I think the standard trick is to compare 1998 to 2008 (a comparatively cool year). Seems like I started hearing this "last decade" schtick in 2009, but I could be wrong.
Whoever told you that was lying to you. They cherry-picked the year 1998 for a two-point comparison because it was anomalously high. If you picked 1997 instead you'd see warming way above predictions. But that would also be a lie. That's why climate scientists don't do that, and instead use rolling averages to find the underlying trends.
Okay, so you accept the parts where increased temperature cause increased releases in CO2, and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes temperature to increase, creating a feedback loop. This, by the way, does mean CO2 and other GHGs are "the mechanical cause of climate change".
Your issue is that something has to cause some initial warming in order to start this feedback loop, and in the past it wasn't CO2.
Yet the part where CO2 is a greenhouse gas that can cause warming, this being the whole idea behind the feedback loop, also means that it could instigate the initial warming if something were to release enough of it. Which matches the current trend. So, where's the issue?
>>>The idea that light was a wave moving through the ether was consistent with all available data, especially given the limitations of 19th century measurement
Well the same is true today, in regards to the limitations of globe-wide measurements. There is a ton of uncertainty there.
Okay, and when alternative hypothesis are not consistent with the available data even given the uncertainty, that tells you something about them.
Oh, so you're one of those extremely advanced people who thinks to themselves "Folks were up in arms about a problem, a bunch of changes were made to fix the problem, and now there isn't a problem... gee must never have been a problem in the first place!
I hope to God that some day I can hear people talking in such an advanced fashion about AGW: "Remember when everyone was predicting dramatic climate change from human emissions, so we made all those massive changes to clean, renewable energy sources and we're all driving electric cars? And now the earth's barely warmer than it was then! What a bunch of hooey!"
P.S. you forgot acid rain on the "not a problem now ergo what was done before I was a gleam in my fathers eye to fix it was actually unnecessary" list.
Any real scientist would put "Earth has always gone through massive climate changes due to its nature and that of the sun" as the hypothesis to take down.
No real scientists wouldn't, because you don't need to invalidate the hypothesis that climate change occurs without human input in order to entertain the hypothesis that a specific instance of climate change is due to human input. They're not exclusive.
The actual hypothesis that you would have to take down would be that the current trend in climate change can be explained solely by natural factors like the sun, volcanism, etc.
And hey, guess what? Hard as it is to believe, real scientists are aware of those natural factors and have investigated their role in the current warming trend and they are insufficient.
You wouldn't be so foolish as to say "Humans have died of non-murder related causes" to prove a given human's death wasn't from murder, would you? Yes that statement is true, but the coroner looked at the body and is pretty sure this person died from the multiple stab wounds to the back.
He made his own email program that had no discernible adoption, was not the base of any other email technology.
Which was good enough for me, especially back when I was a teenager, and doubly so if it was a new thing to me. No idea if this'd be the case for him, but it at least seems possible a teenager in the 70s wouldn't know about things running on ARPAnet; I know there was a lot of things I didn't have access to and thus didn't know about in the 80s that I 'reinvented'. Even if I did know of it, doing it myself was an accomplishment.
I guess what I'm saying is why isn't making a unique email system cool enough that they gotta add on that they invented email too.
nothing else exists except nature, so there cannot be anything that exists or occurs that isn't natural.
Natural vs un- or super-natural (i.e. "exists" vs "doesn't exist") Natural vs artificial (i.e. "not man-made" vs "man-made")
Both are valid contexts for natural, but one is more often meaningful when talking about reality (the one that isn't made meaningless by the context).
it's just what happens when you ask DNA to grow humans.
Hey, I'm all for the observation that humans are a part of the natural world -- except for when it's used to dismiss human agency. We are the only species we know for sure can (and has) changed our behavior specifically because of conscious consideration for the large-scale and long-term effects of what we were doing before.
I understood perfectly well that you're claiming the Nobels are irrelevant using as your examples two that are not awarded by the same committee as the natural science prizes. So you're either ignorant of the distinction, or were just choosing to ignore it. Which either way is ignorant and stupid. A point your reply does not address. So I guess it's clear who doesn't understand the written word: The same one who doesn't understand (whether by ignorance or willful stupidity) the nature of the various things called "Nobel prizes".
They are completely irrelevant, at least to people who understand that this is all politics and nothing else. Obama has gotten his for 'peace' and Krugman has gotten his for 'economics'.
Excellent usage of "understand" to mean "make up in a vacuum of ignorance". Here's what's irrelevant: The opinions on the Nobel of people who don't understand the difference between various prizes with the name "Nobel" attached.
Had the error been in the opposite direction, indicating neutrinos slightly slower than previously thought, this experiment would never have been scrutinized so much.
Maybe not as much, certainly not as much in the mainstream media, but it sure as hell would have been scrutinized as a strange and possibly erroneous result. Nobody would have got a Nobel without serious verification efforts (most likely decades of verification as usually happens with a Nobel).
See, neutrinos are so light that we've never actually been able to measure their mass directly, but we do have upper bounds on that mass that are very, very low (something like 5 or more orders of magnitude lighter than an electron -- super fucking light). So in basically any experiment you could perform the expectation is that the neutrino's velocity should be indistinguishable from c within the experimental error. Even neutrinos from distant supernova are expected to arrive at essentially the same time as the photons.
So if they measured a neutrino velocity that was significantly lower, that would be a major result. It would either contradict a large number of other experimental results, or suggest some new physics by which the two sets of results could be reconciled. Either way, it would be a big deal.
It was a sad day when I learned that for all their training to think logically and to seek out truth...Scientist were just like everyone else. They want to stay in line, they don't want to buck trend... god forbid someone proves the great god Einstein wrong. That would be blasphemous!
When and how, exactly, did you learn that? In Imagination College from Professor Unicorn? Where did this idea that overturning Einstein would be "blasphemous" even enter your head? Paint me a picture. I want to know.
would any of them have the balls to step up and claim it?
Only if they could be sure it was really happening, and then FUCK YES THEY WOULD. It would be the most revolutionary experimental result in the last century, and they would become famous. Because that's how you become famous in science. Why do you think you know Einstein's name? Or any other scientist you happened to learn about in Actual School?
Are you erroneously assuming that because scientists are skeptical that the results would pan out due to the exceedingly successful record of Relativity -- which hey turned out to be the smart money bet -- that they would not be willing to accept a contrary result? Well, stop!
T-Rex was not a hunter. He was a scavenger and oportunitstic hunter. For whatever reason, people get upset thinking he's not some mighty hunter. He wasn't. Even more so, they lived in family pods. They were not the loners everyone presents them to be.
T-Rex was almost certainly a hunter. He was quite mobile, and had the tools to kill just about anything he could catch.
He was also a scavenger. But nearly every large predator is a scavenger. Eagles, for instance, are regular eaters of carrion, and notorious for stealing kills from other birds of prey. It's one of the advantages of being big, you see.
My ultimate point is that I think there should be more public assertions by scientists of scientific uncertainty
Like all the "estimate", "could", and "suggests" lines from TFA?
There are plenty such assertions. People just tend to ignore or forget them -- particularly because all the caveats won't fit in the headline, and our soundbite ADD culture can't handle that. See how many people complain on/. that the headline -- not the summary, but the headline -- is "misleading" because it doesn't fully explain the entire story?
Maybe, though, the real problem is with journalists, textbook authors and University press offices.
Primarily the first. It was the article (and thus summary) that chose to compare this new estimate with the highest estimate ever that was about 3.5 times higher than this one. And also extremely outdated. You might as well compare a new estimate of the earth's mass to when it was thought the earth was a plate resting on a turtle. But comparing to the second-most-recent estimate, which was only about 25% larger than this, doesn't make it sound as revolutionary -- even though the key part, the technique for doing the estimate, is.
Now watch the large number of people whose take away from this was that the mass of Brachiasaurus dropped by 70% overnight.
I do not think that Science is like Religion. Like I said, this article is a Good Thing.
You made it sound like this is the exception to the rule ("I'm glad that some..."), rather than the rule itself.
However, you can't deny that scientists are imperfect and sometimes act that way.
The scientific method is premised on the idea that scientists are imperfect.
In order to overcome growing public growing, rationalists must be like Avis and "Try Harder" at being humble and not so dogmatic.
I'm not sure that's so. Look, you point at this article saying "Is it any wonder people don't trust science?", then point out how science is always changing its mind. You said it's Dogmatic when as a rule it isn't, but then again the people you're talking about don't have a problem with Dogma, do they? They just don't like it when it admits it was wrong and changes.
The unspoken implication, which I think is more correct, is that Joe Fundamentalist Six Pack would be more likely to believe in science if it was more dogmatic, and didn't change hypothesis in light of new data. "Don't worry folks, Brachiasurus weighs 80 metric tonnes and egg whites are bad for you, always and forever."
Which is why we should never, ever change how science is done to win over people whose fundamental issue is that they don't understand science, don't want to understand science, and thus can't be arsed to try.
10/10 for using the ol' "science is like Religion because they claim to have Truth and banish those who disagree with their Orthodoxy" line in an article about scientists at a major research university up-ending the "orthodoxy" and publishing their "heresey" in a Royal Society publication. I love this kind of irony.
Off by a factor of 3 1/2 seems ridiculous, even if we're talking research that was done in the 60s.
I don't think that research was done in the 60s, and I certainly don't think this is up-ending the previous best estimate by such a large factor. I'd bet that guess was made closer to the time Brachiasaurus was discovered in the very early 1900s, and that's why it says "once thought" and "estimates have been as high".
WP suggests the most recent estimate (from 2009) was 28.7 metric tonnes.
While this new figure is still appreciably lighter, it doesn't make it sound as shocking to use the most recent estimate as the comparison point, does it?
It's good to know that someone thought the same and followed through with it.
How do you know that's what they thought? Sure there's been a trend of weight decreasing from early estimates, but maybe they thought it would confirm the latest estimates, or even show them to be heavier. Maybe they just thought that they had a novel new method of estimating the weight and should see what it says.
Which, regardless of their expectation of the result, was what happened. That's the key, going where the results suggest, not where you expected.
I only recall them saying "The forest moon of Endor", which I took to mean that the moon was called Endor, but I guess could have meant "the forest moon of the planet Endor".
Either way, Chewbacca doesn't live on Endor. But that's part of the joke.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the standard trick is to compare 1998 to 2008 (a comparatively cool year). Seems like I started hearing this "last decade" schtick in 2009, but I could be wrong.
How come it's getting colder over the last decade
Whoever told you that was lying to you. They cherry-picked the year 1998 for a two-point comparison because it was anomalously high. If you picked 1997 instead you'd see warming way above predictions. But that would also be a lie. That's why climate scientists don't do that, and instead use rolling averages to find the underlying trends.
It also assumes that TPM will ship on by default, which isnt the case with any computer I've seen.
Heh. In my machine the TPM module wasn't shipped "on" as in "on the motherboard". There's just an empty spot on the board with some solder points.
Okay, so you accept the parts where increased temperature cause increased releases in CO2, and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes temperature to increase, creating a feedback loop. This, by the way, does mean CO2 and other GHGs are "the mechanical cause of climate change".
Your issue is that something has to cause some initial warming in order to start this feedback loop, and in the past it wasn't CO2.
Yet the part where CO2 is a greenhouse gas that can cause warming, this being the whole idea behind the feedback loop, also means that it could instigate the initial warming if something were to release enough of it. Which matches the current trend. So, where's the issue?
Okay, and when alternative hypothesis are not consistent with the available data even given the uncertainty, that tells you something about them.
Oh, so you're one of those extremely advanced people who thinks to themselves "Folks were up in arms about a problem, a bunch of changes were made to fix the problem, and now there isn't a problem... gee must never have been a problem in the first place!
I hope to God that some day I can hear people talking in such an advanced fashion about AGW: "Remember when everyone was predicting dramatic climate change from human emissions, so we made all those massive changes to clean, renewable energy sources and we're all driving electric cars? And now the earth's barely warmer than it was then! What a bunch of hooey!"
P.S. you forgot acid rain on the "not a problem now ergo what was done before I was a gleam in my fathers eye to fix it was actually unnecessary" list.
Any real scientist would put "Earth has always gone through massive climate changes due to its nature and that of the sun" as the hypothesis to take down.
No real scientists wouldn't, because you don't need to invalidate the hypothesis that climate change occurs without human input in order to entertain the hypothesis that a specific instance of climate change is due to human input. They're not exclusive.
The actual hypothesis that you would have to take down would be that the current trend in climate change can be explained solely by natural factors like the sun, volcanism, etc.
And hey, guess what? Hard as it is to believe, real scientists are aware of those natural factors and have investigated their role in the current warming trend and they are insufficient.
You wouldn't be so foolish as to say "Humans have died of non-murder related causes" to prove a given human's death wasn't from murder, would you? Yes that statement is true, but the coroner looked at the body and is pretty sure this person died from the multiple stab wounds to the back.
He made his own email program that had no discernible adoption, was not the base of any other email technology.
Which was good enough for me, especially back when I was a teenager, and doubly so if it was a new thing to me. No idea if this'd be the case for him, but it at least seems possible a teenager in the 70s wouldn't know about things running on ARPAnet; I know there was a lot of things I didn't have access to and thus didn't know about in the 80s that I 'reinvented'. Even if I did know of it, doing it myself was an accomplishment.
I guess what I'm saying is why isn't making a unique email system cool enough that they gotta add on that they invented email too.
nothing else exists except nature, so there cannot be anything that exists or occurs that isn't natural.
Natural vs un- or super-natural (i.e. "exists" vs "doesn't exist")
Natural vs artificial (i.e. "not man-made" vs "man-made")
Both are valid contexts for natural, but one is more often meaningful when talking about reality (the one that isn't made meaningless by the context).
it's just what happens when you ask DNA to grow humans.
Hey, I'm all for the observation that humans are a part of the natural world -- except for when it's used to dismiss human agency. We are the only species we know for sure can (and has) changed our behavior specifically because of conscious consideration for the large-scale and long-term effects of what we were doing before.
This is not "just what happens".
I understood perfectly well that you're claiming the Nobels are irrelevant using as your examples two that are not awarded by the same committee as the natural science prizes. So you're either ignorant of the distinction, or were just choosing to ignore it. Which either way is ignorant and stupid. A point your reply does not address. So I guess it's clear who doesn't understand the written word: The same one who doesn't understand (whether by ignorance or willful stupidity) the nature of the various things called "Nobel prizes".
They are completely irrelevant, at least to people who understand that this is all politics and nothing else. Obama has gotten his for 'peace' and Krugman has gotten his for 'economics'.
Excellent usage of "understand" to mean "make up in a vacuum of ignorance". Here's what's irrelevant: The opinions on the Nobel of people who don't understand the difference between various prizes with the name "Nobel" attached.
I'm totally doing that, but the new prize level isn't *nearly* low enough to count as being treated like a bitch, so I'm out.
Slashdotter uses "learn something".
It is super effective.
How is attom formed?
Had the error been in the opposite direction, indicating neutrinos slightly slower than previously thought, this experiment would never have been scrutinized so much.
Maybe not as much, certainly not as much in the mainstream media, but it sure as hell would have been scrutinized as a strange and possibly erroneous result. Nobody would have got a Nobel without serious verification efforts (most likely decades of verification as usually happens with a Nobel).
See, neutrinos are so light that we've never actually been able to measure their mass directly, but we do have upper bounds on that mass that are very, very low (something like 5 or more orders of magnitude lighter than an electron -- super fucking light). So in basically any experiment you could perform the expectation is that the neutrino's velocity should be indistinguishable from c within the experimental error. Even neutrinos from distant supernova are expected to arrive at essentially the same time as the photons.
So if they measured a neutrino velocity that was significantly lower, that would be a major result. It would either contradict a large number of other experimental results, or suggest some new physics by which the two sets of results could be reconciled. Either way, it would be a big deal.
It was a sad day when I learned that for all their training to think logically and to seek out truth...Scientist were just like everyone else. They want to stay in line, they don't want to buck trend... god forbid someone proves the great god Einstein wrong. That would be blasphemous!
When and how, exactly, did you learn that? In Imagination College from Professor Unicorn? Where did this idea that overturning Einstein would be "blasphemous" even enter your head? Paint me a picture. I want to know.
would any of them have the balls to step up and claim it?
Only if they could be sure it was really happening, and then FUCK YES THEY WOULD. It would be the most revolutionary experimental result in the last century, and they would become famous. Because that's how you become famous in science. Why do you think you know Einstein's name? Or any other scientist you happened to learn about in Actual School?
Are you erroneously assuming that because scientists are skeptical that the results would pan out due to the exceedingly successful record of Relativity -- which hey turned out to be the smart money bet -- that they would not be willing to accept a contrary result? Well, stop!
T-Rex was not a hunter. He was a scavenger and oportunitstic hunter. For whatever reason, people get upset thinking he's not some mighty hunter. He wasn't. Even more so, they lived in family pods. They were not the loners everyone presents them to be.
T-Rex was almost certainly a hunter. He was quite mobile, and had the tools to kill just about anything he could catch.
He was also a scavenger. But nearly every large predator is a scavenger. Eagles, for instance, are regular eaters of carrion, and notorious for stealing kills from other birds of prey. It's one of the advantages of being big, you see.
I'm picturing you saying "Hey, nobody lives forever. Death and taxes, am I right?" after taking the stand at your murder trial.
But of course that would be stupid.
My ultimate point is that I think there should be more public assertions by scientists of scientific uncertainty
Like all the "estimate", "could", and "suggests" lines from TFA?
There are plenty such assertions. People just tend to ignore or forget them -- particularly because all the caveats won't fit in the headline, and our soundbite ADD culture can't handle that. See how many people complain on /. that the headline -- not the summary, but the headline -- is "misleading" because it doesn't fully explain the entire story?
Maybe, though, the real problem is with journalists, textbook authors and University press offices.
Primarily the first. It was the article (and thus summary) that chose to compare this new estimate with the highest estimate ever that was about 3.5 times higher than this one. And also extremely outdated. You might as well compare a new estimate of the earth's mass to when it was thought the earth was a plate resting on a turtle. But comparing to the second-most-recent estimate, which was only about 25% larger than this, doesn't make it sound as revolutionary -- even though the key part, the technique for doing the estimate, is.
Now watch the large number of people whose take away from this was that the mass of Brachiasaurus dropped by 70% overnight.
This is not the fault of science.
I do not think that Science is like Religion. Like I said, this article is a Good Thing.
You made it sound like this is the exception to the rule ("I'm glad that some..."), rather than the rule itself.
However, you can't deny that scientists are imperfect and sometimes act that way.
The scientific method is premised on the idea that scientists are imperfect.
In order to overcome growing public growing, rationalists must be like Avis and "Try Harder" at being humble and not so dogmatic.
I'm not sure that's so. Look, you point at this article saying "Is it any wonder people don't trust science?", then point out how science is always changing its mind. You said it's Dogmatic when as a rule it isn't, but then again the people you're talking about don't have a problem with Dogma, do they? They just don't like it when it admits it was wrong and changes.
The unspoken implication, which I think is more correct, is that Joe Fundamentalist Six Pack would be more likely to believe in science if it was more dogmatic, and didn't change hypothesis in light of new data. "Don't worry folks, Brachiasurus weighs 80 metric tonnes and egg whites are bad for you, always and forever."
Which is why we should never, ever change how science is done to win over people whose fundamental issue is that they don't understand science, don't want to understand science, and thus can't be arsed to try.
10/10 for using the ol' "science is like Religion because they claim to have Truth and banish those who disagree with their Orthodoxy" line in an article about scientists at a major research university up-ending the "orthodoxy" and publishing their "heresey" in a Royal Society publication. I love this kind of irony.
Off by a factor of 3 1/2 seems ridiculous, even if we're talking research that was done in the 60s.
I don't think that research was done in the 60s, and I certainly don't think this is up-ending the previous best estimate by such a large factor. I'd bet that guess was made closer to the time Brachiasaurus was discovered in the very early 1900s, and that's why it says "once thought" and "estimates have been as high".
WP suggests the most recent estimate (from 2009) was 28.7 metric tonnes.
While this new figure is still appreciably lighter, it doesn't make it sound as shocking to use the most recent estimate as the comparison point, does it?
It's good to know that someone thought the same and followed through with it.
How do you know that's what they thought? Sure there's been a trend of weight decreasing from early estimates, but maybe they thought it would confirm the latest estimates, or even show them to be heavier. Maybe they just thought that they had a novel new method of estimating the weight and should see what it says.
Which, regardless of their expectation of the result, was what happened. That's the key, going where the results suggest, not where you expected.
I only recall them saying "The forest moon of Endor", which I took to mean that the moon was called Endor, but I guess could have meant "the forest moon of the planet Endor".
Either way, Chewbacca doesn't live on Endor. But that's part of the joke.
"Don't childproof the world, worldproof the child"
But powered armor suits are prohibitively expensive especially since you have to keep buying bigger ones as the child grows!