Sure science is imperfect and subject to political bias, just as any other field of human endeavor, but science is much better at being self-correcting because unless you've completely swallowed the postmodernist ideology, you would agree that science is built on a bedrock of objective facts that don't change to suit partisan politics.
I disagree with your assessment of the connection between anticapitalism and belief in global warming. Communist nations despised capitalism, but were much more reluctant than Capitalist nations to believe that their industrial activities hurt the environment. Russia and its Eastern European satellites did much more harm to the environment than all the capitalist nations combined. China, the only surviving Communist nation worth considering, is second only to the United States in greenhouse gas emissions and appears to have no qualms about burning vast quantities of coal.
From a capitalist point of view, we can see the environment as a capital asset and see damage to the environment as economically equivalent to spending our capital on recurring operating expenses: it may work for a time, but eventually we'll have nothing left to invest for the future, but the recurring expenses won't have gone away. It's the same line of reasoning that says the United States is foolish to build up a multi-trillion dollar debt to pay for recurring operating expenses, such as welfare, other entitlements, and routine military expenditures (as opposed to wars, which are non-recurring).
My personal position, as an environmental scientist, is that only industrial capitalism can save us from global warming because only a market economy can produce the kind of rapid and economically efficient innovation that can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions before it's too late. If we took a Communist, planned-economy position, we'd never get the job done in time and it would be much to expensive to afford anyway. The problem, as the libertarian economist Ronald Coase wrote back in 1960, is that a market economy can't manage global warming very well because there are no clear property rights to the atmosphere or the climate. If we assign property rights through auctioning emissions permits or if we correct for externalities via carbon taxes (many mainstream economists think these would be more efficient than the central planning necessary to determine the number of emissions permits to produce) then the market can allocate emissions efficiently and create incentives for entrepreneurs to develop and sell climate-friendly energy technology.
As to believing that humans cause global warming, there is a self-consistency to this theory that I don't see in contrarian pictures. We have models with source code that is available for public scrutiny, such as the GISS model used by Jim Hansen at NASA or NCAR's Community Atmosphere Model, that produce results that are quite consistent with historical data when and only when you include anthropogenic warming terms. If you include all known climate factors except anthropogenic warming terms, you get results that are inconsistent with historical data.
I haven't seen anyone demonstrating that Hansen's model or the CAM have serious scientific flaws, as you imply with your claims that there are big flaws that would be discovered if only scientists would open their code and calculations for detailed scrutiny.
Of course there are problems with the models: there are fudge factors that can be adjusted or manipulated to produce phony agreement between observation and theory and there are places where even with those fudge factors, the models disagree significantly with aspects of the observed climate, but still the agreement between model and observation is fairly close for the most part when, and only when, anthropogenic warming terms are included.
Meanwhile, so far as I am aware, no one who disagrees with th
In what fields of science does peer review entail detailed auditing? I have worked in many areas, from molecular spectroscopy to quantum optics to electrocardiology to stratospheric photochemistry and I have yet to see any field of science that satisfies your criteria for good peer review: paid reviewers who audit raw data, detailed calculations, and computer code. You seem to funamentally misunderstand the role of peer review in science if you think that this is what peer review is supposed to do.
The generally accepted purpose of peer review is to answer the questions: Does the paper ask interesting and important questions? Are the methods described appropriate to the problem at hand? Supposing the author accurately carried out the procedures described in the paper, do the data adequately support the conclusions?
Peer review is not supposed to provide an audit of the paper, but an editing function: if a paper passes peer review it is not guaranteed to be correct, but is deemed adequately interesting and plausible to be worth someone's time to read it carefully. The question whether it's plausible is in the eye of the reader.
The problem with Jaworowski is not that peer review of his work would constitute an audit of all his calculations, but that it would provide a document that meets the basic standards of plausibility, so others could try to replicate it or challenge its assumptions. Since Jaworowski doesn't publish his criticisms in serious science journals he denies others the chance to read detailed accounts of his methods.
As to the IPCC, its role is to review the published literature. It has no budget to fund original research or detailed audits of others' work. The way bad science gets corrected is for good science to challenge it. There have been many examples of people challenging and overthrowing popular but false theories by working within the system and there's no credible evidence that the commies have taken over all the science journals and funding agencies as you suggest.
About paleoclimatology: There certainly have been prior periods of global warming as well as cooling and you are also, no doubt, aware that past periods of rapid climate change generally coincided with mass extinctions. Hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes also occur naturally, but that doesn't mean that they are desirable or benign. As I said in my last post, the Ordovician did indeed have greater CO2 concentrations, higher temperatures, and higher sea levels than the present, but that doesn't mean that an Ordovician climate would be desirable, especially for the residents of the Gulf Coast or Florida.
If I exaggerated your line of reasoning, I could say that if a bioterrorist were to release a large amount of weaponized smallpox virus throughout several major cities this would be no cause for concern because there had been many natural smallpox epidemics in the past. I don't think you'd really say this, but could you explain why your argument about global warming is different?
I agree that Crichton is right that this patent shouldn't have been granted. The problem with Crichton's essay is that he doesn't give us a reason why we should worry about patents on nonfunctional technology. You are smarter than Crichton and can probably come up with a dozen examples of how bad patents make the world a worse place, but Crichton doesn't give a single example of how bad patents have actually hurt us. Since he doesn't distinguish between harmless stupidity at the patent office and stupidity that hurts us, he makes a weak case that we should care about the stupidity.
The ease with which I am sure you can come up with lots of examples of how this stupidity does hurt us emphasizes how lazy Crichton was in failing to come up with even one example of why we should care.
I agree almost completely with what you write here. I agree with Crichton's position, but think that his argument to support it is piss poor. The arguments I made in posts above are NOT attempts to refute Crichton, but to point out examples of arguments that he should have refuted himself instead of trying to be cute about patenting real-estate listings and essay structure.
Jaworowski hasn't published his hypothesis that ice cores produce unreliable CO2 data in a peer-reviewed journal, so the details of his analysis aren't available for serious scholars to scrutinize. If he were correct it would be hard to see how, despite the gross errors he asserts, different ice cores from all over the earth would produce CO2 concentrations that agree so well with one another.
As to H2O, you're just wrong. I challenge you to cite a peer-reviewed scientific calculation that finds 95% of the greenhouse effect due to water vapor. It's pretty straightforward to do these calculations and if you posit that almost all the greenhouse warming is due to water vapor, you find much greater meridional temperature contrasts than we observe (because there is so much water vapor in the tropics and so little over the polar regions) and a greater environmental lapse rate than we observe (because water vapor falls off so quickly with altitude, while CO2 remains fairly constant, so radiative cooling to space would start at lower altitudes).
In fact, H2O contributes around half of the greenhouse effect and CO2 contributes a bit more than a quarter. See The Earth's Annual Radiation Budget," by J.T. Kiehl and K.E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorolog. Soc. 78 (2), 197-208 (1997) for details.
The Ordovician climate had significantly higher CO2 levels than today, but there were no significant glaciers during most of that period and the sea levels were much higher than today. If we transitioned into an Ordovician climate, all of Florida and the Gulf Coast would be underwater.
I'm not arguing that nobody ever invents anything useful without patent rights. We get inventions with or without patent rights, but I'm arguing that there evidence (not conclusive, but not trivial either) that we get more inventions with patent rights than without them. This is the basis for having a Patent office in the first place.
Nobody except Chiron managed either to isolate or sequence Hep-C desipite over ten years of hard work. Chiron clearly would not have had the money to do the job successfully if its investors did not think it could turn a profit. I am not arguing that we know for certain that without Chrion, no one else would have succeeded. That's what I meant in my original post when I wrote, "If there were no patent rights in the offing, would we even have a Hepatitis C genome sequence to squabble over? This is a debatable question."
My point was not that the answer to the question was obviously "no," but that Crichton never bothered to address the question at all. He simply assumes that without patent rights Chiron or someone else would have made the discovery.
Your question to me is fair, but it's also fair to ask whether Crichton has any evidence that the discovery would have been made without patent rights or whether he pulled his assertion out of his butt.
Let me try to make myself clear here: Crichton's essay in the Times provides evidence that the patent office made a stupid decision. No doubt about that. What his essay doesn't do is provide any reason why the average voter should care.
This is important because if he wants his readers to do anything, such as write their Representatives and Senators, he needs to show why they should take the trouble. If he's not going to give the reader any evidence why he should care about stupidity at the patent office, why's he bothering to write an op-ed in the Times? This is why the essay is bad.
So now, not only can you copyright a book, you can copyright the citation of a book.
Your comment is a complete non-sequitur. Copyright violation and plagiarism are two completely separate things. If I photocopy Crichton's book and sell it without his permission, I have violated his copyright without plagiarising him. If I steal his ideas and write a different book inspired by his book, but don't give him credit, I have commited plagiarism without violating his copyright (you can't copyright an idea, only a particular expression of an idea).
Crichton used Lindzen's ideas without giving credit. He didn't steal a footnote from Lindzen's essay, as you imply. He stole the ideas. It is stealing not because of copyright issues, but because he didn't give credit. Is this clear?
There is mounting evidence that the natural water vapor cycle is the major cause of "Global Warming":
You're confused. Water vapor causes about 50% of the greenhouse effect, but the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is controlled by other things, such as carbon dioxide concentrations. Because water vapor is close to saturation all over the world, water vapor concentrations can't grow unless something else is causing the atmosphere to change to raise the temperatures. There have been several elegant experimental tests of the water-vapor feedback that demonstrate that water vapor concentrations change on a global scale in response to other forcings, which include anthrpogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
As to the charge that global warming is a left-wing plot, how do you explain that John McCain, Paul O'Neil (George W. Bush's first secretary of the treasury and former CEO of ALCOA), Sherwood Boehlert (Republican head of the House Science Committe), and all seven of the living current and former EPA administrators (these include administrators appointed by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes) all agree that global warming is a real threat to the environment and that it's caused by human activity? Even President Bush agrees that global warming is real and is caused by people.
Elsewhere, officials from 30 major corporations, including Ford Auto, ALCOA, American Electric Power, General Electric, DuPont, Whirlpool, and Intel, agree that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem and have voluntarily pledged to reduce their companies' greenhouse gas emissions.
These people are not Communist or Green Party fanatics. They are mostly Republican capitalists who worry that their grandchildren will not have the same opportunities they had if they don't take care of the environment.
Crichton's post is poorly researched and poorly argued because the only factual case he gives us of a bad patent is of a useless one. Patent abuse is a real issue that hurts real people, but you couldn't tell it from Crichton's essay, which only gives examples where patent abuse either causes no harm or exists only in his fantasy.
Can you provide one single example from Crichton's essay of a case where patent abuse has caused harm. If his essay were well-researched, surely he could have provided evidence that patent abuse is a real problem.
Interesting notion that he came up with the ideas independently. He writes a book about global warming in which he cites several scientific papers by Lindzen. He makes his hero a global-warming contrarian professor at MIT. Lindzen is the only well-known MIT professor who denies that global warming is a threat. Then just coincidentally, he has an idea that Lindzen has published in a book and posted on his web site and we're expected to believe that Crichton never saw it.
I find it easier to believe that he lifted the idea from Lindzen and didn't give credit.
I agree that it's a bit ridiculous to patent the relationship between B vitamins and homocysteine, but if this were a problem in real life, rather than just in paranoid fantasy, shouldn't Crichton be able to come up with examples of where it's actually caused problems? The whole essay seems to be a paranoid fantasy that someone will patent the rights to his next novel rather than a demonstration that there are actual problems in the real world.
I agree that there are actual real-worl problems with patent abuse and the fact that Crichton couldn't be bothered to look any of them up points to his intellectual laziness.
The problem is that the year-to-year noise in climate means that you have to look over something like 20 years to get an unambiguous signal. If I accept your premise---that we don't have actual testable predictions in hand---we wait 20 years and find the models are correct, it will be too late to stop a lot of warming because we will have continued to pump CO2 into the atmosphere for that long (enough according to some predictions, to put us irreversibly over a tipping point for extreme climate change over the following century). CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases affect climate for more than a century afer they're emitted and it's much more expensive to try to remove them from the atmosphere after they're emitted than to prevent emissions in the first place.
The reason to start taking action on global warming before we're 100% certain about the consequences was most articulately stated by Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The same arguments for applying the precautionary principle to Iraq's purported WMD applies even more so to global warming because whatever criticism you may raise about global warming, there is much more solid scientific evidence for this threat than there ever was for Iraq having WMDs.
Finally, I'd point out that according to your criterion for "prediction" we will have to wait tens of thousands of years before we can be convinced that evolution is a tested theory, because that's the time scale for macroscopic speciation to take place.
Crichton whines that the relationship between B vitamins and homocysteine is patented without appearing to have read the papers published in NEJM this week demonstrating quite persuasively that this relationship has no clinical value: vitamin B supplements for patients with high homocysteine don't affect patient outcomes.
Second, Crichton whines about the patents on the Hep-C virus genome. What he doesn't mention is for a decade no one managed to isolate Hep C virus or sequence its genome. Chiron took a big gamble and succeeded where everyone else had failed. If there were no patent rights in the offing, would we even have a Hepatitis C genome sequence to squabble over? This is a debatable question, but Chrichton is more interested in taking cheap shots than in substance. This is quite in character for him.
Finally, Crichton complains about people potentially patenting ways to end an essay, but perhaps he is so sensitive about this because he plagiarized the Afterword to State of Fear from Richard Lindzen. Crichton copies (without attribution) the thesis of Lindzen's 1985 essay, Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics. It's interesting that with all Crichton's footnotes and bilbiographic apparatus, he never references this essay or offers Lindzen credit for the ideas.
In a crash, the SUV generally wins. What gets omitted from this analysis is that SUVs are much less maneuverable than most cars, so most cars are better able to avoid the crash in the first place.
A study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that several compact and mid-size models, such as the Volkswagen Jetta or the Toyota Camry, have significantly lower rates of driver death than almost any SUV. For several SUVs, such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Ford Expedition, the GMC Jimmy, and the Toyota 4-Runner, the driver risk is more than 50% greater than for the Camry.
In a separate study, Tom Wenzel at LBL found that there was very poor correlation between vehicle weight and driver safety.
A few examples of successful revolutions after France, which produced neither reigns of terror nor Napoleons in their wake:
Gandhi's revolution in India, Solidarity's revolution in Poland, the real Irish Revolution (the one that liberated Southern Ireland, not the terrorism in the North masquerading as a republican war of independence), Chile's revolution against colonialism in 1810-2.
One could also point to the Mexican revolution, but that was much more complicated and bloody although I would still argue that its outcome was better (if only marginally) than the antecedant conditions.
Were a revolution organized, we have no weapons of any signifigance to mount an effective revolution.
In 1979, largely unarmed civilians overthrew the government of Iran, which boasted the world's sixth largest armed forces and was led by Shah Reza Pahlevi, whose brutality toward dissidents was legend---he was torturing children to make their parents talk long before Saddam Hussein was.
The current regime in Iran is almost as bloodthirsty and evil as the Shah's but my point is not to defend them, just to point out that revolutions don't need weapons if people understand political tactics. Most importantly, if the soldiers and police were to lose faith in the current regime then repression becomes impossible.
We don't have the sort of corrupt and evil government that you hypothesize above, but if we did, the people would not stand for it and would throw them out of power in a heartbeat.
it's part of a natural cycle of glacial / interglacial periods. Pollution is just uh...speeding things up.:)
The current levels of CO2 are about 25% higher than they've been in any interglacial in the last 650,000 years. The levels of other important greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide are even higher relative to previous earth history. This means that the current warming is expected to bring about temperatures significantly higher than we'd see in any of the Pleistocene interglacials.
To some extent, small amounts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (enough to raise global CO2 levels by around 20 ppmv) may have a beneficial effect by offsetting the natural climate cycle, keeping us comfortably warm when the earth would otherwise be heading slowly toward another ice age over the next several millennia, but we've gone way beyond that point (the increase is around 110 ppmv from the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago).
Fussing about SUVs is completely beside the point. Transportation accounts for only about 30% of US CO2 emissions. Much more (around 38%) comes from burning coal to produce electicity. Switching all 18 mpg SUVs to 36 mpg hybrids would have a much smaller effect on global warming than switching all coal-fired electric power plants to gas-turbines. Better still, let's have a crash program to put nukes in service.
But at the end of the day, if we're serious about limiting global warming, we need to cut the world's use of energy by about a factor of ten over the next few decades. There won't be anywhere near enough clean or renewable energy sources to replace our dirty ones over that time scale, so the only options are to shut off 90% of our electricity, stop driving cars altogether, and stop artificially heating and cooling our homes or else learn to live with the disruptions global warming will throw our way.
Not quite. If the system is originally in an eigenstate of the operator being measured, then it should be possible to perform a measurement without changing the state. For instance, if a photon is in a pure momentum eigenstate, then it should be possible to measure the photon's momentum without changing its state.
The problem is that most quantum measurements destroy the state, even in such a case. For instance, with the photon, we usually absorb the photon in order to measure it, so afterward there is no photon. A quantum nondemolition measurement is one that will leave the system in the measured eigenstate. If you measure the photon's momentum using QND techniques, you will leave the photon in the appropriate momentum eigenstate. If the photon was in that eigenstate to begin with, the measurement does not change its state.
The article in question reports a technique for performing quantum nondemolition measurements on qubit states in coupled Josephson junctions. If you initially prepare a qubit to be "true," then repeated measurements of its truth state should leave it in a "true" state.
Does this mean that we can find out if the cat is dead without opening the box?
No, it means that you can find out that the cat is alive without killing it in the process.
Most quantum measurements require you to kill the cat in order to determine that it was alive when the measurement started. For instance, drop a large weight on the box and listen for screams coming out. Think of measuring photons: the usual way to measure a photon is to allow it to be absorbed by something such as a photomultiplier tube. This tells you about the photon, but destroys the photon in the process.
Often it would be nice to measure the state of a photon now, then manipulate the photon and measure the state at a later time. This is clearly impossible with photomultiplier tubes. Serge Haroche and others have developed nice ways to measure the number of photons in a superconducting cavity without destroying the photons (killing the cat). They used these techniques to perform the first serious analogues of Schrödinger's cat experiment, except using superpositions of macroscopic photon Fock states instead of actual cats.
What the article describes is a similar type of quantum nondemolition measurement of the state of a qbit that lets you read the qbit out of a Josephson junction without destroying it.
I swear by Mitsui archival gold CDs for archival storage of my digital photos. I use a thermal printer to label them: much more legible than pen and the discs are designed to work well with a thermal printer.
People who make up definitions of science and then try to rule out rival theories because they are not "scientific" are usually up to no good. Part of what is at stake in scientific controversy is what the proper definition of science is.
Here's what Alvin Plantinga, one of the major ID honchos and a tenured professor at Notre Dame, suggests for a proper definition of science:
[A] Christian academic and scientific community ought to pursue science in its own way, starting from and taking for granted what we know as Christians. (This suggestion suffers from the considerable disadvantage of being at present both unpopular and heretical; I shall argue, however, that it also has the considerable advantage of being correct).
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I disagree with your assessment of the connection between anticapitalism and belief in global warming. Communist nations despised capitalism, but were much more reluctant than Capitalist nations to believe that their industrial activities hurt the environment. Russia and its Eastern European satellites did much more harm to the environment than all the capitalist nations combined. China, the only surviving Communist nation worth considering, is second only to the United States in greenhouse gas emissions and appears to have no qualms about burning vast quantities of coal.
From a capitalist point of view, we can see the environment as a capital asset and see damage to the environment as economically equivalent to spending our capital on recurring operating expenses: it may work for a time, but eventually we'll have nothing left to invest for the future, but the recurring expenses won't have gone away. It's the same line of reasoning that says the United States is foolish to build up a multi-trillion dollar debt to pay for recurring operating expenses, such as welfare, other entitlements, and routine military expenditures (as opposed to wars, which are non-recurring).
My personal position, as an environmental scientist, is that only industrial capitalism can save us from global warming because only a market economy can produce the kind of rapid and economically efficient innovation that can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions before it's too late. If we took a Communist, planned-economy position, we'd never get the job done in time and it would be much to expensive to afford anyway. The problem, as the libertarian economist Ronald Coase wrote back in 1960, is that a market economy can't manage global warming very well because there are no clear property rights to the atmosphere or the climate. If we assign property rights through auctioning emissions permits or if we correct for externalities via carbon taxes (many mainstream economists think these would be more efficient than the central planning necessary to determine the number of emissions permits to produce) then the market can allocate emissions efficiently and create incentives for entrepreneurs to develop and sell climate-friendly energy technology.
As to believing that humans cause global warming, there is a self-consistency to this theory that I don't see in contrarian pictures. We have models with source code that is available for public scrutiny, such as the GISS model used by Jim Hansen at NASA or NCAR's Community Atmosphere Model, that produce results that are quite consistent with historical data when and only when you include anthropogenic warming terms. If you include all known climate factors except anthropogenic warming terms, you get results that are inconsistent with historical data.
I haven't seen anyone demonstrating that Hansen's model or the CAM have serious scientific flaws, as you imply with your claims that there are big flaws that would be discovered if only scientists would open their code and calculations for detailed scrutiny.
Of course there are problems with the models: there are fudge factors that can be adjusted or manipulated to produce phony agreement between observation and theory and there are places where even with those fudge factors, the models disagree significantly with aspects of the observed climate, but still the agreement between model and observation is fairly close for the most part when, and only when, anthropogenic warming terms are included.
Meanwhile, so far as I am aware, no one who disagrees with th
The generally accepted purpose of peer review is to answer the questions: Does the paper ask interesting and important questions? Are the methods described appropriate to the problem at hand? Supposing the author accurately carried out the procedures described in the paper, do the data adequately support the conclusions?
Peer review is not supposed to provide an audit of the paper, but an editing function: if a paper passes peer review it is not guaranteed to be correct, but is deemed adequately interesting and plausible to be worth someone's time to read it carefully. The question whether it's plausible is in the eye of the reader.
The problem with Jaworowski is not that peer review of his work would constitute an audit of all his calculations, but that it would provide a document that meets the basic standards of plausibility, so others could try to replicate it or challenge its assumptions. Since Jaworowski doesn't publish his criticisms in serious science journals he denies others the chance to read detailed accounts of his methods.
As to the IPCC, its role is to review the published literature. It has no budget to fund original research or detailed audits of others' work. The way bad science gets corrected is for good science to challenge it. There have been many examples of people challenging and overthrowing popular but false theories by working within the system and there's no credible evidence that the commies have taken over all the science journals and funding agencies as you suggest.
About paleoclimatology: There certainly have been prior periods of global warming as well as cooling and you are also, no doubt, aware that past periods of rapid climate change generally coincided with mass extinctions. Hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes also occur naturally, but that doesn't mean that they are desirable or benign. As I said in my last post, the Ordovician did indeed have greater CO2 concentrations, higher temperatures, and higher sea levels than the present, but that doesn't mean that an Ordovician climate would be desirable, especially for the residents of the Gulf Coast or Florida.
If I exaggerated your line of reasoning, I could say that if a bioterrorist were to release a large amount of weaponized smallpox virus throughout several major cities this would be no cause for concern because there had been many natural smallpox epidemics in the past. I don't think you'd really say this, but could you explain why your argument about global warming is different?
The ease with which I am sure you can come up with lots of examples of how this stupidity does hurt us emphasizes how lazy Crichton was in failing to come up with even one example of why we should care.
I agree almost completely with what you write here. I agree with Crichton's position, but think that his argument to support it is piss poor. The arguments I made in posts above are NOT attempts to refute Crichton, but to point out examples of arguments that he should have refuted himself instead of trying to be cute about patenting real-estate listings and essay structure.
As to H2O, you're just wrong. I challenge you to cite a peer-reviewed scientific calculation that finds 95% of the greenhouse effect due to water vapor. It's pretty straightforward to do these calculations and if you posit that almost all the greenhouse warming is due to water vapor, you find much greater meridional temperature contrasts than we observe (because there is so much water vapor in the tropics and so little over the polar regions) and a greater environmental lapse rate than we observe (because water vapor falls off so quickly with altitude, while CO2 remains fairly constant, so radiative cooling to space would start at lower altitudes).
In fact, H2O contributes around half of the greenhouse effect and CO2 contributes a bit more than a quarter. See The Earth's Annual Radiation Budget," by J.T. Kiehl and K.E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorolog. Soc. 78 (2), 197-208 (1997) for details.
The Ordovician climate had significantly higher CO2 levels than today, but there were no significant glaciers during most of that period and the sea levels were much higher than today. If we transitioned into an Ordovician climate, all of Florida and the Gulf Coast would be underwater.
Nobody except Chiron managed either to isolate or sequence Hep-C desipite over ten years of hard work. Chiron clearly would not have had the money to do the job successfully if its investors did not think it could turn a profit. I am not arguing that we know for certain that without Chrion, no one else would have succeeded. That's what I meant in my original post when I wrote, "If there were no patent rights in the offing, would we even have a Hepatitis C genome sequence to squabble over? This is a debatable question. "
My point was not that the answer to the question was obviously "no," but that Crichton never bothered to address the question at all. He simply assumes that without patent rights Chiron or someone else would have made the discovery. Your question to me is fair, but it's also fair to ask whether Crichton has any evidence that the discovery would have been made without patent rights or whether he pulled his assertion out of his butt.
This is important because if he wants his readers to do anything, such as write their Representatives and Senators, he needs to show why they should take the trouble. If he's not going to give the reader any evidence why he should care about stupidity at the patent office, why's he bothering to write an op-ed in the Times? This is why the essay is bad.
Your comment is a complete non-sequitur. Copyright violation and plagiarism are two completely separate things. If I photocopy Crichton's book and sell it without his permission, I have violated his copyright without plagiarising him. If I steal his ideas and write a different book inspired by his book, but don't give him credit, I have commited plagiarism without violating his copyright (you can't copyright an idea, only a particular expression of an idea).
Crichton used Lindzen's ideas without giving credit. He didn't steal a footnote from Lindzen's essay, as you imply. He stole the ideas. It is stealing not because of copyright issues, but because he didn't give credit. Is this clear?
As to the charge that global warming is a left-wing plot, how do you explain that John McCain, Paul O'Neil (George W. Bush's first secretary of the treasury and former CEO of ALCOA), Sherwood Boehlert (Republican head of the House Science Committe), and all seven of the living current and former EPA administrators (these include administrators appointed by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes) all agree that global warming is a real threat to the environment and that it's caused by human activity? Even President Bush agrees that global warming is real and is caused by people.
Elsewhere, officials from 30 major corporations, including Ford Auto, ALCOA, American Electric Power, General Electric, DuPont, Whirlpool, and Intel, agree that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem and have voluntarily pledged to reduce their companies' greenhouse gas emissions.
These people are not Communist or Green Party fanatics. They are mostly Republican capitalists who worry that their grandchildren will not have the same opportunities they had if they don't take care of the environment.
Can you provide one single example from Crichton's essay of a case where patent abuse has caused harm. If his essay were well-researched, surely he could have provided evidence that patent abuse is a real problem.
I find it easier to believe that he lifted the idea from Lindzen and didn't give credit.
I agree that there are actual real-worl problems with patent abuse and the fact that Crichton couldn't be bothered to look any of them up points to his intellectual laziness.
The reason to start taking action on global warming before we're 100% certain about the consequences was most articulately stated by Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The same arguments for applying the precautionary principle to Iraq's purported WMD applies even more so to global warming because whatever criticism you may raise about global warming, there is much more solid scientific evidence for this threat than there ever was for Iraq having WMDs.
Finally, I'd point out that according to your criterion for "prediction" we will have to wait tens of thousands of years before we can be convinced that evolution is a tested theory, because that's the time scale for macroscopic speciation to take place.
Second, Crichton whines about the patents on the Hep-C virus genome. What he doesn't mention is for a decade no one managed to isolate Hep C virus or sequence its genome. Chiron took a big gamble and succeeded where everyone else had failed. If there were no patent rights in the offing, would we even have a Hepatitis C genome sequence to squabble over? This is a debatable question, but Chrichton is more interested in taking cheap shots than in substance. This is quite in character for him.
Finally, Crichton complains about people potentially patenting ways to end an essay, but perhaps he is so sensitive about this because he plagiarized the Afterword to State of Fear from Richard Lindzen. Crichton copies (without attribution) the thesis of Lindzen's 1985 essay, Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics. It's interesting that with all Crichton's footnotes and bilbiographic apparatus, he never references this essay or offers Lindzen credit for the ideas.
Google's server farm uses as much electricity as lighting a medium-sized city. Perhaps shutting Google down at night would do the trick.
A study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that several compact and mid-size models, such as the Volkswagen Jetta or the Toyota Camry, have significantly lower rates of driver death than almost any SUV. For several SUVs, such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Ford Expedition, the GMC Jimmy, and the Toyota 4-Runner, the driver risk is more than 50% greater than for the Camry.
In a separate study, Tom Wenzel at LBL found that there was very poor correlation between vehicle weight and driver safety.
Gandhi's revolution in India, Solidarity's revolution in Poland, the real Irish Revolution (the one that liberated Southern Ireland, not the terrorism in the North masquerading as a republican war of independence), Chile's revolution against colonialism in 1810-2.
One could also point to the Mexican revolution, but that was much more complicated and bloody although I would still argue that its outcome was better (if only marginally) than the antecedant conditions.
Well I used to be disgusted
And now I try to be amused
But since their wings have gotten rusted
You know, the angels want to wear my red shoes.
In 1979, largely unarmed civilians overthrew the government of Iran, which boasted the world's sixth largest armed forces and was led by Shah Reza Pahlevi, whose brutality toward dissidents was legend---he was torturing children to make their parents talk long before Saddam Hussein was.
The current regime in Iran is almost as bloodthirsty and evil as the Shah's but my point is not to defend them, just to point out that revolutions don't need weapons if people understand political tactics. Most importantly, if the soldiers and police were to lose faith in the current regime then repression becomes impossible.
We don't have the sort of corrupt and evil government that you hypothesize above, but if we did, the people would not stand for it and would throw them out of power in a heartbeat.
The current levels of CO2 are about 25% higher than they've been in any interglacial in the last 650,000 years. The levels of other important greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide are even higher relative to previous earth history. This means that the current warming is expected to bring about temperatures significantly higher than we'd see in any of the Pleistocene interglacials.
To some extent, small amounts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (enough to raise global CO2 levels by around 20 ppmv) may have a beneficial effect by offsetting the natural climate cycle, keeping us comfortably warm when the earth would otherwise be heading slowly toward another ice age over the next several millennia, but we've gone way beyond that point (the increase is around 110 ppmv from the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago).
Fussing about SUVs is completely beside the point. Transportation accounts for only about 30% of US CO2 emissions. Much more (around 38%) comes from burning coal to produce electicity. Switching all 18 mpg SUVs to 36 mpg hybrids would have a much smaller effect on global warming than switching all coal-fired electric power plants to gas-turbines. Better still, let's have a crash program to put nukes in service.
But at the end of the day, if we're serious about limiting global warming, we need to cut the world's use of energy by about a factor of ten over the next few decades. There won't be anywhere near enough clean or renewable energy sources to replace our dirty ones over that time scale, so the only options are to shut off 90% of our electricity, stop driving cars altogether, and stop artificially heating and cooling our homes or else learn to live with the disruptions global warming will throw our way.
Not quite. If the system is originally in an eigenstate of the operator being measured, then it should be possible to perform a measurement without changing the state. For instance, if a photon is in a pure momentum eigenstate, then it should be possible to measure the photon's momentum without changing its state.
The problem is that most quantum measurements destroy the state, even in such a case. For instance, with the photon, we usually absorb the photon in order to measure it, so afterward there is no photon. A quantum nondemolition measurement is one that will leave the system in the measured eigenstate. If you measure the photon's momentum using QND techniques, you will leave the photon in the appropriate momentum eigenstate. If the photon was in that eigenstate to begin with, the measurement does not change its state.
The article in question reports a technique for performing quantum nondemolition measurements on qubit states in coupled Josephson junctions. If you initially prepare a qubit to be "true," then repeated measurements of its truth state should leave it in a "true" state.
No, it means that you can find out that the cat is alive without killing it in the process.
Most quantum measurements require you to kill the cat in order to determine that it was alive when the measurement started. For instance, drop a large weight on the box and listen for screams coming out. Think of measuring photons: the usual way to measure a photon is to allow it to be absorbed by something such as a photomultiplier tube. This tells you about the photon, but destroys the photon in the process.
Often it would be nice to measure the state of a photon now, then manipulate the photon and measure the state at a later time. This is clearly impossible with photomultiplier tubes. Serge Haroche and others have developed nice ways to measure the number of photons in a superconducting cavity without destroying the photons (killing the cat). They used these techniques to perform the first serious analogues of Schrödinger's cat experiment, except using superpositions of macroscopic photon Fock states instead of actual cats.
What the article describes is a similar type of quantum nondemolition measurement of the state of a qbit that lets you read the qbit out of a Josephson junction without destroying it.
I swear by Mitsui archival gold CDs for archival storage of my digital photos. I use a thermal printer to label them: much more legible than pen and the discs are designed to work well with a thermal printer.
Under IPv6 the internet will surf you.