Most, if not all, teaching/research professorships at universities do. As a result, typically, for the remaining three months, they have to supplement their salary with research grant money, if there is enough available.
History is filled with intransigent people like yourself that do not believe we will ever grow beyond our current mold, that certain topics are not worth pursuing as they will never bear fruit, etc. A good example are those skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence moving away simple heuristics and mathematical models, despite that "full"-brain simulation, at least at the neuronal level, is now not a matter of if, but when:
H. Markram, "The Blue Brain project", Nature Rev. Neurosci. 7: 153-160, 2006 H. Markram, "Fixing the location and dimensions of functional neocortical columns", HFSP J. 2: 132-135, 2008 G. Khazen, et al., "Combinatorial expression rules of ion channel genes in juvenile rat (Rattus norvegicus) neocortical neurons", PLoS One 7: e34786, 2012 M. Hines, et al., "Comparison of neuronal spike exchange methods on a Blue Gene/P supercomputer" Front. Comput. Neurosci. 5: 49, 2011 R. Perin, et al., "A synaptic organizing principle for cortical neuronal groups", PNAS 108: 5419-5424, 2011 A. C. Anastassiou, et al., "Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons", Nature Neurosci. 14: 217-223, 2011 S. Druckmann, et al, "Effective stimuli for constructing reliable neuron models", PLoS Comput. Biol. 7: e1002133, 2011 E. Hay, et al., "Models of neocortical layer 5b pyramidal cells capturing a wide range of dendritic and perisomatic active properties", PLoS Comput. Biol. 7: e1002107, 2011 S. Romand, et al., "Morphological development of thick-tufted layer V pyramidal cells in the rat somatosensory cortex", Front. Neuroanat. 5: 5, 2011 J. G. King, et al., "A copmonent-based extension framework for large-scale parallel simulations in NEURON", Front. Neuroinfo. 3: 10, 2009 T. K. Berger, et al., "Frequency-dependent disynaptic inhibition in the pyramidal network: A ubiquitous pathway in the developing rat neocortex", J. Physiol. 587: 5411-5425, 2009 A. Loebel, et al., "Multiquantal release underlies the distribution of synaptic efficacies in the neocortex", Front. Comput. Neurosci. 3: 27, 2009 H. Köndgen, et al., "The dynamical response properties of neocortical neurons to temporally modulated noisy inputs in vitro", Cerebral Cortex 18: 2086-2097, 2008 M. L. Hines, et al., "Neuron splitting in compute-bound parallel network simulations enables runtime scaling with twice as many processors", J. Comput. Neurosci. 25: 203-210, 2008 M. L. Hines, et al., "Fully implicit parallel simulation of single neurons", J. Comput. Neurosci. 25: 439-448, 2008 C. Calì, et al., "Inferring connection proximity in networks of electrically coupled cells by subthreshold frequency response analysis", J. Comput. Neurosci. 24: 330-345, 2008 M. Arsiero, et al., "The impact of input fluctuations on the frequency–current relationships of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the rat medial prefrontal cortex", J. Neurosci. 27: 3274-3284, 2007 J.-V. Le Bé, et al., "Morphological, electrophysiological, and synaptic properties of corticocallosal pyramidal cells in the neonatal rat neocortex", Cerebral Cortex 17: 2204-2213, 2007 G. Silberberg and H. Markram, "Disynaptic inhibition between neocortical pyramidal cells mediated by Martinotti cells", Neuron 53: 735-746, 2007 M. Toledo-Rodriguez and H. Markram, "Single-cell RT-PCR, a technique to decipher the electrical, anatomical, and genetic determinants of neuronal diversity", Methods Mol. Biol. 403: 123-139, 2007 T. Berger, et al., "Transient rhythmic network activity in the somatosensory cortex evoked by distributed input in vitro", Neurosci. 140: 1401-1413, 2006 J.-V. Le Bé and H. Markram, "Spontaneous and evoked synaptic rewiring in the neonatal neocortex", PNAS 103: 13214-13219, 2006 M. Migliore, et al., "Parallel network simulations with NEURON", J. Comput. Neurosci. 21: 119-129, 2006 Y. Wang, et al., "Heterogeneity in the pyramidal network of the medial prefrontal cortex", Nature Neurosci. 9: 534-542, 2006 J. V. Le Bé, et al., "Morphological, electrophysiological, and synaptic properties of cor
[...] highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much.
All of the background information in a thesis serves to do three more things, when properly written, beyond what you mentioned, i.e., showing that you appear to know the material:
- First, it should provide a nice, high-level summary of the research area you're focusing on, perhaps with a nod to related ones, so that a new researcher coming into the field can immediately get a foothold and decide what he or she needs to read to become more proficient. (Merely citing a slew of papers is great, but definitely not as meaningful as posting what work was done in them, providing some insights, etc.) In fact, being rather thorough in your literature review is a great way to garner plenty of citations: even if you don't intend for it to be a review paper, others will start viewing it as such.
- A second, intertwined point is that it should provide enough background information for someone who is sufficiently well-versed in that discipline, but not necessarily your topic, to gauge the credibility of your work. For example, in my S.M. Applied Math thesis, I had some nice sections on (special) functions of bounded variation, gamma convergence, k-currents, and variolds, along with some novel proofs of some fundamental notions associated with each of those, as my committee members were not completely knowledgeable about each. Moreover, the proofs I included had the effect of making my later analyses simpler than if I had gone with some of the standard proofs, e.g., by L. Ambrosio, G. Dal Maso, etc.
- Finally, it should explain how what you are doing is sufficient to merit an advanced degree.
From the units posted on the graph, the windows in the Passivhaus are emitting radiation consistent with a 1-2C increase in temperature (or, rather, the difference between 37/39.2F and 41F), while those for the traditional structure are consistent with a ~4C increase in temperature (or, rather, the difference between 37/39.2F and 46F). (Compared to double-pane, low-E, R-3 (U-factor 0.3) windows, triple-pane windows (typically R-5/U-factor 0.2) can reduce average heat loss through the window by more than 30 percent, when compared to R-3 windows in residential buildings situated in northern climate zones.) To say that the windows in the Passivhaus are leaking heat like a sieve is specious.
As a some-time computational physicist I find accounts like yours disturbing and depressing.
Nowhere in my posts have I explicitly espoused the current crop of global climate models: I stated that I wish to see those ardent skeptics go out and intelligently start to refute those models (be it through comment papers or, my primary hope, by advancing much more sound methodologies).
To elaborate, having done a Ph.D. in applied math and another in statistics, let alone having worked on incredibly complex mathematical models for seemingly simple biological, neurological, and geological processes, I recognize that many of the climate models in the literature are likely woefully inadequate. For example, the HadCM2, which I believe you were discussing in your post, required an adjustment phase, whereby additional, "artificial" heat and freshwater fluxes at the ocean surface were added in order to produce "good" simulations (this was, however, corrected in the HadCM3: C. Gordon, et al., "The simulation of SST sea ice extents and ocean heat transports in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 16: 147-168, 2000; V. D. Pope, et al., "The impact of new physical parameterizations in the Hadley Centre climate model - HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 15: 1230146, 2000; M. Collins, et al., "The internal climate variability of HadCM3: A version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 17: 61-81, 2001). Nevertheless, many of them do at least couple multiple processes, e.g., thermomechanical ice sheet dynamics and chemical transport models.
That being said, I would relish the thought of more money, be it from public or private sources, being pumped into exascale computing so we could reduce the equivalent of 64 Blue Gene/Q cabinets into a single one and start doing much more complex simulations.
Impossible when the AGW people control the "peer reviewed literature" and collude to keep out papers that disagree with AGW [...]
The AGW people control the literature as much as officials at the Pentagon wield influence over the US populace with their secret mind control machines.
As I mentioned in my above post, the editors at places like Science, Nature, PNAS, etc., will publish skeptical papers if you can provide sound evidence and/or reasoning to support your claims, let alone a solid empirical validation protocol,. As an example, Nature was willing to publish a paper by Jacques Benveniste ("Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE", Nature 333: 816-818, 1988), which basically proved the existence of homeopathy, provided that the results could be replicated by independent laboratories. Another is the paper by Targ and Puthoff ("Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding", Nature 251: 602-607, 1974) about the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller.
[...] which was one of the things exposed by all those leaked climate emails
The emails between Mann and Jones (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=295&filename=1047388489.txt) were talking about the flawed paper by W. Soon and S. Baliunas ("Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years", Clim. Res. 23: 89-110, 2003) and how Mann, and others, should boycott Climate Research until one of their editors got his act together.
To put things in perspective, if papers that would normally go to the Journal of Creation or Creation Research Society Quarterly, e.g., those with wonderful claims like:
"According to Genesis, trees were created on the third day of the Creation Week. Within a Biblical worldview, this suggests that they are discontinuous with other plant forms. Naturalists posit that trees arose by random processes from simpler photosynthetic organisms. Fossil evidence for tree evolution from putative non-tree precursors is evaluated. It is concluded that the fossil record does not support an evolutionary origin for trees from non-tree plant forms. The earliest trees found in the fossil record were well developed, and no plausible explanation exists to overcome the enormous odds against their evolutionary origins from single-celled ancestors. It is concluded that when the fossil record, tree ecology, global Flood, and complex biochemical systems are analyzed within a Biblical worldview, the data are consistent with the Genesis account that God directly created trees."
and:
"Experiments co-sponsored by the Creation Research Society show that helium leakage deflates radioisotopic ages. In 1982 Robert Gentry found amazingly high retentions of nuclear-decay-generated helium in microscopic zircons (ZrSiO4 crystals) recovered from a borehole in hot Precambrian granitic rock at Fenton Hill, NM. We contracted with a high-precision laboratory to measure the rate of helium diffusion out of the zircons. The initial results were very encouraging. Here we report newer zircon diffusion data that extend to the lower temperatures (100 to 277 C) of Gentry's retention data. The measured rates resoundingly confirm a numerical prediction we made based on the reported retentions and a young age. Combining rates and retentions gives a helium diffusion age of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This contradicts the uniformitarian age of 1.5 billion years based on nuclear decay products in the same zircons. These data strongly support our hypothesis of episodes of highly accelerated nuclear decay occurring within thousands of years ago. Such accelerations shrink the radioisotopic 'billions of years' down to the 6,000-year timescale of the Bible."
started to appear, en masse, in actual, top-tier research journals, I'd boycott those in a heartbeat for purposefully allowing junk science built purely on hand waving, false assertions, and/or overtly flawed experimental methodologies to be published.
[...] which clearly shows that the increased water vapour required by the AGW hypothesis doesn't exist.
T. Vonder Haar has previously stated that the preliminary NVAP data cannot disprove a trend in global water vapor either positive or negative, according the null hypothesis; this is also mentioned in the paper you referenced: "The results of Figs. 1 and 4 have not been subjected to detailed global or regional trend analyses, which will be a topic for a forthcoming paper. Such analyses must account for the changes in satellite sampling discussed in the supplement. Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data." As such, your claims are currently unjustified.
Worst case scenarios I've read discuss what amounts to some re-arranging of where our coastlines start and where the climate will be more or less comfortable. And considering it's going to happen relatively gradually, it sounds like humanity can largely adapt.
There are plenty of things that can happen due to adverse climate change. For example, agricultural outputs are expected to be lower (anywhere from 8-30% in some areas), which can lead to food crises in developing countries or much higher food prices in developed ones:
D. S. Battisti and R. L. Naylor, "Historical warnings of future food insecurity with unprecedented seasonal heat", Science 323: 240-244, 2009
M. E. Brown and C. C. Funk, "Food security under climate change", Science 319: 580-581, 2008
D. B. Lobell, et al., "Prioritizing climate change adaptation needs for food security in 2030", Science 319: 607-610, 2008
W. Schlenker and D. B. Lobell, "Robust negative impacts of climate change on African agriculture", Environ. Res. Lett. 5: 014010, 2010
M. B. Burke, et al., "Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation", Glob. Environ. Change 19: 317-325, 2009
T. W. Hertel, et al., "The poverty implications of climate-induced crop yield changes by 2030", Glob. Environ. Change 20: 577-585, 2010
X. Wei, et al., "Future cereal production in China: The interaction of climate change, water availability and socio-economic scenarios", Glob. Environ. Change 19: 34-44, 2009
F. Tao, et al., "Climate–crop yield relationships at provincial scales in China and the impacts of recent climate trends", Clim. Res. 38: 83-94, 2008
D. B. Lobell, et al., "Nonlinear heat effects on African maize as evidenced by historical yield trials", Nature Clim. Change 1: 42-45, 2011
D. B. Lobell and G. P. Asner, "Climate and management contributions to recent trends in U.S. agricultural yields" Science 299: 1032, 2003
D. B. Lobell and C. B. Field, "Global scale climate-crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming" Environ. Res. Lett. 2: 014002, 2007
S. P. Long, et al., "Food for thought: Lower-than-expected crop yield stimulation with rising CO2 concentrations", Science 312: 1918-1921, 2006
J. Memmott, et al., "Global warming and the disruption of plant-pollinator interactions", Ecol. Lett. 10: 710-717
V. Mishra and K. A. Cherkauer, "Retrospective droughts in the crop growing season: Implications to corn and soybean yield in the midwestern United States", Agric. Meteorol. 150: 1030-1045, 2010
S. Peng, et al., "Rice yields decline with higher night temperature from global warming", PNAS 101: 9971-9975, 2004
W. Schlenker and M. J. Roberts, "Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate change", PNAS 106: 15594-15598
S. M. Schrader, et al., "Thylakoid membrane responses to moderately high leaf temperature in Pima cotton", Plant Cell Environ. 27: 725-735
R. Wassmann, et al., "Regional vulnerability of climate change impacts on Asian rice production and scope for adaptation", Adv. Agron. 102: 93-103, 2009
Ph. Ciais, et al., "Europe-wide reduction in primary productivity caused by the heat and drought in 2003", Nature 437: 529-533, 2005
E. A. Ainsworth, "Rice production in a changing climate: A meta-analysis of responses to elevated carbon dioxide and elevated ozone concentration", Change Biol. 14: 1642-1650, 2008
E. A. Ainsworth, et al., "FACE-ing the facts: Inconsistencies and interdependence among field, chamber and modeling studies of elevated CO2 impacts on crop yield and food supply", New Phytol. 179: 5-9, 2008
S. Ceccarelli, et al., "Plant breeding and climate changes", J. Agri. Sci. 148: 627-637, 2010
R. M. Doherty, et al., "Implications of future climate and atmospheric CO2 content for regional biogeochemistry, biogeography and ecosystem services across East Africa", Glob. Change Biol. 16: 617-640, 2010
H. F. Zheng, et al., "T
As for your second point, i.e., that there is "exceedingly questionable" proof that human activity is driving climate change, feel free to peruse this, rather incomplete, list of references:
N. P. Gillet, et al., "Attribution of polar warming to human influence", Nature Geosci. 1: 750-754, 2008
J. C. Neff, et al., "Increasing eolian dust deposition in the western United States linked to human activity", Nature Geosci. 1: 189-195, 2008
J. R. Marlon, et al., "Climate and human influences on global biomass burning over the past two millennia", Nature Geosci. 1: 697-702, 2008
R. D. Field, et al., "Human amplification of drought-induced biomass burning in Indonesia since 1960", Nature Geosci. 2: 185-188, 2009
G. Hegerl, et al., "Influence of human and natural forcing on European seasonal temperatures", Nature Geosci. 5: 99-103, 2011
P. J. Gleckler, et al., "Human-induced global ocean warming on multidecadal timescales", Nature Clim. Change 2: 524-529, 2012
T. Friedrich, et al., "Detecting regional anthropogenic trends in ocean acidification against natural variability", Nature Clim. Change 2: 167-171, 2012
M. Huber and R. Knutti, Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance", Nature Geosci. 5: 31-36, 2012
T. Ito, et al., "Anthropogenic carbon dioxide transport in the Southern Ocean driven by Ekman flow", Nature 463: 80-83, 2010
P. Pall, et al., "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000", Nature 470: 382-385, 2011
S. Khatiwala, et al., "Reconstruction of the history of anthropogenic CO2 concentrations in the ocean", Nature 462: 346-349, 2009
D. J. Cziczo, et al., "Inadvertent climate modification due to anthropogenic lead", Nature Geosci. 2: 333-336, 2009
C. Rosenzweig, et al., "Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change", Nature 453: 353-357, 2008
P. Bousquet, et al., "Contribution of anthropogenic and natural sources to atmospheric methane variability", Nature 443: 439-443, 2006
G. A. Vecchi, et al., "Weakening of tropical Pacific atmospheric circulation due to anthropogenic forcing", Nature 441: 73-76, 2006
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH", Nature 425:365, 2003
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Ocean model predictions of chemistry changes from carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and ocean", J. Geophys. Res. 110:C09S04, 2005
J. C. Orr, et al., "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the 21st century and its impact on calcifying organisms", Nature 437: 681-686, 2005
C. L. Sabine, et al., "The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2", Science 305:367-371, 2004
H. O. Portner, "Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance", Science 315:95-97, 2007
H. O. Portner, "Climate change and temperature dependent biogeography: Oxygen limitation and thermal tolerance in animals", Naturwissenschaften 88:137-146, 2001
R. A. Feely, et al., "Impact of anthropogenic CO2 on the CaCO3 system in oceans", Science 305:362-366, 2004
Y. Liu and P. H. Daum, "Anthropogenic aerosols: Indirect warming effect from dispersion forcing", Nature 419: 580-581, 2002
T.-H. P. Rik, et al., "Quantification of decadal anthropogenic CO2 uptake in the ocean based on dissolved inorganic carbon measurements", Nature 396: 560-563, 1998
I. N. Sokolik and O. B. Toon, "Direct radiative forcing by anthropogenic airborne mineral aerosols", Nature 381: 681-683, 1996
A. Jones, et al., "A climate model study of indirect radiative forcing by anthropogenic sulphate aerosols", Nature 370: 450-453, 1994
D. L. Sahagian, et al., "Direct anthropogenic contributions to sea level rise in the twentieth century ", Nature 367: 54-57, 1994
J. Langner, et al., "Anthropogenic influence on the distribution of tropospheric sulphate aerosol", Nature 359: 712-716, 1992
P. G. Falkowski and C. Wilson, "Phytoplankton productivity in the North Pacific ocean since 1900 and implicati
I hope you realize that these (perturbed-physics ensemble) models are doing far more than "simple" interpolation and extrapolation of temperature values.
To elaborate, uncertainties or errors in numerical models limit the utility of projections from any individual model. As a result, ensemble approaches have been proposed in an attempt to estimate the uncertainty in short-term predictions (F. Molteni, et al., "The ECMWF ensemble predictions system: Methodology and validation", Quart. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 122: 73-119, 2006), which work by first measuring the prediction uncertainties and then tracing them back to model biases and errors.
Of course, a component of any projection system should be a suite of models that sample natural variability, forcing uncertainty and uncertainties in the underlying physical processes which drive regional and global climate change. Two approaches that have been adopted in recent years are the ensemble-of-opportunity (G. A. Meehl, et al., "The WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset: A new era in climate change research", Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc. 88: 1383-1394, 2007) and the perturbed-physics ensemble (J. M. Murphy, et al., "Quantification of modelling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations", Nature 430: 768-772, 2004), with the latter being preferred.
One of the key strengths of the perturbed physics approach is the ability to produce a large number of ensemble members in a relatively easy way, as it is possible to control the experimentation and systematically explore uncertainties in processes and feedbacks. For example, it is possible to produce a set of experiments where the input forcing data is the same in each experiment, but the parameters which control, say, the climate sensitivity of the model are varied, which allows for different sources of uncertainty to be isolated. As well, it is possible to explore a wide range of feedback processes in the model by de-tuning it, potentially revealing the impact of previous compensating errors; such de-tuning can ameliorate the potential for double-counting when constraining the models with observations, i.e., the assigning of a relative likelihood to different model versions based on observed data that has been used in their development.
To give some specifics, the model employed by Murphy, et al. uses a total of 31 parameters, e.g., mid-top thin cloud percent, low-top thin cloud percent, zonal mean relative humidity cloud percent, sea-ice extent, outgoing SW radiation at TOA, diurnal temperature range, latent heat flux, mean sea level pressure, and climate prediction index, with perturbations done to a single parameter at a time, either to the minimum or maximum of the range specified in consultation with modeling experts/the literature or on/off. This resulted in 53 different model versions, including the standard parameter setting as defined by Gordon et al. ("The simulation of SST, sea ice extents and ocean heat transport in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 16: 147-168, 2000) and Pope et al. ("The impact of new physical parameterizations in the Hadley Centre climate model-HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 16: 123-146, 2000). Further, in this design, if a perturbation in one physical scheme has an impact on a process or model variable that is also related to another there can be no compensation achieved by perturbing a related parameter, as might be done in the model development process. As a result, this single-perturbation approach can be thought of as the simplest form of model de-tuning (T. F. Stocker, "Climate change: Models change their tune", Nature 430: 737-738, 2004), in that there is no attempt to a priori maximize the model performance when compared to observations (it should be stressed that no systematic tuning of model performance was done to produce the standard parameter settings).
Later on, however, others moved to simultaneous perturbation (M. J. Webb, et al., "On the contribution of local feedback mechanisms to
The editors of the literature are just as politicized and refuse to publish studies that say the earth is not warming, or that the earth is warming, but still a lot cooler than 2000 years ago.
I laughed really hard at this comment, considering this paper was posted a while back: J. Esper, et al., "Orbital forcing of tree-ring data", Nature Clim. Change, 2012 (accepted, in press). (I'm sure that the editors at Nature are quickly moving to reject the article in light of your comment, lest they be accused of favoring concrete evidence over their own opinions.)
I'd be willing to settle for the comment (or, potentially, original research) papers sent to the journal(s) editors.
Also, as someone who has written comment papers for Science, Nature, and PNAS, I can say that the reviewers are accepting, considering that science is an ongoing pursuit, provided you can present reasonable claims. For example, aside from the recent bout of arsenic-based life papers, i.e., M. L. Reaves, et al., "Absence of detectable arsenate in DNA from arsenate-grown GFAJ-1 cells", Science, 2012 (accepted, in press) and T. J. Erb, et al., "GFAJ-1 is an arsenate-resistant, phosphate-dependent organism", Science 2012 (accepted, in press), a semi-controversial topic, at least in geoscience, is the existence of the Younger Dryas impact event:
R. B. Firestone, et al., "Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling", PNAS 104: 16016-16021, 2007
D. J. Kennett, et al., "Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas boundary sediment layer", Science 323: 94, 2009
T. E. Bunch, et al., "Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago", PNAS 109: E1903-E1912, 2012
i.e., a large impact or airburst some 12.9 Ka wiped out the Clovis people, a large number of species, etc.
Although, initially, the hypothesis had merit, several researchers have since shown that many of the original conclusions are unsupported:
F. S. Paquay, et al., "Absence of geochemical evidence for an impact event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas transition", PNAS 106: 21505-21510, 2009
T. L. Daulton, et al., "No evidence of nanodiamonds in Younger-Dryas sediments to support an impact event", PNAS 107: 16043-16047, 2010
T. Surovell, et al., "An independent evaluation of the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis", PNAS 106: 18155-18158, 2010
H. Tian, et al., "Nanodiamonds do not provide unique evidence for a Younger Dryas impact", PNAS 108: 40-44, 2011
J. S. Pigati, et al., "Accumulation of impact markers in desert wetlands and implications for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis", PNAS 109: 7208-7212, 2012
A. van Hoesel, et al., "Nanodiamonds and wildfire evidence in the Usselo horizon postdate the Allerød-Younger Dryas boundary", PNAS 109: 7648-7653, 2012
(see also: J. R. Marlon, et al., "Wildfire responses to abrupt climate change in North America", PNAS 106: 2519-2524, 2009
A. L. Westerling, et al., "Warming and earlier spring increase western US forest wildfire activity", Science 313: 940-943, 2006
T. W. Swetnam, "Fire history and climate change in giant sequoia groves", Science 262: 885-889, 1993
A. Hubbe, et al., "Early Holocene survival of megafauna in South America". J. Biogeography 34: 1642-1646, 2007
A. J. Stuart, et al., "Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth". Nature 431: 684-689, 2004
J. L. Gill, et al., "Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America". Science 326: 1100-1103, 2009)
In all of these cases, the authors were able to provide counter-proposals to some of the evidence that satisfied the journal reviewers, e.g., H. Tian, et al. showed that the existence of nanodiamonds alone does not provide sufficient evidence for a Younger Dryas impact, as nanodiamonds can be deposited by stellar dust (Z. R. Dai, et al., "Possible in situ formation of meteoritic nanodiamonds in the early solar system", Nature 418: 157-159, 2002; N. A. Marks, et al., "Nonequilibrium route to nanodiamond with astrophysical implications", Phys. Rev. Lett. 108: 075503, 2012), formed in charred wood (F. Banhart and P. M. Ajayan, "Carbon onions as nanoscopic pressure cells for diamond formation", Nature 382: 433-435, 1996), etc., while, van Hoesel showed that nanodiamonds in sediment layers from multiple areas postdate the Younger Dryas boundary.
And I await, with breathless anticipation, the day that many of the AGW deniers can actually form a cogent argument and start to refute the underlying mathematical models, e.g.,
J. M. Murphy, et al., "Quantification of modelling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations", Nature 430: 768-772, 2004
J. M. Murphy, et al., "A methodology for probabilistic predictions of regional climate change from perturbed physics ensembles", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 1993-2028, 2007
D. A. Stainforth, et al., "Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2145-2161, 2007
P. A. Stott and C. E. Forest, "Ensemble climate predictions using climate models and observational constraints", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2029-2052, 2007
C. Tebaldi and R. Knutti, "The use of the multi-model ensemble in probabilistic climate projections", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2053-2075, 2007
J. D. Annan and J. C. Hargreaves, "Efficient estimation and ensemble generation in climate modelling", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2077-2088, 2007
M. New, et al., "Challenges in using probabilistic climate change information for impact assessments: An example from the water sector", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2117-2131, 2007
H. Huebener, et al. "Ensemble climate simulations using a fully coupled ocean–troposphere–stratosphere general circulation model", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2089-2101, 2007
S. H. Schneider and M. D. Mastrandrea, "Probabilistic assessment of 'dangerous' climate change and emissions pathways", Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 102: 15728-15735, 2005
F. Giorgi and R. Francisco, "Evaluating uncertainties in the prediction of regional climate change", Geophys. Res. Lett 27: 1295-1298, 2000
M. R. Allen and W. J. Ingram, "Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrological cycle", Nature 419, 224-232, 2002
M. R. Allen, et al., Quantifying the uncertainty in forecasts of anthropogenic climate change", Nature 417: 617-620, 2000
F. Giorgi and L. O. Mearns, "Probability of regional climate change based on the Reliability Ensemble Averaging (REA) method", Geophys. Res. Lett. 30: 1629, 2003
N. G. Andronova and M. E. Schlesinger, "Objective estimation of the probability density function for climate sensitivity", J. Geophys. Res. 106: 22605-22612, 2001
C. E. Forest, et al., "Quantifying uncertainties in climate system properties with the use of recent climate observations", Science 295: 113-117, 2002
R. Knutti, et al., "Constraints on radiative forcing and future climate change from observations and climate model ensembles", Nature 416: 719-723, 2002
J. Gregory, et al., "An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity", J. Clim. 15: 3117-3121, 2002
R. J. Stouffer and S. Manabe, "Response of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide: sensitivity to the rate of increase", J. Clim. 12: 2224-2237, 1999
D. A. Stainforth, et al., "Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases", Nature 433: 403-406, 2005
J. Reilly, et al., "Uncertainty in climate change assessments", Science 293: 430-433, 2001
V. D. Pope, et al., "The impact of new physical parameterisations in the Hadley Centre climate model - HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 16: 123–146, 2000
K. D. Williams, et al., "Transient climate change in the Hadley centre models: The role of physical processes" J. Clim. 14: 2659–2674 2001
G. C. Hegerl, et al., "Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries", Nature 440: 1029-1032, 2006
C. Piani, et al., "Constraints on climate change from a multi-thousand member ensemble of simulations", Geophys. Res. Lett. 32: L32825, 2005
D. N. Barnett, et al., "Quantifying uncertainty in changes in extreme event frequency in response to doubled CO2 using a large ensemble of GCM simulations", Clim. Dyn. 26: 489-511, 2006
C. Tebaldi and B. Sanso, "Joint project
Well, why don't you go ahead and make one then, and then try hand-soldering those tiny SoC connectors.
Anyone who has spent a modicum of time doing PCB design would know that many, if not most, PCB manufacturers will either install surface mount components or have the board shipped off to a partnering assembly company for an incredibly small fee (anywhere from $15 USD to $0.04 USD per 2-sided board, depending on the run size/number of unique parts). Why you would suggest hand-soldering components is beyond me.
Touching on your other point, nothing in my original post should suggest that I want to spend time designing my own Raspberry Pi knockoff; the fact that you propose doing so is rather nonsensical. Moreover, even when I was just an S.B./M.Eng. EECS student, I designed much more complex systems/PCBs than the Raspberry Pi; I'm sure plenty of other engineering students have too for their undergraduate theses.
Also, as an aside, there are plenty of "better" development boards available than the Raspberry Pi. Take, for example, the ODROID-X (http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931), which comes with a 1.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, a quad-core ARM Mali-400 GPU, 1 GB of LP-DDR2 RAM, and much more, all for $129 USD.
Part of the issue is the frequency of the posted Raspberry Pi stories that annoys others, let alone myself. The other is that, while it's a nice, little piece of equipment, it's nothing special: anyone that has gone through a decent electrical/computer engineering program should be more than capable of laying out a similar PCB, within the span of a month or two; after that point, ordering the parts and having them mounted is trivial.
There are plenty of legitimate concerns over the increase in CO2 levels. In fact, just doing a quick search, it's easy to see that CO2 is affecting the pH of the ocean:
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH", Nature 425:365, 2003
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Ocean model predictions of chemistry changes from carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and ocean", J. Geophys. Res. 110:C09S04, 2005
J. C. Orr, et al., "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the 21st century and its impact on calcifying organisms", Nature 437: 681-686, 2005
C. L. Sabine, et al., "The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2", Science 305:367-371, 2004
H. O. Portner, "Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance", Science 315:95-97, 2007
H. O. Portner, "Climate change and temperature dependent biogeography: Oxygen limitation and thermal tolerance in animals", Naturwissenschaften 88:137-146, 2001
R. A. Feely, et al., "Impact of anthropogenic CO2 on the CaCO3 system in oceans", Science 305:362-366, 2004
which, in turn, has a number of devastating consequences for marine life, among other things:
Y. Shirayama and H. Thorton, "Effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on shallow water marine benthos", J. Geophys. Res. 110: C09S08, 2005
S. Widdicombe and H. R. Needham, "Impact of CO2-induced seawater acidification on the burrowing activity of Nereis virens and sediment nutrient flux", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 341: 111-122, 2007
H. L. Wood, et al., "Ocean acidification may increase calcification rates, but at a cost", Proc. Royal. Soc. B-Biol. Sci. 275: 1767-1773, 2008
M. D. Iglesias-Rodriguez, et al., "Phytoplankton calcification in a high-CO2 world", Science 320: 336-340, 2008
S. Collins and G. Bell, "Phenotypic consequences of 1000 generations of selection at elevated CO2 in green alga", Nature 431: 566-569, 2004
M. A. Gutowska, et al., "Growth and calcification in the cephalopod Sepia officinalis under elevated sewater pCO2", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 737: 303-309, 2008
S. Dupont, et al., "Near-future level of CO2-driven ocean acidification radically effects larval survival and development in the brittlestar Ophiothrix fragilis", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 285-294, 2008.
A. J. Anderson, et al., "Life on the margin: Implications of ocean acidification on Mg-calcite, high latitude and cold-water marine calcifers", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 265-273, 2008
W. M. Balch and V. J. Fabry, "Ocean acidification: Documenting its impact on calcifying phytoplankton at basin scales", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 239-247, 2008
J. A. Berge, et al., "Effects of increased sea water concentrations of CO2 on growth of the bivalve Mytilus edulis", L. Chemosphere 62: 681-687
T. F. Cooper, et al., "Declining coral calcification in massive Porites in two nearshore regions of the northern Great Barrier Reef", Glob. Change Biol. 144: 529-538, 2008
F. Gazeua, et al., "Impact of elevated CO2 on shellfish calcification", Geophys. Res. Lett. 34: L07603, 2007
K. R. Hinga, "Effects of pH on coastal phytoplankton", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 283: 281-300, 2002
O. Hoegh-Guldberg, et al., "Coral reefs under rapid climate change and ocean acidification", Science 318: 1737-1742, 2007
P. L. Jokiel, et al., "Ocean acidification and calcifying reef organisms: A mesocosm investigation", Coral Reefs 27: 473-483, 2008
H. Kurihara, "Effects of CO2-driven acidification on the early development stages of invertebrates", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 275-284, 2008
S. I. Siikavuopio, et al., "Effects of carbon dioxide exposure on feed intake and gonad growth in green sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis", J. Aquac. 266: 97-101, 2007
H. Kurihara, et al., "Effects of raised CO2 concentration on the egg production rate and early development of two marine copepods (Acartia steueri and Acartia erythraea)", Mar. Pollut. Bull. 49: 721-727, 2004
H. Kurihara, et al., "Effects of increased seawater pCO2 on early development of the oyster Crassostrea gigas", Aquat. Biol. 1: 91-98, 2007
H. Kurihara, et al., "Sub-leath effects of elevated concentration of CO2 on planktonic copepods and sea urchins", J. Oceanogr. 60: 743-750, 2004
Fusion thus far has been a total dead end. Christ, you invoke science, and then advocate something we can't even make produce energy even the slightest bit greater than the energy we put into it.
And you berate the parent poster, yet fail to mention the significant strides that have been made in fusion research in the past two decades, making it far from a "dead end" endeavor, and the likelihood that we will, eventually, produce more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than we pump into it.
To elaborate on just one area: while the empirical scaling of the density limit and the onset of plasma collapse in tokamak reactors has long been known (see: M. Murakami, et al. "Some observations on maximum densities in tokamak experiments", Nuclear Fusion, 16, 347, 1976; S. J. Fielding, et al. "High-density discharges with gettered torus walls in DITE", Nuclear Fusion, 17, 1382, 1977; R. S. Granetz, "Density Threshold for Magnetohydrodynamic Activity in Alcator C", Physical Review Letters, 49, 658–661, 1982; E. S. Marmar, et al., "Impurity injection experiments on the Alcator C tokamak", Nuclear Fusion, 22, 1567, 1982; M. Greenwald, et al., "A new look at density limits in tokamaks", Nuclear Fusion, 28, 2199, 1988; and M. Greenwald, "Density limits in toroidal plasmas", Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 44, R27, 2002), it wasn't until recently that a sound physics mechanism hypothesis was advanced to explain this phenomenon. In particular, Gates and Delgado-Aparicio ("Origin of tokamak density limit scalings", Physical Review Letters, 108, 165004, 2012), building upon the empirical findings of Suttrop et al. ("Tearing mode formation and radiative edge cooling prior to density limit disruptions in ASDEX upgrade", Nuclear Fusion, 37, 119, 1997) and Salzedas, et al., ("Exponentially Growing Tearing Modes in Rijnhuizen Tokamak Project Plasmas", Physical Review Letters, 88, 075002, 2002), conjectured that radiation-driven islands are the cause of the density limit, as the interior of the islands contain impurities, which radiate cooling, thereby increasing local resistivity and helical current perturbation.
Since, from all appearances, the ideas of Gates and Delgado-Aparicio are correct, steps can now be taken to counteract these instabilities before they become a problem and thus improve reactor efficiency, e.g., in the ITER currently underway in France, the Alcator C-Mod at MIT, or the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics; for example, one could adopt the processes outlined by J. P. Graves, et al. ("Control of magnetohydrodynamic stability by phase space engineering of energetic ions in tokamak plasmas", Nature Communications, 3, 624, 2012).
The idea of a subsurface ocean on Titan is nothing new and surfaces in the geophysics/geoscience literature every so often. For example, when Voyager I passed by the moon, it detected an abundance of only 3% (mole fraction) of CH4, which is sufficiently low to preclude the stable coexistence of liquid CH4 on the surface. Lunine, et al. ("Ethane ocean on Titan", Science, 222, 1229-1230, 1983) suggested that Titan's atmospheric CH4 may have broken down by a catalyzed photochemical reaction to C2H6, with the C2H6 stemming from a subsurface ocean; the resulting deep ocean would consist of a 3:1 mixture of C2H6 and CH4. (To explain, the dissociation steps of C2H6 involve loss of hydrogen by escape, with the postulated set reactions: 2CH4 -> C2H6 + H2 and 2CH4 -> C2H6 + 2H. The intermediate molecule C2H2 plays the role of catalysis and shielding of C2H6 from photolysis. Furthermore, CH4 would break down at a rate of 1.5*10^10cm^-2/s and H/H2 would leave the atmosphere at 5.5*10^9 and 7*10^9cm^-2/s, which is consistent with Hanel, et al.'s analysis ("Infrared observations of the Saturnian system from Voyager I", Science, 212, 192-200, 1981). As such, it is reasonable to conclude that the result is a production of an CH4-rich ocean of 1km depth and a 100-200km thick layer of solid C2H2 on Titan's ocean floor).
For additional analyses, see: F. M. Flasar, "Oceans on Titan?", Science, 221, 55-57, 1983; O. B. Toon, et al., "Methane rain on Titan", Icarus, 75, 255-284, 1988; N. Dubouloz, et al., "Titan's hypothesized ocean properties: The influence of surface temperature and atmospheric composition uncertanties", Icarus, 82, 81-96, 1989; W. R. Thompson, et al., "Vapor-liquid equilibrium thermodynamics of N2 + CH4: Model and Titan applications", Icarus, 97, 187-199, 1992.
If, in your example, you are talking about the standard Abelian group of reals with respect to addition, and not some arbitrary (commutative) monoid, then yes, I am against teaching fallacious information to someone so that he or she "feels good". I am not, however, against an instructor mentioning that, in abstract algebra, under special circumstances and for certain kinds of sets, 2+2 can equal 5. The reason I am not is that those kinds of statements, at least from my own experiences, engender curiosity: students start to question what they know, how things work, and so forth.
I just said that terms like "Higher order thinking skills" are a bunch of linguistic BULLSHIT attached to what is effectively a policy of teaching children to have a pavlovian "yessum massa!" response to politically correct buzzwords.
If you had bothered to consult any of the literature pertaining to the concepts you are so quick to condemn, you'd know that your entire take on higher-order thinking skills is incorrect.
To elaborate, in the past, psychologists and educational specialists have found it meaningful to partition thought into two groups, referred to as higher and lower, both of which have been rather well characterized. For instance, N. R. F. Maier ("An aspect of human reasoning", British Journal of Psychology, vol. 24, pp. 144-155, 1933; "Reasoning in rats and human beings", The Psychological Review, vol. 44, pp. 365-378, 1937), who used the terms learned behavior and reproductive learning in lieu of lower-order thinking, found that learned behavior came from contiguous experiences with previous repetitions of the relationships involved in the learned behavior pattern, e.g., memorization of multiplication tables via repeated practice. In contrast, behavior integrations that are made up of two or more isolated experiences are qualitatively different, as they arise without previous repetition, and hence constitute "reasoning" or higher-order thinking. To phrase this in a slightly different manner, "reasoning", is used to solve problems that arise when behavior is blocked because a desired end is not immediately attainable. A good example of "reasoning", that is in line with this description, is when a student that knows how to compute the area of simple geometric shapes, e.g., triangles and squares, and can see how to apply that knowledge, without guidance, to solve for the area of general polygons; in that scenario, the student has happened upon a combination of events that may have never been previously associated.
As a second instance, F. M. Newman ("Higher order thinking in teaching social studies: A rationale for the assessment of classroom thoughtfulness", Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 22, 41-56, 1990) defined higher- and lower-order thinking, in virtually the same manner as Maier, based upon observations in classrooms and interviews with teachers and department chairs. That is, lower-order thinking demands only routine or mechanical application of previously acquired information, e.g., inserting numbers into established formulas or regurgitating lists of facts. On the other hand, higher-order thinking "challenges the student to interpret, analyze, or manipulate information". Furthermore, he pointed out that since individuals differ in the kinds of problems they find challenging, higher-order thinking is relative: what one person finds challenging another may find elementary; as such, to determine the extent to which the individual is involved in higher-order thinking, one would presumably need to know something about that individual's background.
Beyond the above two examples, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles in education and psychology journals that touch on higher-order thinking and critical thinking (which are sometimes used interchangeably). In all of the ones that I have skimmed over, the overwhelming consensus is that higher-order thinking skills are critical, logical, reflective, metacognitive, or creative processes activated when one encounters unfamiliar problems, uncertainties, questions or dilemmas, and certainly are not, as you erroneously stated, "linguistic bullshit" designed to indoctrinate students.
Oh, and before you fly off the handle and claim that I'm some brainwashed, leftist moron, let me state that all of the higher-order thinking skills I learned when I was in primary school and at university prepared me rather well for publishing papers in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of the American Statistical Society, Biometrics, Biometrika, and Annals of Statistics, i.e., the top statistics journals.
Slashdot Mirror
Most, if not all, teaching/research professorships at universities do. As a result, typically, for the remaining three months, they have to supplement their salary with research grant money, if there is enough available.
History is filled with intransigent people like yourself that do not believe we will ever grow beyond our current mold, that certain topics are not worth pursuing as they will never bear fruit, etc. A good example are those skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence moving away simple heuristics and mathematical models, despite that "full"-brain simulation, at least at the neuronal level, is now not a matter of if, but when:
H. Markram, "The Blue Brain project", Nature Rev. Neurosci. 7: 153-160, 2006
H. Markram, "Fixing the location and dimensions of functional neocortical columns", HFSP J. 2: 132-135, 2008
G. Khazen, et al., "Combinatorial expression rules of ion channel genes in juvenile rat (Rattus norvegicus) neocortical neurons", PLoS One 7: e34786, 2012
M. Hines, et al., "Comparison of neuronal spike exchange methods on a Blue Gene/P supercomputer" Front. Comput. Neurosci. 5: 49, 2011
R. Perin, et al., "A synaptic organizing principle for cortical neuronal groups", PNAS 108: 5419-5424, 2011
A. C. Anastassiou, et al., "Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons", Nature Neurosci. 14: 217-223, 2011
S. Druckmann, et al, "Effective stimuli for constructing reliable neuron models", PLoS Comput. Biol. 7: e1002133, 2011
E. Hay, et al., "Models of neocortical layer 5b pyramidal cells capturing a wide range of dendritic and perisomatic active properties", PLoS Comput. Biol. 7: e1002107, 2011
S. Romand, et al., "Morphological development of thick-tufted layer V pyramidal cells in the rat somatosensory cortex", Front. Neuroanat. 5: 5, 2011
J. G. King, et al., "A copmonent-based extension framework for large-scale parallel simulations in NEURON", Front. Neuroinfo. 3: 10, 2009
T. K. Berger, et al., "Frequency-dependent disynaptic inhibition in the pyramidal network: A ubiquitous pathway in the developing rat neocortex", J. Physiol. 587: 5411-5425, 2009
A. Loebel, et al., "Multiquantal release underlies the distribution of synaptic efficacies in the neocortex", Front. Comput. Neurosci. 3: 27, 2009
H. Köndgen, et al., "The dynamical response properties of neocortical neurons to temporally modulated noisy inputs in vitro", Cerebral Cortex 18: 2086-2097, 2008
M. L. Hines, et al., "Neuron splitting in compute-bound parallel network simulations enables runtime scaling with twice as many processors", J. Comput. Neurosci. 25: 203-210, 2008
M. L. Hines, et al., "Fully implicit parallel simulation of single neurons", J. Comput. Neurosci. 25: 439-448, 2008
C. Calì, et al., "Inferring connection proximity in networks of electrically coupled cells by subthreshold frequency response analysis", J. Comput. Neurosci. 24: 330-345, 2008
M. Arsiero, et al., "The impact of input fluctuations on the frequency–current relationships of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the rat medial prefrontal cortex", J. Neurosci. 27: 3274-3284, 2007
J.-V. Le Bé, et al., "Morphological, electrophysiological, and synaptic properties of corticocallosal pyramidal cells in the neonatal rat neocortex", Cerebral Cortex 17: 2204-2213, 2007
G. Silberberg and H. Markram, "Disynaptic inhibition between neocortical pyramidal cells mediated by Martinotti cells", Neuron 53: 735-746, 2007
M. Toledo-Rodriguez and H. Markram, "Single-cell RT-PCR, a technique to decipher the electrical, anatomical, and genetic determinants of neuronal diversity", Methods Mol. Biol. 403: 123-139, 2007
T. Berger, et al., "Transient rhythmic network activity in the somatosensory cortex evoked by distributed input in vitro", Neurosci. 140: 1401-1413, 2006
J.-V. Le Bé and H. Markram, "Spontaneous and evoked synaptic rewiring in the neonatal neocortex", PNAS 103: 13214-13219, 2006
M. Migliore, et al., "Parallel network simulations with NEURON", J. Comput. Neurosci. 21: 119-129, 2006
Y. Wang, et al., "Heterogeneity in the pyramidal network of the medial prefrontal cortex", Nature Neurosci. 9: 534-542, 2006
J. V. Le Bé, et al., "Morphological, electrophysiological, and synaptic properties of cor
[...] highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much.
All of the background information in a thesis serves to do three more things, when properly written, beyond what you mentioned, i.e., showing that you appear to know the material:
- First, it should provide a nice, high-level summary of the research area you're focusing on, perhaps with a nod to related ones, so that a new researcher coming into the field can immediately get a foothold and decide what he or she needs to read to become more proficient. (Merely citing a slew of papers is great, but definitely not as meaningful as posting what work was done in them, providing some insights, etc.) In fact, being rather thorough in your literature review is a great way to garner plenty of citations: even if you don't intend for it to be a review paper, others will start viewing it as such.
- A second, intertwined point is that it should provide enough background information for someone who is sufficiently well-versed in that discipline, but not necessarily your topic, to gauge the credibility of your work. For example, in my S.M. Applied Math thesis, I had some nice sections on (special) functions of bounded variation, gamma convergence, k-currents, and variolds, along with some novel proofs of some fundamental notions associated with each of those, as my committee members were not completely knowledgeable about each. Moreover, the proofs I included had the effect of making my later analyses simpler than if I had gone with some of the standard proofs, e.g., by L. Ambrosio, G. Dal Maso, etc.
- Finally, it should explain how what you are doing is sufficient to merit an advanced degree.
From the units posted on the graph, the windows in the Passivhaus are emitting radiation consistent with a 1-2C increase in temperature (or, rather, the difference between 37/39.2F and 41F), while those for the traditional structure are consistent with a ~4C increase in temperature (or, rather, the difference between 37/39.2F and 46F). (Compared to double-pane, low-E, R-3 (U-factor 0.3) windows, triple-pane windows (typically R-5/U-factor 0.2) can reduce average heat loss through the window by more than 30 percent, when compared to R-3 windows in residential buildings situated in northern climate zones.) To say that the windows in the Passivhaus are leaking heat like a sieve is specious.
As a some-time computational physicist I find accounts like yours disturbing and depressing.
Nowhere in my posts have I explicitly espoused the current crop of global climate models: I stated that I wish to see those ardent skeptics go out and intelligently start to refute those models (be it through comment papers or, my primary hope, by advancing much more sound methodologies).
To elaborate, having done a Ph.D. in applied math and another in statistics, let alone having worked on incredibly complex mathematical models for seemingly simple biological, neurological, and geological processes, I recognize that many of the climate models in the literature are likely woefully inadequate. For example, the HadCM2, which I believe you were discussing in your post, required an adjustment phase, whereby additional, "artificial" heat and freshwater fluxes at the ocean surface were added in order to produce "good" simulations (this was, however, corrected in the HadCM3: C. Gordon, et al., "The simulation of SST sea ice extents and ocean heat transports in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 16: 147-168, 2000; V. D. Pope, et al., "The impact of new physical parameterizations in the Hadley Centre climate model - HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 15: 1230146, 2000; M. Collins, et al., "The internal climate variability of HadCM3: A version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 17: 61-81, 2001). Nevertheless, many of them do at least couple multiple processes, e.g., thermomechanical ice sheet dynamics and chemical transport models.
That being said, I would relish the thought of more money, be it from public or private sources, being pumped into exascale computing so we could reduce the equivalent of 64 Blue Gene /Q cabinets into a single one and start doing much more complex simulations.
Impossible when the AGW people control the "peer reviewed literature" and collude to keep out papers that disagree with AGW [...]
The AGW people control the literature as much as officials at the Pentagon wield influence over the US populace with their secret mind control machines.
As I mentioned in my above post, the editors at places like Science, Nature, PNAS, etc., will publish skeptical papers if you can provide sound evidence and/or reasoning to support your claims, let alone a solid empirical validation protocol,. As an example, Nature was willing to publish a paper by Jacques Benveniste ("Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE", Nature 333: 816-818, 1988), which basically proved the existence of homeopathy, provided that the results could be replicated by independent laboratories. Another is the paper by Targ and Puthoff ("Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding", Nature 251: 602-607, 1974) about the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller.
[...] which was one of the things exposed by all those leaked climate emails
The emails between Mann and Jones (http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=295&filename=1047388489.txt) were talking about the flawed paper by W. Soon and S. Baliunas ("Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years", Clim. Res. 23: 89-110, 2003) and how Mann, and others, should boycott Climate Research until one of their editors got his act together.
To put things in perspective, if papers that would normally go to the Journal of Creation or Creation Research Society Quarterly, e.g., those with wonderful claims like:
"According to Genesis, trees were created on the third day of the Creation Week. Within a Biblical worldview, this suggests that they are discontinuous with other plant forms. Naturalists posit that trees arose by random processes from simpler photosynthetic organisms. Fossil evidence for tree evolution from putative non-tree precursors is evaluated. It is concluded that the fossil record does not support an evolutionary origin for trees from non-tree plant forms. The earliest trees found in the fossil record were well developed, and no plausible explanation exists to overcome the enormous odds against their evolutionary origins from single-celled ancestors. It is concluded that when the fossil record, tree ecology, global Flood, and complex biochemical systems are analyzed within a Biblical worldview, the data are consistent with the Genesis account that God directly created trees."
and:
"Experiments co-sponsored by the Creation Research Society show that helium leakage deflates radioisotopic ages. In 1982 Robert Gentry found amazingly high retentions of nuclear-decay-generated helium in microscopic zircons (ZrSiO4 crystals) recovered from a borehole in hot Precambrian granitic rock at Fenton Hill, NM. We contracted with a high-precision laboratory to measure the rate of helium diffusion out of the zircons. The initial results were very encouraging. Here we report newer zircon diffusion data that extend to the lower temperatures (100 to 277 C) of Gentry's retention data. The measured rates resoundingly confirm a numerical prediction we made based on the reported retentions and a young age. Combining rates and retentions gives a helium diffusion age of 6,000 ± 2,000 years. This contradicts the uniformitarian age of 1.5 billion years based on nuclear decay products in the same zircons. These data strongly support our hypothesis of episodes of highly accelerated nuclear decay occurring within thousands of years ago. Such accelerations shrink the radioisotopic 'billions of years' down to the 6,000-year timescale of the Bible."
started to appear, en masse, in actual, top-tier research journals, I'd boycott those in a heartbeat for purposefully allowing junk science built purely on hand waving, false assertions, and/or overtly flawed experimental methodologies to be published.
[...] which clearly shows that the increased water vapour required by the AGW hypothesis doesn't exist.
T. Vonder Haar has previously stated that the preliminary NVAP data cannot disprove a trend in global water vapor either positive or negative, according the null hypothesis; this is also mentioned in the paper you referenced: "The results of Figs. 1 and 4 have not been subjected to detailed global or regional trend analyses, which will be a topic for a forthcoming paper. Such analyses must account for the changes in satellite sampling discussed in the supplement. Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data." As such, your claims are currently unjustified.
Worst case scenarios I've read discuss what amounts to some re-arranging of where our coastlines start and where the climate will be more or less comfortable. And considering it's going to happen relatively gradually, it sounds like humanity can largely adapt.
There are plenty of things that can happen due to adverse climate change. For example, agricultural outputs are expected to be lower (anywhere from 8-30% in some areas), which can lead to food crises in developing countries or much higher food prices in developed ones:
D. S. Battisti and R. L. Naylor, "Historical warnings of future food insecurity with unprecedented seasonal heat", Science 323: 240-244, 2009
M. E. Brown and C. C. Funk, "Food security under climate change", Science 319: 580-581, 2008
D. B. Lobell, et al., "Prioritizing climate change adaptation needs for food security in 2030", Science 319: 607-610, 2008
W. Schlenker and D. B. Lobell, "Robust negative impacts of climate change on African agriculture", Environ. Res. Lett. 5: 014010, 2010
M. B. Burke, et al., "Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation", Glob. Environ. Change 19: 317-325, 2009
T. W. Hertel, et al., "The poverty implications of climate-induced crop yield changes by 2030", Glob. Environ. Change 20: 577-585, 2010
X. Wei, et al., "Future cereal production in China: The interaction of climate change, water availability and socio-economic scenarios", Glob. Environ. Change 19: 34-44, 2009
F. Tao, et al., "Climate–crop yield relationships at provincial scales in China and the impacts of recent climate trends", Clim. Res. 38: 83-94, 2008
D. B. Lobell, et al., "Nonlinear heat effects on African maize as evidenced by historical yield trials", Nature Clim. Change 1: 42-45, 2011
D. B. Lobell and G. P. Asner, "Climate and management contributions to recent trends in U.S. agricultural yields" Science 299: 1032, 2003
D. B. Lobell and C. B. Field, "Global scale climate-crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming" Environ. Res. Lett. 2: 014002, 2007
S. P. Long, et al., "Food for thought: Lower-than-expected crop yield stimulation with rising CO2 concentrations", Science 312: 1918-1921, 2006
J. Memmott, et al., "Global warming and the disruption of plant-pollinator interactions", Ecol. Lett. 10: 710-717
V. Mishra and K. A. Cherkauer, "Retrospective droughts in the crop growing season: Implications to corn and soybean yield in the midwestern United States", Agric. Meteorol. 150: 1030-1045, 2010
S. Peng, et al., "Rice yields decline with higher night temperature from global warming", PNAS 101: 9971-9975, 2004
W. Schlenker and M. J. Roberts, "Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate change", PNAS 106: 15594-15598
S. M. Schrader, et al., "Thylakoid membrane responses to moderately high leaf temperature in Pima cotton", Plant Cell Environ. 27: 725-735
R. Wassmann, et al., "Regional vulnerability of climate change impacts on Asian rice production and scope for adaptation", Adv. Agron. 102: 93-103, 2009
Ph. Ciais, et al., "Europe-wide reduction in primary productivity caused by the heat and drought in 2003", Nature 437: 529-533, 2005
E. A. Ainsworth, "Rice production in a changing climate: A meta-analysis of responses to elevated carbon dioxide and elevated ozone concentration", Change Biol. 14: 1642-1650, 2008
E. A. Ainsworth, et al., "FACE-ing the facts: Inconsistencies and interdependence among field, chamber and modeling studies of elevated CO2 impacts on crop yield and food supply", New Phytol. 179: 5-9, 2008
S. Ceccarelli, et al., "Plant breeding and climate changes", J. Agri. Sci. 148: 627-637, 2010
R. M. Doherty, et al., "Implications of future climate and atmospheric CO2 content for regional biogeochemistry, biogeography and ecosystem services across East Africa", Glob. Change Biol. 16: 617-640, 2010
H. F. Zheng, et al., "T
As for your second point, i.e., that there is "exceedingly questionable" proof that human activity is driving climate change, feel free to peruse this, rather incomplete, list of references:
N. P. Gillet, et al., "Attribution of polar warming to human influence", Nature Geosci. 1: 750-754, 2008
J. C. Neff, et al., "Increasing eolian dust deposition in the western United States linked to human activity", Nature Geosci. 1: 189-195, 2008
J. R. Marlon, et al., "Climate and human influences on global biomass burning over the past two millennia", Nature Geosci. 1: 697-702, 2008
R. D. Field, et al., "Human amplification of drought-induced biomass burning in Indonesia since 1960", Nature Geosci. 2: 185-188, 2009
G. Hegerl, et al., "Influence of human and natural forcing on European seasonal temperatures", Nature Geosci. 5: 99-103, 2011
P. J. Gleckler, et al., "Human-induced global ocean warming on multidecadal timescales", Nature Clim. Change 2: 524-529, 2012
T. Friedrich, et al., "Detecting regional anthropogenic trends in ocean acidification against natural variability", Nature Clim. Change 2: 167-171, 2012
M. Huber and R. Knutti, Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance", Nature Geosci. 5: 31-36, 2012
T. Ito, et al., "Anthropogenic carbon dioxide transport in the Southern Ocean driven by Ekman flow", Nature 463: 80-83, 2010
P. Pall, et al., "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000", Nature 470: 382-385, 2011
S. Khatiwala, et al., "Reconstruction of the history of anthropogenic CO2 concentrations in the ocean", Nature 462: 346-349, 2009
D. J. Cziczo, et al., "Inadvertent climate modification due to anthropogenic lead", Nature Geosci. 2: 333-336, 2009
C. Rosenzweig, et al., "Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change", Nature 453: 353-357, 2008
P. Bousquet, et al., "Contribution of anthropogenic and natural sources to atmospheric methane variability", Nature 443: 439-443, 2006
G. A. Vecchi, et al., "Weakening of tropical Pacific atmospheric circulation due to anthropogenic forcing", Nature 441: 73-76, 2006
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH", Nature 425:365, 2003
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Ocean model predictions of chemistry changes from carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and ocean", J. Geophys. Res. 110:C09S04, 2005
J. C. Orr, et al., "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the 21st century and its impact on calcifying organisms", Nature 437: 681-686, 2005
C. L. Sabine, et al., "The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2", Science 305:367-371, 2004
H. O. Portner, "Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance", Science 315:95-97, 2007
H. O. Portner, "Climate change and temperature dependent biogeography: Oxygen limitation and thermal tolerance in animals", Naturwissenschaften 88:137-146, 2001
R. A. Feely, et al., "Impact of anthropogenic CO2 on the CaCO3 system in oceans", Science 305:362-366, 2004
Y. Liu and P. H. Daum, "Anthropogenic aerosols: Indirect warming effect from dispersion forcing", Nature 419: 580-581, 2002
T.-H. P. Rik, et al., "Quantification of decadal anthropogenic CO2 uptake in the ocean based on dissolved inorganic carbon measurements", Nature 396: 560-563, 1998
I. N. Sokolik and O. B. Toon, "Direct radiative forcing by anthropogenic airborne mineral aerosols", Nature 381: 681-683, 1996
A. Jones, et al., "A climate model study of indirect radiative forcing by anthropogenic sulphate aerosols", Nature 370: 450-453, 1994
D. L. Sahagian, et al., "Direct anthropogenic contributions to sea level rise in the twentieth century ", Nature 367: 54-57, 1994
J. Langner, et al., "Anthropogenic influence on the distribution of tropospheric sulphate aerosol", Nature 359: 712-716, 1992
P. G. Falkowski and C. Wilson, "Phytoplankton productivity in the North Pacific ocean since 1900 and implicati
I hope you realize that these (perturbed-physics ensemble) models are doing far more than "simple" interpolation and extrapolation of temperature values.
To elaborate, uncertainties or errors in numerical models limit the utility of projections from any individual model. As a result, ensemble approaches have been proposed in an attempt to estimate the uncertainty in short-term predictions (F. Molteni, et al., "The ECMWF ensemble predictions system: Methodology and validation", Quart. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 122: 73-119, 2006), which work by first measuring the prediction uncertainties and then tracing them back to model biases and errors.
Of course, a component of any projection system should be a suite of models that sample natural variability, forcing uncertainty and uncertainties in the underlying physical processes which drive regional and global climate change. Two approaches that have been adopted in recent years are the ensemble-of-opportunity (G. A. Meehl, et al., "The WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset: A new era in climate change research", Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc. 88: 1383-1394, 2007) and the perturbed-physics ensemble (J. M. Murphy, et al., "Quantification of modelling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations", Nature 430: 768-772, 2004), with the latter being preferred.
One of the key strengths of the perturbed physics approach is the ability to produce a large number of ensemble members in a relatively easy way, as it is possible to control the experimentation and systematically explore uncertainties in processes and feedbacks. For example, it is possible to produce a set of experiments where the input forcing data is the same in each experiment, but the parameters which control, say, the climate sensitivity of the model are varied, which allows for different sources of uncertainty to be isolated. As well, it is possible to explore a wide range of feedback processes in the model by de-tuning it, potentially revealing the impact of previous compensating errors; such de-tuning can ameliorate the potential for double-counting when constraining the models with observations, i.e., the assigning of a relative likelihood to different model versions based on observed data that has been used in their development.
To give some specifics, the model employed by Murphy, et al. uses a total of 31 parameters, e.g., mid-top thin cloud percent, low-top thin cloud percent, zonal mean relative humidity cloud percent, sea-ice extent, outgoing SW radiation at TOA, diurnal temperature range, latent heat flux, mean sea level pressure, and climate prediction index, with perturbations done to a single parameter at a time, either to the minimum or maximum of the range specified in consultation with modeling experts/the literature or on/off. This resulted in 53 different model versions, including the standard parameter setting as defined by Gordon et al. ("The simulation of SST, sea ice extents and ocean heat transport in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 16: 147-168, 2000) and Pope et al. ("The impact of new physical parameterizations in the Hadley Centre climate model-HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 16: 123-146, 2000). Further, in this design, if a perturbation in one physical scheme has an impact on a process or model variable that is also related to another there can be no compensation achieved by perturbing a related parameter, as might be done in the model development process. As a result, this single-perturbation approach can be thought of as the simplest form of model de-tuning (T. F. Stocker, "Climate change: Models change their tune", Nature 430: 737-738, 2004), in that there is no attempt to a priori maximize the model performance when compared to observations (it should be stressed that no systematic tuning of model performance was done to produce the standard parameter settings).
Later on, however, others moved to simultaneous perturbation (M. J. Webb, et al., "On the contribution of local feedback mechanisms to
The editors of the literature are just as politicized and refuse to publish studies that say the earth is not warming, or that the earth is warming, but still a lot cooler than 2000 years ago.
I laughed really hard at this comment, considering this paper was posted a while back: J. Esper, et al., "Orbital forcing of tree-ring data", Nature Clim. Change, 2012 (accepted, in press). (I'm sure that the editors at Nature are quickly moving to reject the article in light of your comment, lest they be accused of favoring concrete evidence over their own opinions.)
I'd be willing to settle for the comment (or, potentially, original research) papers sent to the journal(s) editors.
Also, as someone who has written comment papers for Science, Nature, and PNAS, I can say that the reviewers are accepting, considering that science is an ongoing pursuit, provided you can present reasonable claims. For example, aside from the recent bout of arsenic-based life papers, i.e., M. L. Reaves, et al., "Absence of detectable arsenate in DNA from arsenate-grown GFAJ-1 cells", Science, 2012 (accepted, in press) and T. J. Erb, et al., "GFAJ-1 is an arsenate-resistant, phosphate-dependent organism", Science 2012 (accepted, in press), a semi-controversial topic, at least in geoscience, is the existence of the Younger Dryas impact event:
R. B. Firestone, et al., "Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling", PNAS 104: 16016-16021, 2007
D. J. Kennett, et al., "Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas boundary sediment layer", Science 323: 94, 2009
T. E. Bunch, et al., "Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago", PNAS 109: E1903-E1912, 2012
i.e., a large impact or airburst some 12.9 Ka wiped out the Clovis people, a large number of species, etc.
Although, initially, the hypothesis had merit, several researchers have since shown that many of the original conclusions are unsupported:
F. S. Paquay, et al., "Absence of geochemical evidence for an impact event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas transition", PNAS 106: 21505-21510, 2009
T. L. Daulton, et al., "No evidence of nanodiamonds in Younger-Dryas sediments to support an impact event", PNAS 107: 16043-16047, 2010
T. Surovell, et al., "An independent evaluation of the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis", PNAS 106: 18155-18158, 2010
H. Tian, et al., "Nanodiamonds do not provide unique evidence for a Younger Dryas impact", PNAS 108: 40-44, 2011
J. S. Pigati, et al., "Accumulation of impact markers in desert wetlands and implications for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis", PNAS 109: 7208-7212, 2012
A. van Hoesel, et al., "Nanodiamonds and wildfire evidence in the Usselo horizon postdate the Allerød-Younger Dryas boundary", PNAS 109: 7648-7653, 2012
(see also: J. R. Marlon, et al., "Wildfire responses to abrupt climate change in North America", PNAS 106: 2519-2524, 2009
A. L. Westerling, et al., "Warming and earlier spring increase western US forest wildfire activity", Science 313: 940-943, 2006
T. W. Swetnam, "Fire history and climate change in giant sequoia groves", Science 262: 885-889, 1993
A. Hubbe, et al., "Early Holocene survival of megafauna in South America". J. Biogeography 34: 1642-1646, 2007
A. J. Stuart, et al., "Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth". Nature 431: 684-689, 2004
J. L. Gill, et al., "Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America". Science 326: 1100-1103, 2009)
In all of these cases, the authors were able to provide counter-proposals to some of the evidence that satisfied the journal reviewers, e.g., H. Tian, et al. showed that the existence of nanodiamonds alone does not provide sufficient evidence for a Younger Dryas impact, as nanodiamonds can be deposited by stellar dust (Z. R. Dai, et al., "Possible in situ formation of meteoritic nanodiamonds in the early solar system", Nature 418: 157-159, 2002; N. A. Marks, et al., "Nonequilibrium route to nanodiamond with astrophysical implications", Phys. Rev. Lett. 108: 075503, 2012), formed in charred wood (F. Banhart and P. M. Ajayan, "Carbon onions as nanoscopic pressure cells for diamond formation", Nature 382: 433-435, 1996), etc., while, van Hoesel showed that nanodiamonds in sediment layers from multiple areas postdate the Younger Dryas boundary.
And I await, with breathless anticipation, the day that many of the AGW deniers can actually form a cogent argument and start to refute the underlying mathematical models, e.g.,
J. M. Murphy, et al., "Quantification of modelling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations", Nature 430: 768-772, 2004
J. M. Murphy, et al., "A methodology for probabilistic predictions of regional climate change from perturbed physics ensembles", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 1993-2028, 2007
D. A. Stainforth, et al., "Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2145-2161, 2007
P. A. Stott and C. E. Forest, "Ensemble climate predictions using climate models and observational constraints", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2029-2052, 2007
C. Tebaldi and R. Knutti, "The use of the multi-model ensemble in probabilistic climate projections", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2053-2075, 2007
J. D. Annan and J. C. Hargreaves, "Efficient estimation and ensemble generation in climate modelling", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2077-2088, 2007
M. New, et al., "Challenges in using probabilistic climate change information for impact assessments: An example from the water sector", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2117-2131, 2007
H. Huebener, et al. "Ensemble climate simulations using a fully coupled ocean–troposphere–stratosphere general circulation model", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2089-2101, 2007
S. H. Schneider and M. D. Mastrandrea, "Probabilistic assessment of 'dangerous' climate change and emissions pathways", Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 102: 15728-15735, 2005
F. Giorgi and R. Francisco, "Evaluating uncertainties in the prediction of regional climate change", Geophys. Res. Lett 27: 1295-1298, 2000
M. R. Allen and W. J. Ingram, "Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrological cycle", Nature 419, 224-232, 2002
M. R. Allen, et al., Quantifying the uncertainty in forecasts of anthropogenic climate change", Nature 417: 617-620, 2000
F. Giorgi and L. O. Mearns, "Probability of regional climate change based on the Reliability Ensemble Averaging (REA) method", Geophys. Res. Lett. 30: 1629, 2003
N. G. Andronova and M. E. Schlesinger, "Objective estimation of the probability density function for climate sensitivity", J. Geophys. Res. 106: 22605-22612, 2001
C. E. Forest, et al., "Quantifying uncertainties in climate system properties with the use of recent climate observations", Science 295: 113-117, 2002
R. Knutti, et al., "Constraints on radiative forcing and future climate change from observations and climate model ensembles", Nature 416: 719-723, 2002
J. Gregory, et al., "An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity", J. Clim. 15: 3117-3121, 2002
R. J. Stouffer and S. Manabe, "Response of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide: sensitivity to the rate of increase", J. Clim. 12: 2224-2237, 1999
D. A. Stainforth, et al., "Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases", Nature 433: 403-406, 2005
J. Reilly, et al., "Uncertainty in climate change assessments", Science 293: 430-433, 2001
V. D. Pope, et al., "The impact of new physical parameterisations in the Hadley Centre climate model - HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 16: 123–146, 2000
K. D. Williams, et al., "Transient climate change in the Hadley centre models: The role of physical processes" J. Clim. 14: 2659–2674 2001
G. C. Hegerl, et al., "Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries", Nature 440: 1029-1032, 2006
C. Piani, et al., "Constraints on climate change from a multi-thousand member ensemble of simulations", Geophys. Res. Lett. 32: L32825, 2005
D. N. Barnett, et al., "Quantifying uncertainty in changes in extreme event frequency in response to doubled CO2 using a large ensemble of GCM simulations", Clim. Dyn. 26: 489-511, 2006
C. Tebaldi and B. Sanso, "Joint project
Well, why don't you go ahead and make one then, and then try hand-soldering those tiny SoC connectors.
Anyone who has spent a modicum of time doing PCB design would know that many, if not most, PCB manufacturers will either install surface mount components or have the board shipped off to a partnering assembly company for an incredibly small fee (anywhere from $15 USD to $0.04 USD per 2-sided board, depending on the run size/number of unique parts). Why you would suggest hand-soldering components is beyond me.
Touching on your other point, nothing in my original post should suggest that I want to spend time designing my own Raspberry Pi knockoff; the fact that you propose doing so is rather nonsensical. Moreover, even when I was just an S.B./M.Eng. EECS student, I designed much more complex systems/PCBs than the Raspberry Pi; I'm sure plenty of other engineering students have too for their undergraduate theses.
Also, as an aside, there are plenty of "better" development boards available than the Raspberry Pi. Take, for example, the ODROID-X (http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931), which comes with a 1.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, a quad-core ARM Mali-400 GPU, 1 GB of LP-DDR2 RAM, and much more, all for $129 USD.
Part of the issue is the frequency of the posted Raspberry Pi stories that annoys others, let alone myself. The other is that, while it's a nice, little piece of equipment, it's nothing special: anyone that has gone through a decent electrical/computer engineering program should be more than capable of laying out a similar PCB, within the span of a month or two; after that point, ordering the parts and having them mounted is trivial.
There are plenty of legitimate concerns over the increase in CO2 levels. In fact, just doing a quick search, it's easy to see that CO2 is affecting the pH of the ocean:
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH", Nature 425:365, 2003
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Ocean model predictions of chemistry changes from carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and ocean", J. Geophys. Res. 110:C09S04, 2005
J. C. Orr, et al., "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the 21st century and its impact on calcifying organisms", Nature 437: 681-686, 2005
C. L. Sabine, et al., "The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2", Science 305:367-371, 2004
H. O. Portner, "Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance", Science 315:95-97, 2007
H. O. Portner, "Climate change and temperature dependent biogeography: Oxygen limitation and thermal tolerance in animals", Naturwissenschaften 88:137-146, 2001
R. A. Feely, et al., "Impact of anthropogenic CO2 on the CaCO3 system in oceans", Science 305:362-366, 2004
which, in turn, has a number of devastating consequences for marine life, among other things:
Y. Shirayama and H. Thorton, "Effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on shallow water marine benthos", J. Geophys. Res. 110: C09S08, 2005
S. Widdicombe and H. R. Needham, "Impact of CO2-induced seawater acidification on the burrowing activity of Nereis virens and sediment nutrient flux", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 341: 111-122, 2007
H. L. Wood, et al., "Ocean acidification may increase calcification rates, but at a cost", Proc. Royal. Soc. B-Biol. Sci. 275: 1767-1773, 2008
M. D. Iglesias-Rodriguez, et al., "Phytoplankton calcification in a high-CO2 world", Science 320: 336-340, 2008
S. Collins and G. Bell, "Phenotypic consequences of 1000 generations of selection at elevated CO2 in green alga", Nature 431: 566-569, 2004
M. A. Gutowska, et al., "Growth and calcification in the cephalopod Sepia officinalis under elevated sewater pCO2", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 737: 303-309, 2008
S. Dupont, et al., "Near-future level of CO2-driven ocean acidification radically effects larval survival and development in the brittlestar Ophiothrix fragilis", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 285-294, 2008.
A. J. Anderson, et al., "Life on the margin: Implications of ocean acidification on Mg-calcite, high latitude and cold-water marine calcifers", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 265-273, 2008
W. M. Balch and V. J. Fabry, "Ocean acidification: Documenting its impact on calcifying phytoplankton at basin scales", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 239-247, 2008
J. A. Berge, et al., "Effects of increased sea water concentrations of CO2 on growth of the bivalve Mytilus edulis", L. Chemosphere 62: 681-687
T. F. Cooper, et al., "Declining coral calcification in massive Porites in two nearshore regions of the northern Great Barrier Reef", Glob. Change Biol. 144: 529-538, 2008
F. Gazeua, et al., "Impact of elevated CO2 on shellfish calcification", Geophys. Res. Lett. 34: L07603, 2007
K. R. Hinga, "Effects of pH on coastal phytoplankton", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 283: 281-300, 2002
O. Hoegh-Guldberg, et al., "Coral reefs under rapid climate change and ocean acidification", Science 318: 1737-1742, 2007
P. L. Jokiel, et al., "Ocean acidification and calcifying reef organisms: A mesocosm investigation", Coral Reefs 27: 473-483, 2008
H. Kurihara, "Effects of CO2-driven acidification on the early development stages of invertebrates", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 275-284, 2008
S. I. Siikavuopio, et al., "Effects of carbon dioxide exposure on feed intake and gonad growth in green sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis", J. Aquac. 266: 97-101, 2007
H. Kurihara, et al., "Effects of raised CO2 concentration on the egg production rate and early development of two marine copepods (Acartia steueri and Acartia erythraea)", Mar. Pollut. Bull. 49: 721-727, 2004
H. Kurihara, et al., "Effects of increased seawater pCO2 on early development of the oyster Crassostrea gigas", Aquat. Biol. 1: 91-98, 2007
H. Kurihara, et al., "Sub-leath effects of elevated concentration of CO2 on planktonic copepods and sea urchins", J. Oceanogr. 60: 743-750, 2004
Fusion thus far has been a total dead end. Christ, you invoke science, and then advocate something we can't even make produce energy even the slightest bit greater than the energy we put into it.
And you berate the parent poster, yet fail to mention the significant strides that have been made in fusion research in the past two decades, making it far from a "dead end" endeavor, and the likelihood that we will, eventually, produce more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than we pump into it.
To elaborate on just one area: while the empirical scaling of the density limit and the onset of plasma collapse in tokamak reactors has long been known (see: M. Murakami, et al. "Some observations on maximum densities in tokamak experiments", Nuclear Fusion, 16, 347, 1976; S. J. Fielding, et al. "High-density discharges with gettered torus walls in DITE", Nuclear Fusion, 17, 1382, 1977; R. S. Granetz, "Density Threshold for Magnetohydrodynamic Activity in Alcator C", Physical Review Letters, 49, 658–661, 1982; E. S. Marmar, et al., "Impurity injection experiments on the Alcator C tokamak", Nuclear Fusion, 22, 1567, 1982; M. Greenwald, et al., "A new look at density limits in tokamaks", Nuclear Fusion, 28, 2199, 1988; and M. Greenwald, "Density limits in toroidal plasmas", Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 44, R27, 2002), it wasn't until recently that a sound physics mechanism hypothesis was advanced to explain this phenomenon. In particular, Gates and Delgado-Aparicio ("Origin of tokamak density limit scalings", Physical Review Letters, 108, 165004, 2012), building upon the empirical findings of Suttrop et al. ("Tearing mode formation and radiative edge cooling prior to density limit disruptions in ASDEX upgrade", Nuclear Fusion, 37, 119, 1997) and Salzedas, et al., ("Exponentially Growing Tearing Modes in Rijnhuizen Tokamak Project Plasmas", Physical Review Letters, 88, 075002, 2002), conjectured that radiation-driven islands are the cause of the density limit, as the interior of the islands contain impurities, which radiate cooling, thereby increasing local resistivity and helical current perturbation.
Since, from all appearances, the ideas of Gates and Delgado-Aparicio are correct, steps can now be taken to counteract these instabilities before they become a problem and thus improve reactor efficiency, e.g., in the ITER currently underway in France, the Alcator C-Mod at MIT, or the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics; for example, one could adopt the processes outlined by J. P. Graves, et al. ("Control of magnetohydrodynamic stability by phase space engineering of energetic ions in tokamak plasmas", Nature Communications, 3, 624, 2012).
It most likely is an exception.
The idea of a subsurface ocean on Titan is nothing new and surfaces in the geophysics/geoscience literature every so often. For example, when Voyager I passed by the moon, it detected an abundance of only 3% (mole fraction) of CH4, which is sufficiently low to preclude the stable coexistence of liquid CH4 on the surface. Lunine, et al. ("Ethane ocean on Titan", Science, 222, 1229-1230, 1983) suggested that Titan's atmospheric CH4 may have broken down by a catalyzed photochemical reaction to C2H6, with the C2H6 stemming from a subsurface ocean; the resulting deep ocean would consist of a 3:1 mixture of C2H6 and CH4. (To explain, the dissociation steps of C2H6 involve loss of hydrogen by escape, with the postulated set reactions: 2CH4 -> C2H6 + H2 and 2CH4 -> C2H6 + 2H. The intermediate molecule C2H2 plays the role of catalysis and shielding of C2H6 from photolysis. Furthermore, CH4 would break down at a rate of 1.5*10^10cm^-2/s and H/H2 would leave the atmosphere at 5.5*10^9 and 7*10^9cm^-2/s, which is consistent with Hanel, et al.'s analysis ("Infrared observations of the Saturnian system from Voyager I", Science, 212, 192-200, 1981). As such, it is reasonable to conclude that the result is a production of an CH4-rich ocean of 1km depth and a 100-200km thick layer of solid C2H2 on Titan's ocean floor).
For additional analyses, see: F. M. Flasar, "Oceans on Titan?", Science, 221, 55-57, 1983; O. B. Toon, et al., "Methane rain on Titan", Icarus, 75, 255-284, 1988; N. Dubouloz, et al., "Titan's hypothesized ocean properties: The influence of surface temperature and atmospheric composition uncertanties", Icarus, 82, 81-96, 1989; W. R. Thompson, et al., "Vapor-liquid equilibrium thermodynamics of N2 + CH4: Model and Titan applications", Icarus, 97, 187-199, 1992.
If, in your example, you are talking about the standard Abelian group of reals with respect to addition, and not some arbitrary (commutative) monoid, then yes, I am against teaching fallacious information to someone so that he or she "feels good". I am not, however, against an instructor mentioning that, in abstract algebra, under special circumstances and for certain kinds of sets, 2+2 can equal 5. The reason I am not is that those kinds of statements, at least from my own experiences, engender curiosity: students start to question what they know, how things work, and so forth.
I just said that terms like "Higher order thinking skills" are a bunch of linguistic BULLSHIT attached to what is effectively a policy of teaching children to have a pavlovian "yessum massa!" response to politically correct buzzwords.
If you had bothered to consult any of the literature pertaining to the concepts you are so quick to condemn, you'd know that your entire take on higher-order thinking skills is incorrect.
To elaborate, in the past, psychologists and educational specialists have found it meaningful to partition thought into two groups, referred to as higher and lower, both of which have been rather well characterized. For instance, N. R. F. Maier ("An aspect of human reasoning", British Journal of Psychology, vol. 24, pp. 144-155, 1933; "Reasoning in rats and human beings", The Psychological Review, vol. 44, pp. 365-378, 1937), who used the terms learned behavior and reproductive learning in lieu of lower-order thinking, found that learned behavior came from contiguous experiences with previous repetitions of the relationships involved in the learned behavior pattern, e.g., memorization of multiplication tables via repeated practice. In contrast, behavior integrations that are made up of two or more isolated experiences are qualitatively different, as they arise without previous repetition, and hence constitute "reasoning" or higher-order thinking. To phrase this in a slightly different manner, "reasoning", is used to solve problems that arise when behavior is blocked because a desired end is not immediately attainable. A good example of "reasoning", that is in line with this description, is when a student that knows how to compute the area of simple geometric shapes, e.g., triangles and squares, and can see how to apply that knowledge, without guidance, to solve for the area of general polygons; in that scenario, the student has happened upon a combination of events that may have never been previously associated.
As a second instance, F. M. Newman ("Higher order thinking in teaching social studies: A rationale for the assessment of classroom thoughtfulness", Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 22, 41-56, 1990) defined higher- and lower-order thinking, in virtually the same manner as Maier, based upon observations in classrooms and interviews with teachers and department chairs. That is, lower-order thinking demands only routine or mechanical application of previously acquired information, e.g., inserting numbers into established formulas or regurgitating lists of facts. On the other hand, higher-order thinking "challenges the student to interpret, analyze, or manipulate information". Furthermore, he pointed out that since individuals differ in the kinds of problems they find challenging, higher-order thinking is relative: what one person finds challenging another may find elementary; as such, to determine the extent to which the individual is involved in higher-order thinking, one would presumably need to know something about that individual's background.
Beyond the above two examples, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles in education and psychology journals that touch on higher-order thinking and critical thinking (which are sometimes used interchangeably). In all of the ones that I have skimmed over, the overwhelming consensus is that higher-order thinking skills are critical, logical, reflective, metacognitive, or creative processes activated when one encounters unfamiliar problems, uncertainties, questions or dilemmas, and certainly are not, as you erroneously stated, "linguistic bullshit" designed to indoctrinate students.
Oh, and before you fly off the handle and claim that I'm some brainwashed, leftist moron, let me state that all of the higher-order thinking skills I learned when I was in primary school and at university prepared me rather well for publishing papers in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of the American Statistical Society, Biometrics, Biometrika, and Annals of Statistics, i.e., the top statistics journals.