You sort of just demonstrated my point right there.
My point was that we're not going to have falling CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere anytime soon, as what we're doing is and/or planning to do is to reduce the amount we pump into the atmosphere.
You may think that means CO2 must be a pollutant, but I content that it supports my own position that it does not. First, CO2 is not man-made. It's part of the carbon cycle of life on earth. You can say that human activities increase the amount of CO2 released, but you can't call it man-made. It's also not waste, but rather a by-product of respiration, of forest fires (which have occurred naturally for millions of years), and of other natural processes, as well as burning of fossil fuels. All of these thing contribute to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
By this definition no chemical contamination would be man-made and a pollutant. Humans create CO2 by burning fossil fuels and that can be tracked in the atmosphere because of the different isotopes it has compared to the naturally occuring CO2 concentrations. Just that we're on the same page:
man-made adj :manufactured, created, or constructed by man
You're not taking this seriously enough. As I linked above CO2 caused acidification will kill entire species and reduce others to a fraction of their former population. Just because this doesn't fit the mental image of polluted riverbeds that "real" waste looks like in the media, it doesn't mean it's less serious. CFCs are a pollutant in the atmosphere aswell, even though people used them in deodorants for decades.
But the study was done in a *less* controlled environment.
No, the study was done outside a greenhouse. The environment was not less controlled, however it was a lot more realistic as you don't produce the vast majority of these crops in greenhouses and greenhouses introduced a bias into the previous studies. They simply replicated the real world scenario a lot more closely than previous studies.
If you've haven't noticed btw, politicians are jumping late on the bandwagon on this one. A lot of people are demanding action and politicians are just satisfying the demand for that action because that's what they eventually do, if a reasonably large segment of the population wants something.
but surely the concentrations of such a critical component of photosynthesis as CO2 must have some effect on yields as well
While I couldn't quote a study about the past yields, studies have shown that contrary to expectations a higher CO2 level didn't contribute much to higher yields, while other effects that result from global warming like increased temperatures and dryer soil reduces yields.
So will our attempts to "solve" the Global Warming "crisis" have other unintended consequences like... starvation?
No, first because increasing CO2 levels are less significant than other factors, see above. Also, noone is talking about stopping global warming, that would mean stopping _all_ manmade CO2 emissions and scrubbing the atmosphere and shoving the already exhausted CO2 back underground somehow. The best we can achieve is controlled disaster management.
My cell phone and my laptop having the same IP address only matters when I want to use the INTERNET to connect the two. There are hundreds of thousands of compelling reasons to avoid doing so. In this light, it is entirely possible to provide the ENTIRE set if IPv4 addresses for mobile phone use.
Wouldn't that eliminate the congestion issue?
I tried to parse what you've said 3 times and I have a guess what you might have ment, but I'm not sure. Could you please clarify?
Define for me the need to connect every device with every other device and I'd agree that we have an issue that readily needs solving.
It's not that you would want to, but that you can that's important. To be specific, to be globally addressable. It's like saying that there would be no need for the vast majority of phones to be able to call each other, noone is ever going to dial all the possible numbers. That's not the point.
If you're going dual stack, you'll be giving me an IPv4-to-IPv6 gateway
No, dual stack means you have two fully working, independent networking protocols running beside each other, IPv4 and IPv6. A gateway is something different.
Back to the topic at hand, I'd like to see a result reflected in the climate. We have already taken steps to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Assuming there really is a one-to-one link, there almost certainly has to be data to represent it. The gotcha though is if we demonstrate that CO2 reduction worked then the world is not yet doomed and suddenly the movement loses its momentum and political clout. So, in reality, we will never, ever, ever see that kind of result. Never will climate scientists ever say, 'thanks guys for all your hard work, we are out of danger now', because the moment they do the money stops coming.
There has been no steps to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere yet, all has been done is to slow the growth slightly and Copenhagen is about various blocks of countries arguing how much they want to reduce emissions compared to 1990 or 2004. That still means a lot of emissions. I'm pretty sure most people don't realise how close are we to the edge. Currently the oceans act as a huge carbon sink, but they show signs of reduced intake (along with acidifaction). At this point, things are about defining a level of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that doesn't push us over the tipping point.
Which is exactly the layman's view on IPv6. The fact is that we will reach IPv4 exhaustion by fall, 2011. CIDR, NAT and the financial crisis pushed this date out as much as it was possible, but that's it.
Carrier level NAT solutions are not going to fly for all sorts of subtle technical and not so subtle social reasons, as a lot of network experts have stated before. Telcos are not gobbling up IPv4 space, that's a myth. They are not taking more than they need to take to provide reasonable mobile service with planning for the next 5 years or so.
Cisco and co. didn't try especially hard to bring about IPv6, for a few years the lack of capable routers was the biggest blocking factor for IPv6.
IPv6 and climate change are remarkably similar that the tragedy of the commons affects both issues. There isn't "aggressively timed" IPv6 migration, we're fucking late on the schedule and the same thing is happening with CO2 emissions. It's just that a lot of the companies operate on a quarter to quarter basis, sacrificing long term stability and profit. There is a lot of money to be made by embracing future realities early, but it requires more thought and an escape from the herd mentality that permeates the business culture, so not a lot of companies are doing it.
Finally, an agreed roadmap for IPv6 adoption and CO2 reduction with solid targets would have been the far, far more advantageous scenario in both cases. What we're seeing now is damage control at best, but most likely an uncontrolled process in reality.
2. The data is for the US land area, not the whole world.
3. Here is the paper listing and referencing the adjustments. Be the first to prove in detail how and why they are wrong to make and you'd be instantly famous.
A picture can lie a lot better than a thousand words. I see that picture popping up in the climate denialist literature all over the place, without most places referencing the paper it is taken from.
The paper actually contains information that explains what you're seeing on the picture. The adjustments made are detailed, compared and explained. The references for the expanded reasoning can be followed.
Besides, the graph is about the US temperature measurements. US != global. It could show warming and global warming could not be happening or it could show a decrease in temperature and global warming could be highly severe. Your argument is simply bad.
If Vikings farmed there then, doesn't that mean the world was much much warmer than today?
IF Vikings farmed on Greenland that might mean that Greenland was warmer back then. Local warming is not indicative of global warming. The so called medieval warm period is _discounted_ from global climate studies because it was an effect that held true only for Europe. Other parts of the world have shown no warming back then.
Global warming means the warming of the global average temperature.
Actually, it is a slightly wrong, totally unimportant and absolutely human response that the scientists in question exhibited.
In a networking analogy, it's RIPE, ARIN and the other registrars facing people calling them chicken little for pointing out IPv4 exhaustion and suggesting to use ip addresses "with higher than 256 parts", calling networking engineers "stupid people didn't think of that" and calling IPv6 a scam "to sell some routers".
So it's perfectly understandable that scientists with 20+ years in the field feel a little touchy and get annoyed by the 50th FOI request. The best solution for creationists, climate change denialists and 9/11 conspiracy theorist is to send them to school. If I were a climate scientists I would have been really annoyed by that time now by the elementary ignorance demonstrated by these people.
Snake oil salesmen my ass, if you examine someone's private correspondence over a 10 year period and that's all you find, then I want to give the give a damn medal for integrity.
With the global warming 'scandal', you have a few scientists who are the only ones with access to the raw temperature data. There is no independent analysis of the data, meaning the statistics (and released data) can be tweaked or cherry-picked until the authors get results they want. Without independent analysis repeating their results, that's failed science as well.
Actually, I've seen no indication that this is true at all. As far as I know, there is at least 3 independently maintained major datasets, with the overwhelming part of the raw data published. (In the case of the MET dataset, 95%+ is freely available and they are trying to free the remaining 5%, which requires cooperation from dozens of sovereign governments and cutting through red tape.)
There are at least 7 major competing climate models, only disagreeing in minor details and at least as many teams trying to find flaws in each other's model like sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
And this is just the direct temperature measurements, there are vast hordes of indirect measurements, like sealevel rise, melting glaciers, changing currents, etc.
There is at least a decade worth of correspondence there in the hacked emails. While it is true that noone expects to find evidence of collusion in every email, but surely if there were some collusion between scientists about AGW, there would be more than 3 choice quotes in a decade worth of private correspondence!
You're telling me that people can simultaneously organize a global conspiracy and not coordinate it in any electronic way for the past decade?
1. "Trick" is frequently used in scientific context to mean "clever method" or "correction".
2. The tree ring proxy temperature problem is pretty well documented for the past 10 years at least. The basic idea is that using tree rings as thermometers gave an error bar +-x% and it has been discovered, that since 1960, actual temperature records started to disagree slightly with tree ring temperature records. Actual temperature records have an error bar of +-x/y%, where y is > 1, so they are more accurate than tree ring proxy records (which is why they are called a proxy in the first place).
3. The deviation since 1960 doesn't automatically mean that the records are wrong before 1960, as the instrumental records validate a large chunk of the pre 1960 period tree ring proxy data as correct within a given error bar. Noone knows the reasons why the tree ring proxy data is wrong "recently", but it is entirely possible that the cause is something like "more recent rings on trees take time to dry out" or something like that. It would be interesting to find out the cause.
4. The tree ring proxy data wasn't destroyed or altered, the "decline" is "hidden" in a graph for policymakers that depicted temperature data. It makes sense to replace the tree ring data with more accurate instrument records, because they are well, more accurate.
You can isolate oxygen, show its effect on a candle or a toad. You can make electricity and calculate trajectories and show people.
We, chemical scum view the world through a narrow slit in our burka. We see a tiny tiny part of the spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation and we see sizes within a few orders of magnitude of our body sizes. Noone has ever seen an oxygen atom with their own eyes that resulted in any conscious recognition, without a scientific equipment to facilitate the viewing. The evidence for oxygen, or the evidence against aether is no less direct than the evidence for global warming and AGW and the theory that explains it, the evidence for oxygen is just more accessible, easier to understand and has more showy demonstrations. The case for oxygen also doesn't have people receiving large amounts of money to deny the evidence no matter what.
Until you can predict the weather with the same reasonably unerring accuracy with which we predict projectile trajectories, the science isn't good enough.
You will never be able to predict weather over long timescales (more than a few weeks). Weather is not climate. When you're doing physics, you're not calculating the trajectory, energy content of atoms that compose a gas in a volume of space, instead you're dealing with statistical averaging and assumptions about the closed system, in terms of pressure, volume and temperature.
Climate Science is a STUDY, much like Social Studies, Political "Science", and most (but not all) fields of Psychology. You cannot experiment on Climate on the timeframes or scales these "scientists" are suggesting. You cannot produce a hypothesis, alter variables, and confirm or deny your ideas.
Climate Studies, as it should be called, consists entirely of observation and computer modelling - a form of mathematics which is also not a science, but an art or "language".
No. Climate science works on similar timescales as evolution and both biologists and climatologists would be shocked to hear that they can't formulate a hypothesis, make predictions and attempt to disprove them. That's exactly what they do. You seem to have a very naíve idea of what an experiment is - that stuff the chemists do in the labcoats right? Climate science produces testable predictions both for our current future and starting from past points to arrive at conclusions about our past. Climate scientists made predictions based on a theory about past climate, before knowing what the past climate looked like, then someone actually came up with a way of measuring the past climate. That's predictive value. Evolutionary biologists do the same, please read Richard Dawkins' latest book "The greatest show on earth" for a robust overview how evolution is based on testable ideas.
In 1975, American Scientist, Nature, and New York Times were publishing story after story about the imminent New Ice Age that would plunge the world into subfreezing temperatures for the next 100 years. Suddenly, 20 years later and Global Warming is all we can talk about? I don't understand. No, I do understand... both points of view have been apparent for nearly a hundred years. Politicians and marketers just grab hold of whichever evidence they want to promote their own agenda. Sure it's possible, which is exactly why it's such a powerful weapon in the social manipulator's arsenal... just like 9/11 denier's evidence is just plausible enough to make people believe it... or how creationists can bend scientific discoveries just enough to gain a following.
At no time in the past 100 years did the scientific consensus suggest that there would be imminent global cooling. There were some (one?) article that suggested global cooling in the 70s and the mainstream press run with it. It is also pretty well known that climate is cyclic and "imminent" in climate science might mean 10 thousands years. There was also a valid view that aerosol pollution would cause "global dimming" and reduce temperatures slightly. We fixed that problem by banning a lot of those pollutants in the 70s thus _averted_ the problem. There wasn't any serious following for "global cooling" among scientists in the past 100 years. You are exaggerating extremely heavily. Comparing climate science to 9/11 theories or creationists is disingenius. It reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about "what did the Romans ever gave us...". You have to realize that a lot of things in your life depend on the scientists and the scientific consensus getting it right. There would be no internet, computing industry, aviation, etc. without scientific base research in a lot of these areas. Science, it works.
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' ''Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.' - Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom.
The relevance, I think is that "the networks giving people what they want" is orthogonal to providing quality reporting for two reasons: because it assumes that the networks know what they are doing to an almost perfect degree, in other words somehow they are superhuman. That reminds me of conspiracy theories where the villains organize and scheme and control people with perfect coordination and detail. The second reason is that there are multiple ways in which to give people "what they want", just as there are multiple forms of arts.
Here's the thing: There is no they. "They" is really us. "We" could be doing any of this. But the fact is, our mainstream culture ISN'T that way because for the most part, WE aren't that way. In the meantime, there is a wealth of information out there for us outliers to FIND that information. Forums like slashdot where you CAN find the relevant terms, links to the paper, etc.
There is a they, I was referring to the precise group of journalists/online outlets who get paid to deliver/disseminate news. What commenters on slashdot are doing by digging out the original paper, etc. is an aftermarket substitute for what the journalists should be doing in the first place. Heck, I consider half of the whole blogging phenomena to be a substitute for what journalists should be doing: providing context and investigating.
There is sensationalism because sensationalism sells. Sensationalism sells because that is what people WANT. They vote what they want with their wallets and their eyeballs. The "vast majority of people" want exactly what they are getting and the market delivers it to them.
It is true that sensationalism sells, but it's not because that's what people want, on the contrary. It's about content that people fear. War, terrorism, health issues, scandals. That does provide news organizations with some revenue, but it leaves people unsatisfied because a lot of us feel we've been had with some coverage or other. There is a market vacuum that some blogs are exploiting and that's exactly why a growing number of people trust some blogs more than the vast majority of professional media. "The market" is not even nearly delivering what people want!
You might be right. Or I might be right. Who knows? It would be nice to see a study on this that includes p-values, control groups and detailed methodology.
It's people buying into the sensationalism that the media perpetuates around anything vaguely related to human healthcare. Dumbing everything down to the level of the stupidest person consuming the news results in demeaning everyone else.
There is so much potential for online news. They could be using, omg, hyperlinks to connect the topic to the relevant terms and field of science. I wish I would hear about p-values and numbers in scientific notation! I think the vast majority of people would have actually no problem understanding news that is expressed not in Libraries of Congress, but in proper SI units. I want reporters to link to the original scientific paper they are writing a piece about or what's better: ask for and pressure scientists into being able to distribute the paper itself.
I want to read news with an Atom feed aggregator, where I find the paper the article refers to as a directly downloadable content.
In order to grow resistance, you have to leave a few alive and they have to have been left alive due in some part to something in their makeup causing them to be less vulnerable to the 'weapon'.
In other words, something that lived only because it was never touched isn't going to evolve into the superbug.
Your first sentence is true, the second is false. Position _can_ be a genetic advantage. "Something that lived only because it was never touched" happens all the time in biology, where the positional behaviour can be driven by genetics.
Birds avoid high altitude, herds don't generally jump off cliffs, etc. The same happens on a more primitive level, too. People think about genetics and think it's like a human arms race or something, but all natural selection needs is surviving members of a species and it will encode _whatever_ information made them survive. Please remember, we're not talking about single instances of plasma sterilization processes, but basically waiting for a mutation to come along that happens to encode the information which in turn makes a significant contribution to the survival of the bacteria. It might not happen often, but if it happens a few times, then that strain will spread.
Actually, evolution is pretty clever. If it doesn't eradicate human skin (maybe just reduces the dead layer a bit?), then bacterias can survive too.
A more apt analogy would be to say that out of all the intelligent species in the universe, there is bound to be some that know how to evade or cope with a supernovae.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that we're not going to have falling CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere anytime soon, as what we're doing is and/or planning to do is to reduce the amount we pump into the atmosphere.
By this definition no chemical contamination would be man-made and a pollutant. Humans create CO2 by burning fossil fuels and that can be tracked in the atmosphere because of the different isotopes it has compared to the naturally occuring CO2 concentrations. Just that we're on the same page:
:manufactured, created, or constructed by man
man-made adj
You're not taking this seriously enough. As I linked above CO2 caused acidification will kill entire species and reduce others to a fraction of their former population. Just because this doesn't fit the mental image of polluted riverbeds that "real" waste looks like in the media, it doesn't mean it's less serious. CFCs are a pollutant in the atmosphere aswell, even though people used them in deodorants for decades.
No, the study was done outside a greenhouse. The environment was not less controlled, however it was a lot more realistic as you don't produce the vast majority of these crops in greenhouses and greenhouses introduced a bias into the previous studies. They simply replicated the real world scenario a lot more closely than previous studies.
If you've haven't noticed btw, politicians are jumping late on the bandwagon on this one. A lot of people are demanding action and politicians are just satisfying the demand for that action because that's what they eventually do, if a reasonably large segment of the population wants something.
465k (with author name) vs 440k results (without). I guess that means the point still stands.
pol.lut.ant n
:something that pollutes
pol.lute vt pol.lut.ed; pol.lut.ing
2b: to contaminate (an environment) esp. with man-made waste
The world's oceans are becoming acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the last 55m years, threatening disaster for marine life and food supplies across the globe. Hmm. Maybe some man-made waste that contaminates the environment that threatens to turn the oceans into a barren wasteland could, just maybe could be justified to be called a pollutant.
While I couldn't quote a study about the past yields, studies have shown that contrary to expectations a higher CO2 level didn't contribute much to higher yields, while other effects that result from global warming like increased temperatures and dryer soil reduces yields.
No, first because increasing CO2 levels are less significant than other factors, see above. Also, noone is talking about stopping global warming, that would mean stopping _all_ manmade CO2 emissions and scrubbing the atmosphere and shoving the already exhausted CO2 back underground somehow. The best we can achieve is controlled disaster management.
I tried to parse what you've said 3 times and I have a guess what you might have ment, but I'm not sure. Could you please clarify?
It's not that you would want to, but that you can that's important. To be specific, to be globally addressable. It's like saying that there would be no need for the vast majority of phones to be able to call each other, noone is ever going to dial all the possible numbers. That's not the point.
No, dual stack means you have two fully working, independent networking protocols running beside each other, IPv4 and IPv6. A gateway is something different.
There has been no steps to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere yet, all has been done is to slow the growth slightly and Copenhagen is about various blocks of countries arguing how much they want to reduce emissions compared to 1990 or 2004. That still means a lot of emissions. I'm pretty sure most people don't realise how close are we to the edge. Currently the oceans act as a huge carbon sink, but they show signs of reduced intake (along with acidifaction). At this point, things are about defining a level of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that doesn't push us over the tipping point.
Which is exactly the layman's view on IPv6. The fact is that we will reach IPv4 exhaustion by fall, 2011. CIDR, NAT and the financial crisis pushed this date out as much as it was possible, but that's it.
Carrier level NAT solutions are not going to fly for all sorts of subtle technical and not so subtle social reasons, as a lot of network experts have stated before. Telcos are not gobbling up IPv4 space, that's a myth. They are not taking more than they need to take to provide reasonable mobile service with planning for the next 5 years or so.
Cisco and co. didn't try especially hard to bring about IPv6, for a few years the lack of capable routers was the biggest blocking factor for IPv6.
IPv6 and climate change are remarkably similar that the tragedy of the commons affects both issues. There isn't "aggressively timed" IPv6 migration, we're fucking late on the schedule and the same thing is happening with CO2 emissions. It's just that a lot of the companies operate on a quarter to quarter basis, sacrificing long term stability and profit. There is a lot of money to be made by embracing future realities early, but it requires more thought and an escape from the herd mentality that permeates the business culture, so not a lot of companies are doing it.
Finally, an agreed roadmap for IPv6 adoption and CO2 reduction with solid targets would have been the far, far more advantageous scenario in both cases. What we're seeing now is damage control at best, but most likely an uncontrolled process in reality.
1. The data is from the NOAA, not the NASA.
2. The data is for the US land area, not the whole world.
3. Here is the paper listing and referencing the adjustments. Be the first to prove in detail how and why they are wrong to make and you'd be instantly famous.
A picture can lie a lot better than a thousand words. I see that picture popping up in the climate denialist literature all over the place, without most places referencing the paper it is taken from.
The paper actually contains information that explains what you're seeing on the picture. The adjustments made are detailed, compared and explained. The references for the expanded reasoning can be followed.
Besides, the graph is about the US temperature measurements. US != global. It could show warming and global warming could not be happening or it could show a decrease in temperature and global warming could be highly severe. Your argument is simply bad.
IF Vikings farmed on Greenland that might mean that Greenland was warmer back then. Local warming is not indicative of global warming. The so called medieval warm period is _discounted_ from global climate studies because it was an effect that held true only for Europe. Other parts of the world have shown no warming back then.
Global warming means the warming of the global average temperature.
Actually, it is a slightly wrong, totally unimportant and absolutely human response that the scientists in question exhibited.
In a networking analogy, it's RIPE, ARIN and the other registrars facing people calling them chicken little for pointing out IPv4 exhaustion and suggesting to use ip addresses "with higher than 256 parts", calling networking engineers "stupid people didn't think of that" and calling IPv6 a scam "to sell some routers".
So it's perfectly understandable that scientists with 20+ years in the field feel a little touchy and get annoyed by the 50th FOI request. The best solution for creationists, climate change denialists and 9/11 conspiracy theorist is to send them to school. If I were a climate scientists I would have been really annoyed by that time now by the elementary ignorance demonstrated by these people.
Snake oil salesmen my ass, if you examine someone's private correspondence over a 10 year period and that's all you find, then I want to give the give a damn medal for integrity.
Actually, I've seen no indication that this is true at all. As far as I know, there is at least 3 independently maintained major datasets, with the overwhelming part of the raw data published. (In the case of the MET dataset, 95%+ is freely available and they are trying to free the remaining 5%, which requires cooperation from dozens of sovereign governments and cutting through red tape.)
There are at least 7 major competing climate models, only disagreeing in minor details and at least as many teams trying to find flaws in each other's model like sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
And this is just the direct temperature measurements, there are vast hordes of indirect measurements, like sealevel rise, melting glaciers, changing currents, etc.
There is at least a decade worth of correspondence there in the hacked emails. While it is true that noone expects to find evidence of collusion in every email, but surely if there were some collusion between scientists about AGW, there would be more than 3 choice quotes in a decade worth of private correspondence!
You're telling me that people can simultaneously organize a global conspiracy and not coordinate it in any electronic way for the past decade?
1. "Trick" is frequently used in scientific context to mean "clever method" or "correction".
2. The tree ring proxy temperature problem is pretty well documented for the past 10 years at least. The basic idea is that using tree rings as thermometers gave an error bar +-x% and it has been discovered, that since 1960, actual temperature records started to disagree slightly with tree ring temperature records. Actual temperature records have an error bar of +-x/y%, where y is > 1, so they are more accurate than tree ring proxy records (which is why they are called a proxy in the first place).
3. The deviation since 1960 doesn't automatically mean that the records are wrong before 1960, as the instrumental records validate a large chunk of the pre 1960 period tree ring proxy data as correct within a given error bar. Noone knows the reasons why the tree ring proxy data is wrong "recently", but it is entirely possible that the cause is something like "more recent rings on trees take time to dry out" or something like that. It would be interesting to find out the cause.
4. The tree ring proxy data wasn't destroyed or altered, the "decline" is "hidden" in a graph for policymakers that depicted temperature data. It makes sense to replace the tree ring data with more accurate instrument records, because they are well, more accurate.
We, chemical scum view the world through a narrow slit in our burka. We see a tiny tiny part of the spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation and we see sizes within a few orders of magnitude of our body sizes. Noone has ever seen an oxygen atom with their own eyes that resulted in any conscious recognition, without a scientific equipment to facilitate the viewing. The evidence for oxygen, or the evidence against aether is no less direct than the evidence for global warming and AGW and the theory that explains it, the evidence for oxygen is just more accessible, easier to understand and has more showy demonstrations. The case for oxygen also doesn't have people receiving large amounts of money to deny the evidence no matter what.
You will never be able to predict weather over long timescales (more than a few weeks). Weather is not climate. When you're doing physics, you're not calculating the trajectory, energy content of atoms that compose a gas in a volume of space, instead you're dealing with statistical averaging and assumptions about the closed system, in terms of pressure, volume and temperature.
No. Climate science works on similar timescales as evolution and both biologists and climatologists would be shocked to hear that they can't formulate a hypothesis, make predictions and attempt to disprove them. That's exactly what they do. You seem to have a very naíve idea of what an experiment is - that stuff the chemists do in the labcoats right? Climate science produces testable predictions both for our current future and starting from past points to arrive at conclusions about our past. Climate scientists made predictions based on a theory about past climate, before knowing what the past climate looked like, then someone actually came up with a way of measuring the past climate. That's predictive value. Evolutionary biologists do the same, please read Richard Dawkins' latest book "The greatest show on earth" for a robust overview how evolution is based on testable ideas.
At no time in the past 100 years did the scientific consensus suggest that there would be imminent global cooling. There were some (one?) article that suggested global cooling in the 70s and the mainstream press run with it. It is also pretty well known that climate is cyclic and "imminent" in climate science might mean 10 thousands years. There was also a valid view that aerosol pollution would cause "global dimming" and reduce temperatures slightly. We fixed that problem by banning a lot of those pollutants in the 70s thus _averted_ the problem. There wasn't any serious following for "global cooling" among scientists in the past 100 years. You are exaggerating extremely heavily. Comparing climate science to 9/11 theories or creationists is disingenius. It reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about "what did the Romans ever gave us...". You have to realize that a lot of things in your life depend on the scientists and the scientific consensus getting it right. There would be no internet, computing industry, aviation, etc. without scientific base research in a lot of these areas. Science, it works.
The relevance, I think is that "the networks giving people what they want" is orthogonal to providing quality reporting for two reasons: because it assumes that the networks know what they are doing to an almost perfect degree, in other words somehow they are superhuman. That reminds me of conspiracy theories where the villains organize and scheme and control people with perfect coordination and detail. The second reason is that there are multiple ways in which to give people "what they want", just as there are multiple forms of arts.
There is a they, I was referring to the precise group of journalists/online outlets who get paid to deliver/disseminate news. What commenters on slashdot are doing by digging out the original paper, etc. is an aftermarket substitute for what the journalists should be doing in the first place. Heck, I consider half of the whole blogging phenomena to be a substitute for what journalists should be doing: providing context and investigating.
It is true that sensationalism sells, but it's not because that's what people want, on the contrary. It's about content that people fear. War, terrorism, health issues, scandals. That does provide news organizations with some revenue, but it leaves people unsatisfied because a lot of us feel we've been had with some coverage or other. There is a market vacuum that some blogs are exploiting and that's exactly why a growing number of people trust some blogs more than the vast majority of professional media. "The market" is not even nearly delivering what people want!
You might be right. Or I might be right. Who knows? It would be nice to see a study on this that includes p-values, control groups and detailed methodology.
See what I did there?
It's people buying into the sensationalism that the media perpetuates around anything vaguely related to human healthcare. Dumbing everything down to the level of the stupidest person consuming the news results in demeaning everyone else.
There is so much potential for online news. They could be using, omg, hyperlinks to connect the topic to the relevant terms and field of science. I wish I would hear about p-values and numbers in scientific notation! I think the vast majority of people would have actually no problem understanding news that is expressed not in Libraries of Congress, but in proper SI units. I want reporters to link to the original scientific paper they are writing a piece about or what's better: ask for and pressure scientists into being able to distribute the paper itself.
I want to read news with an Atom feed aggregator, where I find the paper the article refers to as a directly downloadable content.
Your first sentence is true, the second is false. Position _can_ be a genetic advantage. "Something that lived only because it was never touched" happens all the time in biology, where the positional behaviour can be driven by genetics.
Birds avoid high altitude, herds don't generally jump off cliffs, etc. The same happens on a more primitive level, too. People think about genetics and think it's like a human arms race or something, but all natural selection needs is surviving members of a species and it will encode _whatever_ information made them survive. Please remember, we're not talking about single instances of plasma sterilization processes, but basically waiting for a mutation to come along that happens to encode the information which in turn makes a significant contribution to the survival of the bacteria. It might not happen often, but if it happens a few times, then that strain will spread.
Actually, evolution is pretty clever. If it doesn't eradicate human skin (maybe just reduces the dead layer a bit?), then bacterias can survive too.
A more apt analogy would be to say that out of all the intelligent species in the universe, there is bound to be some that know how to evade or cope with a supernovae.
You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas.
Scientology is an efficient church. They are focusing on what a church usually does: scamming people out of their money and scamming them for control.
I thought you'd like to patent viewing your patent, so we patented viewing your patent viewing your patent!
This is a good lesson in why a beta/staging environment should be as close to the real stuff as possible.
I hope they start signing beta packages with beta keys in the future...