hypothesis (Lindzen on global warming, Duesberg on HIV), but on both, the vast majority of scientists have achieved consensus that the causal connection has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
McIntyre and McKitrick were not taken as seriously as they should have been,
It's a pity not to take McKitrick as seriously as we should when he publishes "debunking" papers in which he mixes up radians and degrees when computing solar flux at different latitudes. The quality of peer-review McKitrick's papers get in the journals that do accept them is evident from the fact that this error was not being caught before the paper went to press.
When the latitude-dependence is properly calculated, McKitrick's alleged refutation of anthropogenic global warming disappears.
There have been many serious errors in the McKitrick's publications and this was only one of the more glaring and idiotic.
Much of what Gideon Tech complains about in the 10 terrible portrayals of technology is people copping interface ideas from Gibson's "cyberspace" and Stephenson's "metaverse." There's a double standard here where people rave about how cool Stephenson's and Gibson's visions are on the printed page, but complain about how stupid the same ideas are when portrayed in film.
Of course, Neuromancer and Snow Crash were much, much better as literature than Hackers or Swordfish was as a film, but the problem with the latter was not their use of Gibson's and Stephenson's cyberspace iconography. It was the fact that the former had imaginative unpredictable plots and engaging sometimes subtle characters while the latter had stupid, derivative stories and stupid, one-dimensional characters.
The mystery of Morgellons disease: infection or delusion?
Savely VR, Leitao MM, Stricker RB.
South Austin Family Practice Clinic, Austin, Texas, USA.
Morgellons disease is a mysterious skin disorder that was first described more than 300 years ago. The disease is characterized by fiber-like strands extruding from the skin in conjunction with various dermatologic and neuropsychiatric symptoms. In this respect, Morgellons disease resembles and may be confused with delusional parasitosis. The association with Lyme disease and the apparent response to antibacterial therapy suggest that Morgellons disease may be linked to an undefined infectious process. Further clinical and molecular research is needed to unlock the mystery of Morgellons disease.
Rain drops keep signaling my phone But that doesn't mean I'll pay their charges just to roam Roaming's not for me 'Cause I can't talk on my phone from an airplane The FCC Keeps on hassling me And rain drops keep signaling my phone.
One of the robust predictions of climate models is that the stratosphere will cool, making the prevelance of PSCs (polar stratospheric clouds) more likely. Ozone-destroying chemistry is accelerated by having ice crystal surfaces available. Thus it is not true that there's no relationship between global warming and the ozone hole.
But even in the presence of PSCs you need stratospheric chlorine levels above a threshold value before substantial ozone depletion takes place. That's there wasn't any ozone hole before 1980 despite plentiful PSCs over Antarctica. By the time anyone thinks we'll have enough cooling for significant PSC levels over the Arctic, CFC concentrations will have fallen well below the threshold for ozone hole formation, so it's very difficult to imagine a polar ozone hole even in the presence of very strong global warming.
Now we're getting to clearer, more scientific issues. I agree that there are three separate questions: First where is the CO2 coming from? Second, what are its effects on climate? Third, what are these effects likely to do to the quality of human life? The first question is much simpler and is settled. The second is much more complicated because climate is a complex nonlinear beast, but I think we have made a lot of progress over the past 20 years in understanding these effects so we can now make pretty reliable predictions. The third is the most difficult of all and I am not convinced that we can make useful detailed predictions about the effects of global warming on human life.
Climate is constantly being changed by natural phenomena and we've seen from paleoclimatology that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are part of complex feedback cycles that control natural climate variations. I agree that past CO2 variations grossly exceed anything we expect from anthropogenic activity. However, the more clearly we understand these cycles, the more it seems (to me) clear that adding a forcing term to any part of a feedback cycle can perturb the system and if we look at the nature of the CO2 cycle as we understand it (imperfectly), the past correlations between CO2 and temperature argue strongly that increasing CO2 levels artificially will warm the climate in the same way that natural increases in CO2 during the Pleistocene caused warming and natural decreases in CO2 caused cooling.
The difficult part of climate prediction is that the direct forcing terms are usually small and most of the effect is due to amplification by positive feedbacks, which may be modified by negative feedbacks. All the discussion in serious scientific circles, both among those who believe in global warming and those who doubt it, are about the relative magnitudes and interactions among the feedbacks. Even the most adamanat climate skeptics, such as Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels, agree that anthropogenic CO2 will warm the planet up, but Lindzen and Michaels think that there are more negative than positive feedbacks, so the total anthropogenic warming will not exceed about 0.5 Kelvin. People like Jim Hansen tend to think that positive feedbacks are more significant and that many of Lindzen's and Michaels's proposed negative feedbacks have not been demonstrated convincingly, so the same amount of anthropogenic CO2 will cause more like 3 Kelvins of warming.
I tend to find Hansen's arguments more convincing, as to most people who work full time in climate science, but there are those who prefer Lindzen's and Michaels's arguments.
The hardest part of the equation is not figuring out mean temperature rise, but the practical consequences of that. I am quite confident in the estimates of climate warming by Hansen et al., but I am more doubtful about the detailed predictions of precipitation patterns, tropical disease extent, species extinction, etc. The thing we can predict most confidently is the sea-level rise due to thermal expansion, but the more important question on sea-level rise, ice-cap melting, is very poorly understood at this time.
I don't think these things are well-enough understood for us to make confident predictions and we should approach the global warming question understanding the limits of our ability to make detailed predictions of the impact on our quality of life. I favor a more precautionary approach and others favor more of a "no regrets" approach, but this is a political question, not a scientific one.
Although I disagree with the no regrets position, it's intellectually defensible and deserves respect. What bothers me is that instead of having the real argument we should be having---whether the costs of avoiding global warming are even remotely justified by avoiding the harm we think it might cause---too many people are engaged in ad-hominem attacks on the honesty and character of decent hard-working scientists. We really ought to be able to have respectful arguments, such as you and I are having, without name-calling. Both sides are very guilty of descending into ad hominem invective and I don't think that serves any useful purpose.
It seems to me that you're approaching the atmospheric CO2 growth not as a scientist with an open mind, but as an ideologue who's already made up his mind.
The idea that CO2 growth comes from unknown natural sources is very contrived If the growth in CO2 were coming from unknown underwater sources, and fossil fuel CO2 is not accumulating in the atmosphere, then where is the CO2 from fossil fuels going? Perhaps it's being absorbed by unknown sinks. But then I ask why those sinks that absorb fossil fuel CO2 don't absorb the CO2 from your mysterious undersea sources.
You're asking me to believe that most of the CO2 from fossil fuels is absorbed by natural sinks and that growth in CO2 is due to natural sources, whose CO2 is not absorbed by those sinks that are eating the fossil fuel CO2. I don't see how you expect the natural sinks to recognize fossil fuel CO2 and absorb only that.
If you look at the growth of atmospheric CO2, it almost exactly matches the growth of fossil fuel use. We know fossil fuel consumption because the energy companies keep records and publish sales in their annual reports (detail: about half of fossil fuels burned are absorbed by various sinks, while about half remain in the atmosphere as CO2). We know CO2 growth before the 1950s from ice cores and other records and we have continuous real-time measurements from many stations around the world starting in the mid-1950s. All of these sources agree that growth of atmospheric CO2 almost perfectly matches the growth of fossil fuel consumption. More than half of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 10,000 years occurred since 1970.
So now you ask me to assume that these natural CO2 sources, which remained quiet for the last 10,000 years, suddenly turned on in the last two centuries, and that they turned on at a rate that mirrored the growth of fossil fuel consumption.
I know that atmospheric CO2 growing at rates that closely match fossil fuel consumption. I also know that fossil fuel consumption produces CO2. I also know that the changing isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 agrees with the isotopic ratios measured in fossil fuels. Now you ask me to choose between two hypotheses: either the CO2 comes from fossil fuel or it comes from natural sources that no one can identify, while the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels disappears into some sink that you can't identify and which only consumes fossil fuel CO2, not CO2 from your mysterious undersea sources. Ockham's razor tells me that the more probable answer is the simpler one: the growth in CO2 comes from fossil fuels. There are just too many arbitrary assumptions in your alternative explanation.
If you look at this as a scientist, how can you justify your alternative hypothesis on the grounds of simplicity, elegance, falsifiability, or any other measure of scientific merit? Your preference for a very elaborate and untested hypothesis over a much simpler one that has been tested (if the growth of atmospheric CO2 over the last 200 years did not match the growth of fossil-fuel consumption, my hypothesis would have been proved wrong; if the changing isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 didn't match the isotopic composition of fossil fuels, my hypothesis would have been proved wrong; etc.) doesn't make any sense to me, especially since you seem to be a practicing scientist.
I have given you many examples of tests that could disprove the anthropogenic warming hypothesis to my satisfaction. Can you tell me what tests you would accept as proving it (or disproving the null hypothesis that observed climate variation in the last century is purely natural)? If your hypothesis of natural causes is scientific, then you should be able to specify some clear criteria for falsifying it.
I had someone pull that "I pay your salary, and I'd like my burger without mayonnaise" line of bullshit once. Exactly once, because that hungry person had to go across the street and re-order his meal from another restaurant. I don't care if you're at the French Laundry and paying $450 per person for dinner, the dining room belongs to the waiter. You don't like the waiter's rules, take your money and go elsewhere. The restaurant doesn't NEED your self-centered, obnoxious ass around anyway.
I disagree about environmentalism and communism. I know and work with many pro-capitalist environmentalists. You fall into the ad-hominem fallacy when you assert that because there are marxist-wacko environmentalists, therefore environmentalism is fundamentally communist/marxist. Remember that Benito Mussolini was a brutal fascist capitalist (his hero was the economist Vilfredo Pareto), but that doesn't mean that capitalism is the "new refuge of fascist thinking."
In a previous post, I pointed out that lots of conservative Republicans and CEOs of large industrial businesses have stated that they are very concerned about global warming and believe that it's real and that it's caused by human activity. These include John McCain, Sherwood Boehlert, Paul O'Neill, all living former EPA administrators, including those who were appointed by Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes. I pointed you to a list of many major US industrial companies, including DuPont, Alcoa, and American Electric Power, that are working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions because their CEOs think global warming is a big problem. These people convince me that environmentalism is much more than a refuge for nutty former commies and hippies.
You also show a fundamental confusion when you get weather and climate mixed up. Predicting climate is much easier than predicting weather. I can't predict the weather for this coming July 15th, but I can predict the climate for July. Where I live, it's much sunnier and warmer than March. Because climate, by definition, is the statistical distribution of weather over time, it's much easier to make climate predictions than weather predictions.
As to an accurate anthropogenic number, we know that the bulk of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in the last thousand years is anthropogenic. We know this because the timing of the increases almost exactly matches the timing of burning fossil fuels. We also know it by observing changes in oxygen balance and isotopic composition---living carbon sources have different 12C and 13C ratios from fossil fuels. We then put a term into the model to include or not include the greenhouse effect from known anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide, methane, aerosols, etc. If we take this term out and only include known natural sources of variation we don't get good agreement with models.
These models only include known sources and sinks. How would you include an unknown one? Thus, they don't, so far, include the newly discovered natural methane sources. It's possible that including these sources would make the models more accurate regarding observations, and if so this would argue for a larger natural contribution. However, the fact that you can get pretty good agreement between theory and observation without including this term suggests to me that it's a small detail, not a big error. If it were extremely important, surely leaving it out of the calculations would produce garbage!
On the other hand, if someone, such as you, would do these calculations using the newly-discovered natural sources of GHGs and found that the natural sources could account for observed climate variations without needing to put anthropogenic sources in, this would be a strong argument against anthropogenic global warming.
My point is that the models are available to anyone who wants to download the source code, but no one has published calculations that simulate observed climate variations reasonably well without including the anthropogentic contributions. Also, no published calculations that simulate observed climate variations well fail to predict serious warming over the next 200 years.
If the models were full of errors, they wouldn't produce output that agrees well with observed climate variation. The burden is now on greenhouse skeptics to produce models that accurately model past climate observations and that don't predict future warming.
Exactly. I agree with you completely. My point was only that Crichton didn't raise any of these issues. He assumes that it's bad for Chiron to have a patent on a genome (something that's clearly not an invention). He then raises paranoid fantasies about people patenting essay forms, but never engages the reader in a reasoned argument that stupid patents such as Chiron's or the patent for the seemingly useless connection between B vitamins and homocysteine actually harm the public interest.
A good essay, and I think you could have written a much better one than Crichton, might have followed the lines of reasoning you introduce above and present a case for reforming patents. You might say, The patent office issues stupid patents. Here are the reasons
why stupid patents hurt the public interest. Therefore it's worth the public's time to write legislators and ask for patent reform.
Crichton, on the other hand, writes: The patent office issues stupid patents. Here are some paranoid fanatsies about where this might lead. Don't worry your little heads about whether this is actually hurts the public interest, just take my word that it's bad and go write your Congressman.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to defend damn_registrars because that post said a lot more (the masters had to be in education and a Ph.D. didn't count as "equivalent coursework), so what damn_registrars said might well be BS. But if you look at the text on p. 85 and figure 79 on p. 87, it looks to me as though the masters is required not for tenure, but to get a mandatory teaching license. Did I misunderstand that?
Ooops. I misread the GP post, so my answer did not address the real question of whether they would reject a Ph.D. as being equivalent. Sorry about posting an irrelevant answer.
One thing I will say is that getting a Ph.D. prepares a person for research, but most Ph.D. programs don't include anything about how to teach the material to high school students, so it's reasonable that a state would want to know not only do you know the technical material, but also do you know how to teach it, maintain classroom discipline, work with students who have learning disabilities, etc.
It's nice to be drawn to secondary teaching after getting a Ph.D., but there is an important step in actually getting training in how to teach before that Ph.D. will be useful to most high schools.
You've been asked twice already to say where this policy supposedly exists. What states are you talking about? I don't want to call BS on your post if some stupid state where liberals don't think about the consequences of their policies actually did something so dumb.
Since the commenter won't answer your question, here goes: Google points me to the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2013 State Teacher Quality Yearbook, which says that: "Connecticut, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New York and Oregon all require a master’s degree or coursework equivalent to a master’s degree" (p. 87).
In related news, John Carmack is using a BFG 9000 to compute the square root of -1.
So I'm curious: Since you have contempt for the way college educates kids, do you hire a lot of employees straight out of high school and provide the kind of real-world on-the-job learning that you extol? Or do you think that's just something OTHER employers ought to do?
What's the point of having your casino full of people if you are broke?
What casino would go broke from five or ten slot-machine jackpots? They actually do understand the statistics of payouts. That's why I mentioned the law of large numbers above.
Actually, no. If a machine hits jackpot twice even like that, they would yank the machine from the floor.
Why? Wouldn't a machine that happened to hit multiple jackpots in a row be a huge draw for customers? My impression is that Casinos want flashy payouts to get more people to come play because they damned well understand the law of large numbers.
Fascinating. We're talking about teaching scientific reasoning, yet this comment, its parent and its grandparent all infer principles about how to get better qualified teachers into a classroom on the basis of personal anecdotes.
No one cites systematic research on what produces effective teachers. None even says, "this is my experience, but it would take systematic research to tell whether it can be generalized." Instead, each one falls into exactly the fallacy identified in the article in the OP: using informal reasoning and thinking that it's principle-based scientific reasoning.
This is a very good point. Consider similarly, Dave Pritchard, the amazing MIT atomic physicist, who co-chaired a conference in 1992 on alien abduction. Weird stuff and a bit embarrassing to Pritchard's colleagues, but did not detract from his main work in atomic physics.
A more difficult case is Shockley, whose dabblings into eugenics and whose outright racism justly derailed his career but who undeniably was one of the crucial figures who set off the solid-state electronics revolution. Shockley is qualitatively different from Jahn or Pritchard because his private pet projects were noxious where theirs were innocuous.
US Immigration authorities tried this early in the 20th century. They gave IQ tests to large numbers of immigrants and found that those from English speaking countries tended to have much higher IQs than those from Italy and other non-angliphone places.
Of course, the political correctness police complained that the fact the tests were administered in English might have biased the results, but those bleeding hearts always find something to complain about.
Actually, in studying the ice ages, there is no plausible explanation for the cycles of glaciation that does not include substantial greenhouse-modulation as a major part of the cycle. Ockham's razor recommends that this straightforward explanation is preferable to positing some "unknown third factor" which has no predictive or explanatory power.
Also, your notion that there is no rational reason to think CO2 is the cause rather than effect of Pleistocene climate change is a bit strange. There is a sound physical basis for connecting greenhouse gases to surface temperature and it's been tested by making predictions about variation of earth's weather as water-vapor mixing ratios vary and predicting properties of other planets' atmospheres. Moreover, you oversimplify when you posit a simple cause-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature. Actually there are well-known feedback relationships whereby increasing temperature tends to increase the concentration of greenhouse gases, which in turn raise the temperature, which then raises GHG levels further and so on.
Several of these loops have been tested against observations and confirmed. There are details that we don't understand yet, but the big picture is quite clear. Holding out for some mysterious unknown mechanism is a bit bizarre under the circumstances. Rather like arguing that maybe HIV doesn't cause AIDS, but some mysterious third-cause is responsible for both. Each of these hypotheses has a prominent scientist and member of the National Academy who supports the skeptical "third cause" hypothesis (Lindzen on global warming, Duesberg on HIV), but on both, the vast majority of scientists have achieved consensus that the causal connection has been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
It's a pity not to take McKitrick as seriously as we should when he publishes "debunking" papers in which he mixes up radians and degrees when computing solar flux at different latitudes. The quality of peer-review McKitrick's papers get in the journals that do accept them is evident from the fact that this error was not being caught before the paper went to press.
When the latitude-dependence is properly calculated, McKitrick's alleged refutation of anthropogenic global warming disappears.
There have been many serious errors in the McKitrick's publications and this was only one of the more glaring and idiotic.
Much of what Gideon Tech complains about in the 10 terrible portrayals of technology is people copping interface ideas from Gibson's "cyberspace" and Stephenson's "metaverse." There's a double standard here where people rave about how cool Stephenson's and Gibson's visions are on the printed page, but complain about how stupid the same ideas are when portrayed in film.
Of course, Neuromancer and Snow Crash were much, much better as literature than Hackers or Swordfish was as a film, but the problem with the latter was not their use of Gibson's and Stephenson's cyberspace iconography. It was the fact that the former had imaginative unpredictable plots and engaging sometimes subtle characters while the latter had stupid, derivative stories and stupid, one-dimensional characters.
The mystery of Morgellons disease: infection or delusion?
Savely VR, Leitao MM, Stricker RB.
South Austin Family Practice Clinic, Austin, Texas, USA.
Morgellons disease is a mysterious skin disorder that was first described more than 300 years ago. The disease is characterized by fiber-like strands extruding from the skin in conjunction with various dermatologic and neuropsychiatric symptoms. In this respect, Morgellons disease resembles and may be confused with delusional parasitosis. The association with Lyme disease and the apparent response to antibacterial therapy suggest that Morgellons disease may be linked to an undefined infectious process. Further clinical and molecular research is needed to unlock the mystery of Morgellons disease.
PMID: 16489838 [PubMed - in process]
Rain drops keep signaling my phone
But that doesn't mean I'll pay their charges just to roam
Roaming's not for me
'Cause I can't talk on my phone from an airplane
The FCC
Keeps on hassling me
And rain drops keep signaling my phone.
You better stay away from those who carry round a firehose.
But even in the presence of PSCs you need stratospheric chlorine levels above a threshold value before substantial ozone depletion takes place. That's there wasn't any ozone hole before 1980 despite plentiful PSCs over Antarctica. By the time anyone thinks we'll have enough cooling for significant PSC levels over the Arctic, CFC concentrations will have fallen well below the threshold for ozone hole formation, so it's very difficult to imagine a polar ozone hole even in the presence of very strong global warming.
Climate is constantly being changed by natural phenomena and we've seen from paleoclimatology that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are part of complex feedback cycles that control natural climate variations. I agree that past CO2 variations grossly exceed anything we expect from anthropogenic activity. However, the more clearly we understand these cycles, the more it seems (to me) clear that adding a forcing term to any part of a feedback cycle can perturb the system and if we look at the nature of the CO2 cycle as we understand it (imperfectly), the past correlations between CO2 and temperature argue strongly that increasing CO2 levels artificially will warm the climate in the same way that natural increases in CO2 during the Pleistocene caused warming and natural decreases in CO2 caused cooling.
The difficult part of climate prediction is that the direct forcing terms are usually small and most of the effect is due to amplification by positive feedbacks, which may be modified by negative feedbacks. All the discussion in serious scientific circles, both among those who believe in global warming and those who doubt it, are about the relative magnitudes and interactions among the feedbacks. Even the most adamanat climate skeptics, such as Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels, agree that anthropogenic CO2 will warm the planet up, but Lindzen and Michaels think that there are more negative than positive feedbacks, so the total anthropogenic warming will not exceed about 0.5 Kelvin. People like Jim Hansen tend to think that positive feedbacks are more significant and that many of Lindzen's and Michaels's proposed negative feedbacks have not been demonstrated convincingly, so the same amount of anthropogenic CO2 will cause more like 3 Kelvins of warming.
I tend to find Hansen's arguments more convincing, as to most people who work full time in climate science, but there are those who prefer Lindzen's and Michaels's arguments.
The hardest part of the equation is not figuring out mean temperature rise, but the practical consequences of that. I am quite confident in the estimates of climate warming by Hansen et al., but I am more doubtful about the detailed predictions of precipitation patterns, tropical disease extent, species extinction, etc. The thing we can predict most confidently is the sea-level rise due to thermal expansion, but the more important question on sea-level rise, ice-cap melting, is very poorly understood at this time.
I don't think these things are well-enough understood for us to make confident predictions and we should approach the global warming question understanding the limits of our ability to make detailed predictions of the impact on our quality of life. I favor a more precautionary approach and others favor more of a "no regrets" approach, but this is a political question, not a scientific one.
Although I disagree with the no regrets position, it's intellectually defensible and deserves respect. What bothers me is that instead of having the real argument we should be having---whether the costs of avoiding global warming are even remotely justified by avoiding the harm we think it might cause---too many people are engaged in ad-hominem attacks on the honesty and character of decent hard-working scientists. We really ought to be able to have respectful arguments, such as you and I are having, without name-calling. Both sides are very guilty of descending into ad hominem invective and I don't think that serves any useful purpose.
It seems to me that you're approaching the atmospheric CO2 growth not as a scientist with an open mind, but as an ideologue who's already made up his mind.
The idea that CO2 growth comes from unknown natural sources is very contrived If the growth in CO2 were coming from unknown underwater sources, and fossil fuel CO2 is not accumulating in the atmosphere, then where is the CO2 from fossil fuels going? Perhaps it's being absorbed by unknown sinks. But then I ask why those sinks that absorb fossil fuel CO2 don't absorb the CO2 from your mysterious undersea sources.
You're asking me to believe that most of the CO2 from fossil fuels is absorbed by natural sinks and that growth in CO2 is due to natural sources, whose CO2 is not absorbed by those sinks that are eating the fossil fuel CO2. I don't see how you expect the natural sinks to recognize fossil fuel CO2 and absorb only that.
If you look at the growth of atmospheric CO2, it almost exactly matches the growth of fossil fuel use. We know fossil fuel consumption because the energy companies keep records and publish sales in their annual reports (detail: about half of fossil fuels burned are absorbed by various sinks, while about half remain in the atmosphere as CO2). We know CO2 growth before the 1950s from ice cores and other records and we have continuous real-time measurements from many stations around the world starting in the mid-1950s. All of these sources agree that growth of atmospheric CO2 almost perfectly matches the growth of fossil fuel consumption. More than half of the increase in atmospheric CO2 in the last 10,000 years occurred since 1970.
So now you ask me to assume that these natural CO2 sources, which remained quiet for the last 10,000 years, suddenly turned on in the last two centuries, and that they turned on at a rate that mirrored the growth of fossil fuel consumption.
I know that atmospheric CO2 growing at rates that closely match fossil fuel consumption. I also know that fossil fuel consumption produces CO2. I also know that the changing isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 agrees with the isotopic ratios measured in fossil fuels. Now you ask me to choose between two hypotheses: either the CO2 comes from fossil fuel or it comes from natural sources that no one can identify, while the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels disappears into some sink that you can't identify and which only consumes fossil fuel CO2, not CO2 from your mysterious undersea sources. Ockham's razor tells me that the more probable answer is the simpler one: the growth in CO2 comes from fossil fuels. There are just too many arbitrary assumptions in your alternative explanation.
If you look at this as a scientist, how can you justify your alternative hypothesis on the grounds of simplicity, elegance, falsifiability, or any other measure of scientific merit? Your preference for a very elaborate and untested hypothesis over a much simpler one that has been tested (if the growth of atmospheric CO2 over the last 200 years did not match the growth of fossil-fuel consumption, my hypothesis would have been proved wrong; if the changing isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 didn't match the isotopic composition of fossil fuels, my hypothesis would have been proved wrong; etc.) doesn't make any sense to me, especially since you seem to be a practicing scientist.
I have given you many examples of tests that could disprove the anthropogenic warming hypothesis to my satisfaction. Can you tell me what tests you would accept as proving it (or disproving the null hypothesis that observed climate variation in the last century is purely natural)? If your hypothesis of natural causes is scientific, then you should be able to specify some clear criteria for falsifying it.
I had someone pull that "I pay your salary, and I'd like my burger without mayonnaise" line of bullshit once. Exactly once, because that hungry person had to go across the street and re-order his meal from another restaurant. I don't care if you're at the French Laundry and paying $450 per person for dinner, the dining room belongs to the waiter. You don't like the waiter's rules, take your money and go elsewhere. The restaurant doesn't NEED your self-centered, obnoxious ass around anyway.
In a previous post, I pointed out that lots of conservative Republicans and CEOs of large industrial businesses have stated that they are very concerned about global warming and believe that it's real and that it's caused by human activity. These include John McCain, Sherwood Boehlert, Paul O'Neill, all living former EPA administrators, including those who were appointed by Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes. I pointed you to a list of many major US industrial companies, including DuPont, Alcoa, and American Electric Power, that are working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions because their CEOs think global warming is a big problem. These people convince me that environmentalism is much more than a refuge for nutty former commies and hippies.
You also show a fundamental confusion when you get weather and climate mixed up. Predicting climate is much easier than predicting weather. I can't predict the weather for this coming July 15th, but I can predict the climate for July. Where I live, it's much sunnier and warmer than March. Because climate, by definition, is the statistical distribution of weather over time, it's much easier to make climate predictions than weather predictions.
As to an accurate anthropogenic number, we know that the bulk of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in the last thousand years is anthropogenic. We know this because the timing of the increases almost exactly matches the timing of burning fossil fuels. We also know it by observing changes in oxygen balance and isotopic composition---living carbon sources have different 12C and 13C ratios from fossil fuels. We then put a term into the model to include or not include the greenhouse effect from known anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide, methane, aerosols, etc. If we take this term out and only include known natural sources of variation we don't get good agreement with models.
These models only include known sources and sinks. How would you include an unknown one? Thus, they don't, so far, include the newly discovered natural methane sources. It's possible that including these sources would make the models more accurate regarding observations, and if so this would argue for a larger natural contribution. However, the fact that you can get pretty good agreement between theory and observation without including this term suggests to me that it's a small detail, not a big error. If it were extremely important, surely leaving it out of the calculations would produce garbage!
On the other hand, if someone, such as you, would do these calculations using the newly-discovered natural sources of GHGs and found that the natural sources could account for observed climate variations without needing to put anthropogenic sources in, this would be a strong argument against anthropogenic global warming.
My point is that the models are available to anyone who wants to download the source code, but no one has published calculations that simulate observed climate variations reasonably well without including the anthropogentic contributions. Also, no published calculations that simulate observed climate variations well fail to predict serious warming over the next 200 years.
If the models were full of errors, they wouldn't produce output that agrees well with observed climate variation. The burden is now on greenhouse skeptics to produce models that accurately model past climate observations and that don't predict future warming.
A good essay, and I think you could have written a much better one than Crichton, might have followed the lines of reasoning you introduce above and present a case for reforming patents. You might say, The patent office issues stupid patents. Here are the reasons why stupid patents hurt the public interest. Therefore it's worth the public's time to write legislators and ask for patent reform.
Crichton, on the other hand, writes: The patent office issues stupid patents. Here are some paranoid fanatsies about where this might lead. Don't worry your little heads about whether this is actually hurts the public interest, just take my word that it's bad and go write your Congressman.