Make any sense? Are doctors really required to eliminate all bias and treat everyone equivalently? The premise of the study, that bias is bad, is wrong. Bias, which by definition means altering ones behavior based on circumstance, seems to me to be quite essential in medicine.
The differing genes in every population selection experiment demonstrating the process of natural selection in adapting a species to its environment have been universally already present in the genome. The famous Peppered moth experiment, for example, did not involve mutations at all, but simply selective breeding using a natural (as opposed to an intentional) selecting agent. Provide an example of a random mutation that created a beneficial mutation that resulted in objectively improved future survivability. You can't, because there are none.
Mutations are indeed a well established fact, but researchers have yet to show evidence of a truly beneficial mutation. Yes, there are mutations with beneficial outcomes in restricted environments. That's because mutations are context dependent, meaning the observer and the environment determines the definition of "beneficial".
The term "survival of the fittest" doesn't define "benefitial", since it is a tautology (Which individuals are the fittest? Why, the ones that survive!) An oft tauted example is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. In an environment where antibiotics are present, mutations in the bacterial DNA that alter the target of the antibiotic allow the bacteria to survive (the bacteria are faced with a “live or die” situation). But those mutations alter a protein or system that is in every case important for the normal functioning of the bacteria in the near future.
For example, a mutation may destroy the ability to process essential nutrients. The popular catch-phrase among researchers in all these bacterial antibiotic experiments is "...and then it died.". The benefit of any given mutation is not an independent, measurable quantity, and no current research considers the total affect of the mutation on the life of future generations. The general result has been that future generations are short-lived.
If you're speaking of the Peppered moth experiment, that involved two existing variations of the same organism, a white-colored phenotype and a black-colored phenotype. In the Peppered moth species, a single gene controls the body color of the peppered moth. The dark phenotype is a dominant allele, which means that a moth possessing at least one such allele will have a dark body. Each individual will have alleles - one from each of its parents. To have a light body, the moth must have both alleles for light body color.
This was not a mutation. There was no change in the genotype. It's simply selective breeding from the existing gene pool.
I'm open to verifiable examples of beneficial random mutations that have been passed on to offspring. There are lot's of "just so" stories, but no reproducible results. If descent with modification through random mutation and survival of the "fittest" really takes place, there should be millions of examples readily observable,.
That's NOT evolution. Evolution is descent with _modification_, specifically through random mutation. Otherwise it's just population selection of existing genes. Which has never been demonstrated.
The idea that the earth "should have" any particular average temperature is a pointless one. Climate is what it is, and factors like albedo and Coriolis forces induce enough randomness that nobody "average" temperature has any particular meaning. In fact, it's rather like asking what the average phone number should be.
But "fixing" a non-problem is usually deleterious. You make things worse, and you waste capital doing so. It may well be that a warmer planet will be a better one. All the "just so" stories of tipping points and rising oceans are just that: unproven suppositions. Like the South Pacific islands supposedly being swamped by rising seas that actually turn out to be sinking.
For example, more people die from cold than heat. And longer growing seasons in a warmer earth more than offset the reduced arability due to small temperature excursions. Adaptation is required, to be sure, but I bet that's way, way cheaper than the cost of trying to alter climate change, which may well not be anthropomorphic.
"The "suspicion" of CO2 as a warming agent is based on the physics of CO2, specifically its property of absorbing infrared radiation which is easily measured in the laboratory. Why would you think it wouldn't do the same thing in the atmosphere or what is it in the Earth system that negates the effect?"
Because a laboratory is not an atmosphere. It doesn't contain all the factors that affect surface temperature, such as clouds, for example, which increase the albedo of the earth, and are a much larger factor in temperature change than CO2. In fact, the climate warmists acknowledge that the actual heat directly generated by infrared radiation of CO2 is inconsequential. They had to invent the "positive water vapor feedback" amplifier to give CO2 actual warming power. That theory has only been "proven" by computer modeling, which is widely recognized to be completely inadequate to the problem at hand.
The problem is assigning higher validity to measurements that agree with other measurements. The validity of each measurement must stand on its own, based on the rigor of the measuring system. To say that "well, this number agrees with my other numbers, so it's more likely to be right" is one of the fundamental errors made in research. As a scientist, the confidence in your data comes from your experiment design, not from the how the results line up. The most you can say is that "it feels good" when data lines up, but to use one measurement to validate another is a science sin.
That mythbuster's episode is completely offbase. It starts with the incorrect assumption that the "greenhouse effect" works like an earthbound greenhouse. It doesn't -- that term is just an erroneous simplification to make the mechanics seem understandable. See The greenhouse effect is not the effect that warms greenhouses.".
It turns out it is very hard to test the assertion that so-called greenhouse gasses cause warming. So hard that it has never been empirically tested, only modeled in computer simulations. (To prove me wrong, just cite the researcher who conducted an experiment demonstrating the effect). The assertaion that so-called greenhouse gases, especially CO2, contribute to near-surface atmospheric warming is contradicted by well-known physical laws relating to gas and vapour, as well as to general thermodynamics.
In the late 1800s, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius discovered a correlation between greenhouse gas concentrations and surface temperatures. However, he did not demonstrate cause and effect. It could well be that temperatures affect CO2 concentrations, rather than the other way around.
"The relationship between CO2 content in the atmosphere, and how much heat the Earth absorbs from / radiates into space, is basic physics, and has been well understood for a hundred years or so."
No, what has been "well understood" for 100 years is how to measure CO2 in the atmosphere, and that process has been refined dramatically over time. We can measure CO2, see its rise and fall with the seasons, and see some temperature change over a geologically insignificant timespan. CO2 and climate temperature change show correlations, but not cause and effect. It could well be that CO2 levels increase as the result of temperature increases, and that the long term trend for both is oscillation rather than steadfast increases.
Basic physics says that tiny changes in CO2 don't affect climate temperature. To get a significant amount of warming, climate alarmists have come up with a "CO2 Feedback" theory that depends on a positive (heating) water vapor feedback process to amplify CO2 influence of temperature. But that is just an unproven theory, supported only by tenuous and doubtful simulations, not by actual scientific experiment. No measurement show this positive water vapor feedback, but in fact show the opposite, in the form of a cooling Earth albedo.
In the peer-reviewed paper Radiation physics constraints on global warming: CO2 increase has little effect, physicist Denis Rancourt describes the "basic physics" of planetary radiation balance and surface temperature. He demonstrates that clouds have a much greater cooling effect on temperature by greatly increasing the Earth's otherwise low albedo, a property measurable from satellite imagery. The cooling effect completely overwhelms the unproven CO2 amplification feedback theory. He also says:
"What emboldens warmist scientists and modellers, beyond institutional backing and the advantages of groupthink, is the fact that the atmosphere’s uniform CO2 concentration is easy to work with – both in modelling and conceptually – but they should aquire humility before indulging their CO2 fetish and advancing their tenuous doomsday predictions given geoscience’s overwhelming ignorance about climate feedbacks."
The physical chemist's point was that the physicist was thinking the wrong way about the problem: at the atomic level, rather than the chemical level. In fact, freezing CO2, while physically possible, is not economically feasible. But there are many carbon extraction systems that can use solar power and/or convection, in combination with CO2 absorbents, to extract CO2 at a reasonable cost. For example, early this year the NY Times reported on a Bill Gates-funded project to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere that aims to lower the cost to $100/ton, which is a reasonable cost that could be borne by industry.
But that cost should only be incurred once it's proven that CO2 does indeed cause global temperature increases, and that the CO2 is human-generated. Right now those are not proven facts. The suspicion of CO2 as a warming agent has been based on the correlation of CO2 concentrations with temperature, but no cause-and-effect has been proven. It could be that CO2 changes result from temperature changes, rather than vice-versa.
The ice contains bubbles. The bubbles contain air, in gaseous form. Ice crystals near the surface of a glacier are compressed by the continual addition of snow at the surface. As the ice crystals travel down into the glacier, they grow and reorient themselves into a closer packing. Density rises, open porosity decreases, and by some depth between 40 and 120 m, the crystals are sintered together into an impermeable mass (‘‘glacial ice’’) in which about 10% of the volume is composed of isolated bubbles.
It's not proven yet that these bubbles really represent the actual atmosphere at the time of freezing, due to the effects of temperature on gas composition. As others have pointed out, since the process can't be repeated experimentally, there may be unknown factors increasing CO2 or other gas ratios.
Sheesh! What are they teaching people these days? Not mathematics, certainly.
PPM stands for PARTS PER MILLION. What we are talking about here is a change of 0.00012, or 1.2% of 1% of the atmosphere's gaseous composition. Climate hypochondriacs would have us believe that the atmospheric system is so precarious that a 0.00012 change in gas composition creates observable temperature results. Keep in mind that the CO2 effects are dwarfed by the oscillations of the major climate change gas, water vapor. There is simply no scientific evidence that CO2 changes of these tiny amounts quantitatively changes temperature in a world-wide system that has so many variables that no computational model today can hope to cope with.
Much bogus science has survived based on the naive expectations of experimental rigor that later turned out to be ill-advised. Cold Fusion comes to mind. The point is that scientists have to document, and publish, ALL of their methodology. And in this case, as far as I can tell, they haven't. Of course, I didn't pony up to the research journal paywall to read every published paper. But I have read a great deal about volcanic test stations for CO2, and their arguments seem unsupported to me.
I was once at a climate conference on sequestration, where a nuclear physicist on a panel begin talking about how difficult separating CO2 from the air actually is. "Magnetic separation requires a huge apparatus due to CO2's non-polarity. Centrifugal separation requires massive amounts of energy. This problem, I can tell you as a long-time experimental physicist, is tougher than it looks."
An audience member raised his hand: "I am only a physical chemist, and so can't really speak to your separation methods. But the way we do it is to cool the air to -78C and then collect the solid precipitate."
"Fortunately for science the Mauna Loa readings are in good agreement with those taken at hundreds of other sites around the globe."
This is called Confirmation Bias. And it's not Science. Science is when you recognize that data NOT in agreement with other data is significant, and not just a discardable outlier.
This is a new report, and a somewhat arbitrary threshhold (400, after all, is just an integer with no chemical significance):
"NOAA has reported 400.03 for May 9, 2013, while Scripps has reported 399.73. The difference partly reflects different reporting periods. NOAA uses UTC, whereas Scripps uses local time in Hawaii to define the 24-hr reporting period. If Scripps were to use same reporting period as NOAA, we would report 400.08 for May 9."
So, since this is a new report, we get to rerun all our original criticisms explaining why the report is bogus, and NOT SCIENCE.
Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth, among the most active of all volcanoes, having erupted 33 times since its first well-documented historical eruption in 1843. The enormous cone covers half of the Island of Hawai`i and by itself amounts to about 85 percent of all the other Hawaiian Islands combined.
So this seems like a silly place to consider as a steady-state CO standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Make any sense? Are doctors really required to eliminate all bias and treat everyone equivalently? The premise of the study, that bias is bad, is wrong. Bias, which by definition means altering ones behavior based on circumstance, seems to me to be quite essential in medicine.
The differing genes in every population selection experiment demonstrating the process of natural selection in adapting a species to its environment have been universally already present in the genome. The famous Peppered moth experiment, for example, did not involve mutations at all, but simply selective breeding using a natural (as opposed to an intentional) selecting agent. Provide an example of a random mutation that created a beneficial mutation that resulted in objectively improved future survivability. You can't, because there are none.
Mutations are indeed a well established fact, but researchers have yet to show evidence of a truly beneficial mutation. Yes, there are mutations with beneficial outcomes in restricted environments. That's because mutations are context dependent, meaning the observer and the environment determines the definition of "beneficial".
The term "survival of the fittest" doesn't define "benefitial", since it is a tautology (Which individuals are the fittest? Why, the ones that survive!) An oft tauted example is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. In an environment where antibiotics are present, mutations in the bacterial DNA that alter the target of the antibiotic allow the bacteria to survive (the bacteria are faced with a “live or die” situation). But those mutations alter a protein or system that is in every case important for the normal functioning of the bacteria in the near future.
For example, a mutation may destroy the ability to process essential nutrients. The popular catch-phrase among researchers in all these bacterial antibiotic experiments is "...and then it died.". The benefit of any given mutation is not an independent, measurable quantity, and no current research considers the total affect of the mutation on the life of future generations. The general result has been that future generations are short-lived.
If you're speaking of the Peppered moth experiment, that involved two existing variations of the same organism, a white-colored phenotype and a black-colored phenotype. In the Peppered moth species, a single gene controls the body color of the peppered moth. The dark phenotype is a dominant allele, which means that a moth possessing at least one such allele will have a dark body. Each individual will have alleles - one from each of its parents. To have a light body, the moth must have both alleles for light body color.
This was not a mutation. There was no change in the genotype. It's simply selective breeding from the existing gene pool.
I'm open to verifiable examples of beneficial random mutations that have been passed on to offspring. There are lot's of "just so" stories, but no reproducible results. If descent with modification through random mutation and survival of the "fittest" really takes place, there should be millions of examples readily observable,.
Descent with modification of a beneficial mutation has never been demonstrated.
That's NOT evolution. Evolution is descent with _modification_, specifically through random mutation. Otherwise it's just population selection of existing genes. Which has never been demonstrated.
It's bias when you say that because a particular number agrees with other numbers it is a "better" result. It's just a result.
The idea that the earth "should have" any particular average temperature is a pointless one. Climate is what it is, and factors like albedo and Coriolis forces induce enough randomness that nobody "average" temperature has any particular meaning. In fact, it's rather like asking what the average phone number should be.
But "fixing" a non-problem is usually deleterious. You make things worse, and you waste capital doing so. It may well be that a warmer planet will be a better one. All the "just so" stories of tipping points and rising oceans are just that: unproven suppositions. Like the South Pacific islands supposedly being swamped by rising seas that actually turn out to be sinking.
For example, more people die from cold than heat. And longer growing seasons in a warmer earth more than offset the reduced arability due to small temperature excursions. Adaptation is required, to be sure, but I bet that's way, way cheaper than the cost of trying to alter climate change, which may well not be anthropomorphic.
My point precisely. There is no scientific reason for calling out 400 PPM as a landmark, other than hyperbole.
"The "suspicion" of CO2 as a warming agent is based on the physics of CO2, specifically its property of absorbing infrared radiation which is easily measured in the laboratory. Why would you think it wouldn't do the same thing in the atmosphere or what is it in the Earth system that negates the effect?"
Because a laboratory is not an atmosphere. It doesn't contain all the factors that affect surface temperature, such as clouds, for example, which increase the albedo of the earth, and are a much larger factor in temperature change than CO2. In fact, the climate warmists acknowledge that the actual heat directly generated by infrared radiation of CO2 is inconsequential. They had to invent the "positive water vapor feedback" amplifier to give CO2 actual warming power. That theory has only been "proven" by computer modeling, which is widely recognized to be completely inadequate to the problem at hand.
You should read up on Confirmation Bias. An excellent paper is Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises" (1998, Nickerson, RS)
The problem is assigning higher validity to measurements that agree with other measurements. The validity of each measurement must stand on its own, based on the rigor of the measuring system. To say that "well, this number agrees with my other numbers, so it's more likely to be right" is one of the fundamental errors made in research. As a scientist, the confidence in your data comes from your experiment design, not from the how the results line up. The most you can say is that "it feels good" when data lines up, but to use one measurement to validate another is a science sin.
That mythbuster's episode is completely offbase. It starts with the incorrect assumption that the "greenhouse effect" works like an earthbound greenhouse. It doesn't -- that term is just an erroneous simplification to make the mechanics seem understandable. See The greenhouse effect is not the effect that warms greenhouses.".
It turns out it is very hard to test the assertion that so-called greenhouse gasses cause warming. So hard that it has never been empirically tested, only modeled in computer simulations. (To prove me wrong, just cite the researcher who conducted an experiment demonstrating the effect). The assertaion that so-called greenhouse gases, especially CO2, contribute to near-surface atmospheric warming is contradicted by well-known physical laws relating to gas and vapour, as well as to general thermodynamics.
In the late 1800s, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius discovered a correlation between greenhouse gas concentrations and surface temperatures. However, he did not demonstrate cause and effect. It could well be that temperatures affect CO2 concentrations, rather than the other way around.
"The relationship between CO2 content in the atmosphere, and how much heat the Earth absorbs from / radiates into space, is basic physics, and has been well understood for a hundred years or so."
No, what has been "well understood" for 100 years is how to measure CO2 in the atmosphere, and that process has been refined dramatically over time. We can measure CO2, see its rise and fall with the seasons, and see some temperature change over a geologically insignificant timespan. CO2 and climate temperature change show correlations, but not cause and effect. It could well be that CO2 levels increase as the result of temperature increases, and that the long term trend for both is oscillation rather than steadfast increases.
Basic physics says that tiny changes in CO2 don't affect climate temperature. To get a significant amount of warming, climate alarmists have come up with a "CO2 Feedback" theory that depends on a positive (heating) water vapor feedback process to amplify CO2 influence of temperature. But that is just an unproven theory, supported only by tenuous and doubtful simulations, not by actual scientific experiment. No measurement show this positive water vapor feedback, but in fact show the opposite, in the form of a cooling Earth albedo.
In the peer-reviewed paper Radiation physics constraints on global warming: CO2 increase has little effect, physicist Denis Rancourt describes the "basic physics" of planetary radiation balance and surface temperature. He demonstrates that clouds have a much greater cooling effect on temperature by greatly increasing the Earth's otherwise low albedo, a property measurable from satellite imagery. The cooling effect completely overwhelms the unproven CO2 amplification feedback theory. He also says:
"What emboldens warmist scientists and modellers, beyond institutional backing and the advantages of groupthink, is the fact that the atmosphere’s uniform CO2 concentration is easy to work with – both in modelling and conceptually – but they should aquire humility before indulging their CO2 fetish and advancing their tenuous doomsday predictions given geoscience’s overwhelming ignorance about climate feedbacks."
The physical chemist's point was that the physicist was thinking the wrong way about the problem: at the atomic level, rather than the chemical level. In fact, freezing CO2, while physically possible, is not economically feasible. But there are many carbon extraction systems that can use solar power and/or convection, in combination with CO2 absorbents, to extract CO2 at a reasonable cost. For example, early this year the NY Times reported on a Bill Gates-funded project to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere that aims to lower the cost to $100/ton, which is a reasonable cost that could be borne by industry.
But that cost should only be incurred once it's proven that CO2 does indeed cause global temperature increases, and that the CO2 is human-generated. Right now those are not proven facts. The suspicion of CO2 as a warming agent has been based on the correlation of CO2 concentrations with temperature, but no cause-and-effect has been proven. It could be that CO2 changes result from temperature changes, rather than vice-versa.
They picked 400 because it's a round number. That's the only reason.
Anonycow,
The ice contains bubbles. The bubbles contain air, in gaseous form. Ice crystals near the surface of a glacier are compressed by the continual addition of snow at the surface. As the ice crystals travel down into the glacier, they grow and reorient themselves into a closer packing. Density rises, open porosity decreases, and by some depth between 40 and 120 m, the crystals are sintered together into an impermeable mass (‘‘glacial ice’’) in which about 10% of the volume is composed of isolated bubbles.
It's not proven yet that these bubbles really represent the actual atmosphere at the time of freezing, due to the effects of temperature on gas composition. As others have pointed out, since the process can't be repeated experimentally, there may be unknown factors increasing CO2 or other gas ratios.
Sheesh! What are they teaching people these days? Not mathematics, certainly.
PPM stands for PARTS PER MILLION. What we are talking about here is a change of 0.00012, or 1.2% of 1% of the atmosphere's gaseous composition. Climate hypochondriacs would have us believe that the atmospheric system is so precarious that a 0.00012 change in gas composition creates observable temperature results. Keep in mind that the CO2 effects are dwarfed by the oscillations of the major climate change gas, water vapor. There is simply no scientific evidence that CO2 changes of these tiny amounts quantitatively changes temperature in a world-wide system that has so many variables that no computational model today can hope to cope with.
Much bogus science has survived based on the naive expectations of experimental rigor that later turned out to be ill-advised. Cold Fusion comes to mind. The point is that scientists have to document, and publish, ALL of their methodology. And in this case, as far as I can tell, they haven't. Of course, I didn't pony up to the research journal paywall to read every published paper. But I have read a great deal about volcanic test stations for CO2, and their arguments seem unsupported to me.
;)
I was once at a climate conference on sequestration, where a nuclear physicist on a panel begin talking about how difficult separating CO2 from the air actually is. "Magnetic separation requires a huge apparatus due to CO2's non-polarity. Centrifugal separation requires massive amounts of energy. This problem, I can tell you as a long-time experimental physicist, is tougher than it looks."
An audience member raised his hand: "I am only a physical chemist, and so can't really speak to your separation methods. But the way we do it is to cool the air to -78C and then collect the solid precipitate."
He got a standing ovation
Precisely:
March 6, 2013: As Carbon Dioxide Levels Continue To Rise, Global Temperatures Are Not Following Suit
"Fortunately for science the Mauna Loa readings are in good agreement with those taken at hundreds of other sites around the globe."
This is called Confirmation Bias. And it's not Science. Science is when you recognize that data NOT in agreement with other data is significant, and not just a discardable outlier.
As Carbon Dioxide Levels Continue To Rise, Global Temperatures Are Not Following Suit
"Measurements are adjusted to account for local outgassing of CO2 from the volcano"
Really? How?
This is a new report, and a somewhat arbitrary threshhold (400, after all, is just an integer with no chemical significance):
"NOAA has reported 400.03 for May 9, 2013, while Scripps has reported 399.73. The difference partly reflects different reporting periods. NOAA uses UTC, whereas Scripps uses local time in Hawaii to define the 24-hr reporting period. If Scripps were to use same reporting period as NOAA, we would report 400.08 for May 9."
So, since this is a new report, we get to rerun all our original criticisms explaining why the report is bogus, and NOT SCIENCE.
Mauna Loa is the largest volcano on Earth, among the most active of all volcanoes, having erupted 33 times since its first well-documented historical eruption in 1843. The enormous cone covers half of the Island of Hawai`i and by itself amounts to about 85 percent of all the other Hawaiian Islands combined.
So this seems like a silly place to consider as a steady-state CO standard.