Oh FFS. The overwhelming majority of the data are available. If you think CRU are wrong, run your own analysis and see if you can come up with a significantly different answer. No-one has been able to do that yet, as pretty much any way of analysing the data comes up with pretty much the same answer. For instance excluding all the skeptics' hand-picked poorly-sited stations (surfacestations.org) gives exactly the same answer for US temperature:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/On-the-reliability-of-the-US-Surface-Temperature-Record.html
So are the skeptics too stupid, too lazy, or already done it and know that CRU is correct?
Looking at the paper itself.. it rests entirely on an allegedly strong correlation between "annual growth anomaly" (which is the absolute deviation from a cubic spline fitted to the entire data set) and annual cosmic ray flux. So far so good although the choice of a cubic spline is "interesting" (it has a very good fit to the tree ring data, well no shit Sherlock that's the whole point of a cubic spline isn't it).
The resulting 45-year record has a superficial resemblance to cosmic ray data over the same period although I rather suspect that this is dependent on the degree of smoothing specified for the cubic spline.
But now the good bit - the fit between the growth anomaly and cosmic ray flux has a correlation coefficient of 0.39, or if you prefer an "r^2" of 0.15, from 45 points. Alternatively you can (and the authors do) specify it as a probability of fit,which gets a mighty 0.8% (i.e. there is a less than 1% chance that the cosmic rays explain the growth ring data).
Of course the usual suspects that complain the entire field of anthropogenic global change is "junk science" will doubtless be all over this one like a rash. Different standards apply to research claiming an extraterrestrial effect, you see..
Sure, a lot of self-appointed experts are saying "there wasn't enough fuel reduction", plus a few real ones with barrows to push. We'll have to wait for the results of the formal investigation, but so far its looking awfully like those firestorms went straight through absolutely everything: bush that hadn't been burned for years, bush that had had recent fuel reduction, bush that had had recent summer fires, managed plantations, and even farmland with scattered trees. When it hasn't rained for weeks, the temperature has been between 35 and 45 degrees C for much of that time, and then you get 46 to 48 deg C with gale-force winds, EVERYTHING burns.
You'll get little argument that fuel reduction burning reduces the impact of wildfire under "normal" summer conditions. But when the gale force winds blow at over 45 deg C (that's over 110 deg F), all bets are off regardless of prior burning.
My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between.ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the.bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow.
Few things irritate me more than a meeting that insists on.ppt, and which won't let you plug your own laptop into the projection system. But there is a solution for this: export your talk to.pdf using a mechanism of your choice (embedding all fonts of course), and display it full-screen in Adobe Viewer. I've seen the occasional startled-looking convention centre IT drone when I've made this request, but even the most blinkered of them are able to accommodate it.
OK so you don't get to use any movies this way, or animated builds, but you can at least build text in by using multiple pages which differ only by a single bullet point if you are that way inclined (Apple's Keynote can build a.pdf in this form automatically, presumably other presentation applications can as well). And on the plus side you get, pure, guaranteed cross-platform compatibility - something powerpoint has never been able to do even between different versions of MS windows.
Perhaps, somewhat arrogantly, I consider myself an intelligent scientist (though not a climatologist). I would love to read the research on the subject of global warming, minus the political punditry, and make my own decisions on the problem.
Seeing as you're a scientist you most likely have access to the ISI Web of Knowledge or similar through your institution's library, but failing that even Google Scholar does a passably good job of digging up literature on the subject:
So what's stopping you? And for the majority of readers here for whom many of the journal links will deny access, just try the same search from a public terminal in any university library and you'll get access to pretty much all of it.
We can't seriously believe either side, but must stick to logic and examine all the facts. Both sides have their hysterical evangelists and paid shills.
How does stuff like this get modded insightful? If you are an intelligent person and are interested in the issue, then don't believe either "side," least of all any "paid shills." Go and read what the science has to say, which you will find is somewhat different to most of what you see in the media, although rather closer to one "side" than the other. If finding and thumbing through the last few years' research in the several dozen most relevant scientific journals is a bit much work, then the third assessment report of the IPCC is well worth a read as a comprehensive review of available research as things stood a few years back:
..and for those who balk at hundreds of pages of scientific review or want to know what has changed since the third assesment report, the "summary for policymakers" is now available for the fourth assesment report, although the actual report is yet to be released:
Yes, there are a handful of scientists in the field who might say the IPCC reports overstate the existence, extent or cause of ongoing climate change. But they'd be substantially outnumbered by those who'd say the IPCC understates the case. Irrespective of this, it is simply not possible to hold an informed position in the climate "debate" being conducted by Hollywood and the media unless you have at the very least read the IPCC summary for policymakers.
This new "the whole ozone hole thing is a fraud" movement is downright creepy!
The reason the Montreal protocol was signed so quickly and enacted so forcibly was precisely because the scientific evidence was (and still is) so overwhelmingly robust.
The process is very simple - to "destroy" stratospheric ozone, you need chlorine ions, particles of some sort (i.e. ice crystals), and UV radiation, all in the stratosphere and all at the same time. Although Cl is a very common element, it and its natural compounds are either water-soluble or reactive or both, and never make that high into the atmosphere. CFCs however are inert (hence their usefulness to humans) and so are not scrubbed from the troposphere, allowing them to reach the stratosphere unharmed where they are eventually split apart by UV radiation and release their chlorine.
This was predicted by atmospheric chemists long before the Antarctic hole was observed, and has since been validated by pretty much every experiment thrown at it including by flying stratospheric aircraft through the ice clouds and sampling the process as it happened.
But if you really want to believe any of the various wacky conspiracy theories going around (which have gone far beyond the usual "the scientific establishment is rotten to the core and they made the whole thing up to get more grant money") then I rather doubt anything you read here or anywhere else is going to change your mind on this one.
And lastly - "green eco-activists believe in the ozone hole, but being stupid green eco-activists they are wrong, therefore CFCs can't destroy ozone," to paraphrase the parent post's argument, is enough to get modded up to five?!?
As a scientist working in a related field I find this desire to polarise the whole thing utterly exasperating. For whatever reason, mainstream scientific opinion gets lumped on one side of this divide, and the other side is left fixated on fringe opinions from a tiny minority of dissenters on one wing of the science. The media then jump into the fray with their desire for "balance" and give these fringe dwellers equal airtime and column space with the mainstream, in doing so manufacturing a series of debates which are not really there.
If you want balance, and you want to put the opinions of a handful of scientists on one extreme of the argument into it, then leave the vast majority of us in the middle out of it and go find the same level of extremism on the other side. Those who argue that we're in danger of imminent collapse of both the East Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, or who talk alarmingly of extreme "runaway greenhouse" feedbacks, for instance.
Alternatively of course you could all just stop fixating on tiny minorities of fringe scientific opinion. There is plenty of genuine debate going on and opportunity for journalistic and political "balance" in covering it - but it is simply no longer over such big picture questions as "is the climate warming now?" or "are human emissions largely responsible for this warming?"
"Unfortunately Google tells it like it is - the Internet is full of crap."
YMMV, but in general technically proficient people have long since learned to tell the difference between credible and crackpot in terms of stuff they find on the web. For instance, anyone is able to contrast a selection of what they find in the results of these two web searches, and is free to make up their own mind:
The scientific case for a CFC origin for the Antarctic ozone hole is so overwhelmingly robust that the case was effectively closed over ten years ago. For anyone mistakenly concerned that the parent post's sentiment is even remotely factual, do a bit of reading - Google is your friend.
An old, but good starting point is the ozone depletion FAQ - e.g. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/. There are countless others..
As for the content of the post, it essentially sets up a series of straw men - a couple of these things come up again and again and again from people who've read a few "think tank" websites on paleoclimate one afternoon and immediately reckon they know more than any of those stupid, corrupt climate scientists who've been studying these things for a lifetime..
Ther last interglacial (i.e. 125 thousand years ago) was warmer (by 1 to 2 degrees C) than the Holocene (i.e. the last few thousand years)? No shit - we've known that for, oh thirty years now? Depending on who/what you believe, sea level at the same time was at least two metres higher and as much as seven metres higher than today, as it happens - I suppose the residents of New Orleans aand Bangladesh would all say "well, cool if it's happened before then no worries, eh!" The critical question is, if the ca. five thousand years that it took for climate to warm by 6 degrees C or so to those temperatures from the immediately preceding glaciation means that it was considered an exteremly rapid warming (which it certainly is, compared to pretty much anything else we can see in the record), then what are we to make of the current global warming rate of a bit over 1 degree C per century, i.e. ten times faster?
Antarctic ice increasing a bit? Well again, duh! Antarctic ice mass again has long been known to respond to changes in precipitation, itself strongly influenced by temperature. Some parts of the Antarctic ice cap were actually smaller during the last global ice age than they are today, since going from (for instance) minus 20 to minus 40 degrees C doesn't make ice any more frozen than it already was but it sure makes less snow fall when you're 2000 km from the nearest open water. So are the same geniuses going to tell us that less Antarctic ice during a global ice age actually means the earth must have been warmer at the time? If you want to see something that responds more closely to temperature change, check out Arctic sea ice extent, or global average alpine glacier mass (clue - both shrinking like crazy recently).
Lastly, sea level rising by 10-20 cm every 100 years over the last 6000 years? That is just plain bollocks, which is presumably why there is no citation for it. Again, Wikipedia have an excellent page on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise, with referenced figures showing all available research (there is a lot) on the issue, and this (well-referenced) quote: "The sea level has risen more than 120 m since the peak of the last ice age about 18000 years ago. However, only 2-4 m of this increase has occurred in the last 6000 years. From 3000 years ago to the 19th century the long term change was roughly 0.5 meters at a rate of 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr."
Pretty much all covered by H.G. Wells, in When the Sleeper Awakes, written in 1899. A sleeper wakes from a coma to find his assets have grown to the extent that he literally owns the world, but that his trustees have become corrupt autocratic rulers in his name and most certainly don't want him awake again.
This book is also notable for being the source of Asimov's vision of an Earth of huge covered cities where people get around on giant high-speed travellators, and for containing the first account of an aerial dogfight, written some years before the first plane flew.
I couldn't agree more on the "let's see a few double-blind studies" thing, but I think equating it with magnetic snake oil might be a little unfair. It is hard to glean much from TFA, but this bit:
His company's machine is a two-chambered device roughly the size of a stereo. Wine passes through one and tap water passes through the other; a membrane the company has patented separates the two. Platinum electrodes provide the juice, driving negative ions - the cause of acidity - from the wine into the water.
Implies something at least a little less implausible. Driving ions through a (say) Teflon membrane between counter-flowing fluids as described should be quite possible. What is unclear to me though is how that might in any way make a nicer wine (e.g. how are all the molecules we don't want in the wine actaully ionised, wthout also ionising any of the many molecules that we do want to see in a fine wine?)
Actually, it is more likely to be something of a standoff at the moment. As long as Microsoft keep producing Office for the Mac, Apple refrain from putting their considerable resources behind OpenOffice. Given that Office for Windows is where Microsoft make a substantial portion of their profit, I don't imagine they are keen to find out how far Apple could take OpenOffice if they tried, or especially how much of that might flow back to the Windows version.
Being quite familiar with the study of the end of the last ice age, I can say pretty much everyone in the field agrees that the earth as a whole warmed about five degrees C over a period of about five thousand years. That's 0.1 degrees per century, and it was a period of massive global change. I could go out a bit further out on a limb and say I personally believe that a significant part of that global warming occurred over an extremely short period of time - perhaps three degrees C over 1200 years, equal to 0.25 degrees C per century.
This period, known as "Termination I" is arguably the most extreme global climatic event we can resolve from the geological record with any certainty (there will have been others, but they were much, much longer ago). Anything that has happened since, during the Holocene, pales into insignificance by comparison. Yet here we are now, warming something like 0.5 degrees C during the last century and by all accounts projected to warm by significantly more than this during the next century. In terms of global paleoclimate as we know it, this is extremely rapid climate change.
Sure, the the US government can force US government-funded researchers to publish in journals which allow open posting of their articles after six months, but there are not many such journals. I didn't see anything in the article to indicate that they were intending to force journal publishers to give up their copyright - that would presumably involve some pretty serious law changes and would be a lot more difficult than just controlling how (i.e. where) government researchers are allowed to publish in the first place. A large proportion of high-impact journals are located outside the US anyway.
So let's assume US government-funded researchers are told they may not publish in journals which wish to retain copyright over their articles (that's pretty much all journals currently worth publishing in), and instead must either publish in obscure low-impact journals or release their findings on the internet sans independent peer review. This will not be good for their citation rates, nor for their employment prospects outside of US government agencies - researchers tend to be rated on the impact of their published work, both in terms of the impact factor of the journals it is published in and the frequency with which other researchers cite their work. This will probably only work if the government is prepared to commit significant financial support to the establishment of new, high-quality open journals. Good journals are expensive to produce - just ask all the scientific societies who spun their publications out to private enterprise in the first place..
I guess the question is, are the NSF and NIH big enough to drag the big journals to a more open publishing model, or will the likes of Nature (which currently rejects 90% of papers submitted to it) just shrug their shoulders and get along with whatever the remaining 90% of the international scientific community can scrape together and send their way?
This is all a bit of a red herring anyway - as others have noted it's the patents, stupid. Why get upset at a private publishing house wringing a measly few hundred dollars out of a government-funded research paper, when private pharmaceutical companies routinely make millions from government-funded NIH patents?
Sure, the the US government can force US government-funded researchers to publish in journals which allow open posting of their articles after six months, but there are not many such journals. I didn't see anything in the article to indicate that they were intending to force journal publishers to give up their copyright - that would presumably involve some pretty serious law changes and would be a lot more difficult than just controlling how (i.e. where) government researchers are allowed to publish in the first place. A large proportion of high-impact journals are located outside the US anyway.
So let's assume US government-funded researchers are told they may not publish in journals which wish to retain copyright over their articles (that's pretty much all journals currently worth publishing in), and instead must either publish in obscure low-impact journals or release their findings on the internet sans independent peer review. This will not be good for their citation rates, nor for their employment prospects outside of US government agencies - researchers tend to be rated on the impact of their published work, both in terms of the impact factor of the journals it is published in and the frequency with which other researchers cite their work. This will probably only work if the government is prepared to commit significant financial support to the establishment of new, high-quality open journals. Good journals are expensive to produce - just ask all the scientific societies who spun their publications out to private enterprise in the first place..
I guess the question is, are the NSF and NIH big enough to drag the big journals to a more open publishing model, or will the likes of Nature (which currently rejects 90% of papers submitted to it) just shrug their shoulders and get along with whatever the remaining 90% of the international scientific community can scrape together and send their way?
This is all a bit of a red herring anyway - as others have noted it's the patents, stupid. Why get upset at a private publishing house wringing a measly few hundred dollars out of a government-funded research paper, when private pharmaceutical companies routinely make millions from government-funded NIH patents?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh FFS. The overwhelming majority of the data are available. If you think CRU are wrong, run your own analysis and see if you can come up with a significantly different answer. No-one has been able to do that yet, as pretty much any way of analysing the data comes up with pretty much the same answer. For instance excluding all the skeptics' hand-picked poorly-sited stations (surfacestations.org) gives exactly the same answer for US temperature: http://www.skepticalscience.com/On-the-reliability-of-the-US-Surface-Temperature-Record.html So are the skeptics too stupid, too lazy, or already done it and know that CRU is correct?
Looking at the paper itself.. it rests entirely on an allegedly strong correlation between "annual growth anomaly" (which is the absolute deviation from a cubic spline fitted to the entire data set) and annual cosmic ray flux. So far so good although the choice of a cubic spline is "interesting" (it has a very good fit to the tree ring data, well no shit Sherlock that's the whole point of a cubic spline isn't it).
The resulting 45-year record has a superficial resemblance to cosmic ray data over the same period although I rather suspect that this is dependent on the degree of smoothing specified for the cubic spline.
But now the good bit - the fit between the growth anomaly and cosmic ray flux has a correlation coefficient of 0.39, or if you prefer an "r^2" of 0.15, from 45 points. Alternatively you can (and the authors do) specify it as a probability of fit,which gets a mighty 0.8% (i.e. there is a less than 1% chance that the cosmic rays explain the growth ring data).
Of course the usual suspects that complain the entire field of anthropogenic global change is "junk science" will doubtless be all over this one like a rash. Different standards apply to research claiming an extraterrestrial effect, you see..
Sure, a lot of self-appointed experts are saying "there wasn't enough fuel reduction", plus a few real ones with barrows to push. We'll have to wait for the results of the formal investigation, but so far its looking awfully like those firestorms went straight through absolutely everything: bush that hadn't been burned for years, bush that had had recent fuel reduction, bush that had had recent summer fires, managed plantations, and even farmland with scattered trees. When it hasn't rained for weeks, the temperature has been between 35 and 45 degrees C for much of that time, and then you get 46 to 48 deg C with gale-force winds, EVERYTHING burns. You'll get little argument that fuel reduction burning reduces the impact of wildfire under "normal" summer conditions. But when the gale force winds blow at over 45 deg C (that's over 110 deg F), all bets are off regardless of prior burning.
My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between .ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the .bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow.
Few things irritate me more than a meeting that insists on .ppt, and which won't let you plug your own laptop into the projection system. But there is a solution for this: export your talk to .pdf using a mechanism of your choice (embedding all fonts of course), and display it full-screen in Adobe Viewer. I've seen the occasional startled-looking convention centre IT drone when I've made this request, but even the most blinkered of them are able to accommodate it.
OK so you don't get to use any movies this way, or animated builds, but you can at least build text in by using multiple pages which differ only by a single bullet point if you are that way inclined (Apple's Keynote can build a .pdf in this form automatically, presumably other presentation applications can as well). And on the plus side you get, pure, guaranteed cross-platform compatibility - something powerpoint has never been able to do even between different versions of MS windows.
Perhaps, somewhat arrogantly, I consider myself an intelligent scientist (though not a climatologist). I would love to read the research on the subject of global warming, minus the political punditry, and make my own decisions on the problem.
Seeing as you're a scientist you most likely have access to the ISI Web of Knowledge or similar through your institution's library, but failing that even Google Scholar does a passably good job of digging up literature on the subject:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=glob al+warming&btnG=Search
So what's stopping you? And for the majority of readers here for whom many of the journal links will deny access, just try the same search from a public terminal in any university library and you'll get access to pretty much all of it.
We can't seriously believe either side, but must stick to logic and examine all the facts. Both sides have their hysterical evangelists and paid shills.
How does stuff like this get modded insightful? If you are an intelligent person and are interested in the issue, then don't believe either "side," least of all any "paid shills." Go and read what the science has to say, which you will find is somewhat different to most of what you see in the media, although rather closer to one "side" than the other. If finding and thumbing through the last few years' research in the several dozen most relevant scientific journals is a bit much work, then the third assessment report of the IPCC is well worth a read as a comprehensive review of available research as things stood a few years back:
http://www.ipcc.ch/
..and for those who balk at hundreds of pages of scientific review or want to know what has changed since the third assesment report, the "summary for policymakers" is now available for the fourth assesment report, although the actual report is yet to be released:
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf
Yes, there are a handful of scientists in the field who might say the IPCC reports overstate the existence, extent or cause of ongoing climate change. But they'd be substantially outnumbered by those who'd say the IPCC understates the case. Irrespective of this, it is simply not possible to hold an informed position in the climate "debate" being conducted by Hollywood and the media unless you have at the very least read the IPCC summary for policymakers.
You can't use a $20,000 commercial link to whip up a tasty and healthy stir-fry
To be fair, have you actually tried this?This new "the whole ozone hole thing is a fraud" movement is downright creepy!
The reason the Montreal protocol was signed so quickly and enacted so forcibly was precisely because the scientific evidence was (and still is) so overwhelmingly robust.
The process is very simple - to "destroy" stratospheric ozone, you need chlorine ions, particles of some sort (i.e. ice crystals), and UV radiation, all in the stratosphere and all at the same time. Although Cl is a very common element, it and its natural compounds are either water-soluble or reactive or both, and never make that high into the atmosphere. CFCs however are inert (hence their usefulness to humans) and so are not scrubbed from the troposphere, allowing them to reach the stratosphere unharmed where they are eventually split apart by UV radiation and release their chlorine.
This was predicted by atmospheric chemists long before the Antarctic hole was observed, and has since been validated by pretty much every experiment thrown at it including by flying stratospheric aircraft through the ice clouds and sampling the process as it happened.
But if you really want to believe any of the various wacky conspiracy theories going around (which have gone far beyond the usual "the scientific establishment is rotten to the core and they made the whole thing up to get more grant money") then I rather doubt anything you read here or anywhere else is going to change your mind on this one.
And lastly - "green eco-activists believe in the ozone hole, but being stupid green eco-activists they are wrong, therefore CFCs can't destroy ozone," to paraphrase the parent post's argument, is enough to get modded up to five?!?
As a scientist working in a related field I find this desire to polarise the whole thing utterly exasperating. For whatever reason, mainstream scientific opinion gets lumped on one side of this divide, and the other side is left fixated on fringe opinions from a tiny minority of dissenters on one wing of the science. The media then jump into the fray with their desire for "balance" and give these fringe dwellers equal airtime and column space with the mainstream, in doing so manufacturing a series of debates which are not really there.
If you want balance, and you want to put the opinions of a handful of scientists on one extreme of the argument into it, then leave the vast majority of us in the middle out of it and go find the same level of extremism on the other side. Those who argue that we're in danger of imminent collapse of both the East Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, or who talk alarmingly of extreme "runaway greenhouse" feedbacks, for instance.
Alternatively of course you could all just stop fixating on tiny minorities of fringe scientific opinion. There is plenty of genuine debate going on and opportunity for journalistic and political "balance" in covering it - but it is simply no longer over such big picture questions as "is the climate warming now?" or "are human emissions largely responsible for this warming?"
YMMV, but in general technically proficient people have long since learned to tell the difference between credible and crackpot in terms of stuff they find on the web. For instance, anyone is able to contrast a selection of what they find in the results of these two web searches, and is free to make up their own mind:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ozone+hole+fraud+ho ax
vs
http://www.google.com/search?q=ozone+hole+science
The scientific case for a CFC origin for the Antarctic ozone hole is so overwhelmingly robust that the case was effectively closed over ten years ago. For anyone mistakenly concerned that the parent post's sentiment is even remotely factual, do a bit of reading - Google is your friend. An old, but good starting point is the ozone depletion FAQ - e.g. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/. There are countless others..
As for the content of the post, it essentially sets up a series of straw men - a couple of these things come up again and again and again from people who've read a few "think tank" websites on paleoclimate one afternoon and immediately reckon they know more than any of those stupid, corrupt climate scientists who've been studying these things for a lifetime..
Ther last interglacial (i.e. 125 thousand years ago) was warmer (by 1 to 2 degrees C) than the Holocene (i.e. the last few thousand years)? No shit - we've known that for, oh thirty years now? Depending on who/what you believe, sea level at the same time was at least two metres higher and as much as seven metres higher than today, as it happens - I suppose the residents of New Orleans aand Bangladesh would all say "well, cool if it's happened before then no worries, eh!" The critical question is, if the ca. five thousand years that it took for climate to warm by 6 degrees C or so to those temperatures from the immediately preceding glaciation means that it was considered an exteremly rapid warming (which it certainly is, compared to pretty much anything else we can see in the record), then what are we to make of the current global warming rate of a bit over 1 degree C per century, i.e. ten times faster?
Antarctic ice increasing a bit? Well again, duh! Antarctic ice mass again has long been known to respond to changes in precipitation, itself strongly influenced by temperature. Some parts of the Antarctic ice cap were actually smaller during the last global ice age than they are today, since going from (for instance) minus 20 to minus 40 degrees C doesn't make ice any more frozen than it already was but it sure makes less snow fall when you're 2000 km from the nearest open water. So are the same geniuses going to tell us that less Antarctic ice during a global ice age actually means the earth must have been warmer at the time? If you want to see something that responds more closely to temperature change, check out Arctic sea ice extent, or global average alpine glacier mass (clue - both shrinking like crazy recently).
Lastly, sea level rising by 10-20 cm every 100 years over the last 6000 years? That is just plain bollocks, which is presumably why there is no citation for it. Again, Wikipedia have an excellent page on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise, with referenced figures showing all available research (there is a lot) on the issue, and this (well-referenced) quote: "The sea level has risen more than 120 m since the peak of the last ice age about 18000 years ago. However, only 2-4 m of this increase has occurred in the last 6000 years. From 3000 years ago to the 19th century the long term change was roughly 0.5 meters at a rate of 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr."
Pretty much all covered by H.G. Wells, in When the Sleeper Awakes, written in 1899. A sleeper wakes from a coma to find his assets have grown to the extent that he literally owns the world, but that his trustees have become corrupt autocratic rulers in his name and most certainly don't want him awake again. This book is also notable for being the source of Asimov's vision of an Earth of huge covered cities where people get around on giant high-speed travellators, and for containing the first account of an aerial dogfight, written some years before the first plane flew.
Actually, it is more likely to be something of a standoff at the moment. As long as Microsoft keep producing Office for the Mac, Apple refrain from putting their considerable resources behind OpenOffice. Given that Office for Windows is where Microsoft make a substantial portion of their profit, I don't imagine they are keen to find out how far Apple could take OpenOffice if they tried, or especially how much of that might flow back to the Windows version.
Being quite familiar with the study of the end of the last ice age, I can say pretty much everyone in the field agrees that the earth as a whole warmed about five degrees C over a period of about five thousand years. That's 0.1 degrees per century, and it was a period of massive global change. I could go out a bit further out on a limb and say I personally believe that a significant part of that global warming occurred over an extremely short period of time - perhaps three degrees C over 1200 years, equal to 0.25 degrees C per century.
This period, known as "Termination I" is arguably the most extreme global climatic event we can resolve from the geological record with any certainty (there will have been others, but they were much, much longer ago). Anything that has happened since, during the Holocene, pales into insignificance by comparison. Yet here we are now, warming something like 0.5 degrees C during the last century and by all accounts projected to warm by significantly more than this during the next century. In terms of global paleoclimate as we know it, this is extremely rapid climate change.
So let's assume US government-funded researchers are told they may not publish in journals which wish to retain copyright over their articles (that's pretty much all journals currently worth publishing in), and instead must either publish in obscure low-impact journals or release their findings on the internet sans independent peer review. This will not be good for their citation rates, nor for their employment prospects outside of US government agencies - researchers tend to be rated on the impact of their published work, both in terms of the impact factor of the journals it is published in and the frequency with which other researchers cite their work. This will probably only work if the government is prepared to commit significant financial support to the establishment of new, high-quality open journals. Good journals are expensive to produce - just ask all the scientific societies who spun their publications out to private enterprise in the first place..
I guess the question is, are the NSF and NIH big enough to drag the big journals to a more open publishing model, or will the likes of Nature (which currently rejects 90% of papers submitted to it) just shrug their shoulders and get along with whatever the remaining 90% of the international scientific community can scrape together and send their way?
This is all a bit of a red herring anyway - as others have noted it's the patents, stupid. Why get upset at a private publishing house wringing a measly few hundred dollars out of a government-funded research paper, when private pharmaceutical companies routinely make millions from government-funded NIH patents?
So let's assume US government-funded researchers are told they may not publish in journals which wish to retain copyright over their articles (that's pretty much all journals currently worth publishing in), and instead must either publish in obscure low-impact journals or release their findings on the internet sans independent peer review. This will not be good for their citation rates, nor for their employment prospects outside of US government agencies - researchers tend to be rated on the impact of their published work, both in terms of the impact factor of the journals it is published in and the frequency with which other researchers cite their work. This will probably only work if the government is prepared to commit significant financial support to the establishment of new, high-quality open journals. Good journals are expensive to produce - just ask all the scientific societies who spun their publications out to private enterprise in the first place..
I guess the question is, are the NSF and NIH big enough to drag the big journals to a more open publishing model, or will the likes of Nature (which currently rejects 90% of papers submitted to it) just shrug their shoulders and get along with whatever the remaining 90% of the international scientific community can scrape together and send their way?
This is all a bit of a red herring anyway - as others have noted it's the patents, stupid. Why get upset at a private publishing house wringing a measly few hundred dollars out of a government-funded research paper, when private pharmaceutical companies routinely make millions from government-funded NIH patents?