Hardly, when you consider that the results are typically posted every day online and in the newspapers. Its not as if world temperature data is being kept secret. Are you suggesting that scientists are hiding temperature data from the public? Surely you must be joking.
You missed my point entirely. Many scientists work for the public and it is the public who pays, yet it is typically a handful of capitalists that profit. Why should scientists be expected to share, but not those capitalists who get to profit form the work of others?
Perhaps the solution is for scientists to simply patent and copyright everything themselves. Now that there is electronic publishing, except for reviews is there really the need to pay publishers 7 figure salaries just to gather up the work of others, copyright it, and distribute it with no tangible benefit to the scientists that their work wouldn't gain beyond what they would have received if they published it themselves? Scientists are already doing the reviewing and the editing.
More rapid sequencing and hopefully much less expensive sequencing will greatly improve our knowledge, but the reality is that species identification will always be an issue since there are so many similar species often difficult to tell apart. So care must be taken with the identifications to ensure that the correct name is being attached to the sequences generated. The need for vouchers will be with us for a very long time to come and this may be a good thing, since it will shift the focus from simply obtaining and describing sequences or simply describing morphology toward understanding the functional, ecological, physiological, and evolutionary relationships between the different kinds of data that can be used for identification.
And to make it worse, someone then discovers that many of the original specimens from such a study were not saved and hence the identifications used in the study can not be duplicated, making the study worthless, because no one can be sure from which organism or linneage the sequences were actually collected from.
Well one area of concern is how the data are used in litigation. Take a particular ecological or molecular study, any that you might think of. Say the data is curated and made available via PLOS or some other archive or entity. Now a good lawyer notices that the data are incomplete, since they do not cite the repositories of any voucher materials that would permit the reidentification of any of the species in the study. None were saved, because it was too costly. Without the vouchers, such studies are essentially useless since a case could be made that the original identifications are suspect or the original tissues were contaminated by the genes of other species not correctly identified. A good corporate lawyer will have an easy time showing any environmental studies are indefensible and incomplete and in now time, there are no environmental studies or laws that can pass a rigorous voucher test. Why weren't vouchers saved? For many of the same reasons most data is not archived for posterity and freely available: the cost in time and effort that is simply unavailable.
Often museums and scientists would love to save the material, but can't afford to do so, since they have become no longer vast collections of well curated and intensively studied materials, but expensive headaches that the public isn't really interested in since they are more fascinated with youtube.com. Perhaps, we will all just be able to watch as humanity bends over and kisses its arse good bye.
This is a tall order, since scientists are held to a much higher standard than capitalists, and consequently always at a disadvantage. Scientists are expected to give away the product of their labor for free for all to use as they wish, but others are permitted to extract all the profits they may be able to get from the scientist's work, without any of the funds flowing directly to the scientist, who generated the data in the first place. One might ask why government contractors aren't likewise expected to turn all their profits and records over to the public, since their profits are derived entirely from public money?
Perhaps scientists wouldn't be so squeamish about releasing ALL of their data just to publish a single paper, if they can be guaranteed a minimum of 50% of all profits that may derive from their work. My guess is that GOP politicians would immediately object to this a limiting the religious freedom of capitalists to worship money as they see fit. I freely admit, however, that this is just a hunch, based entirely on past performance.
"What? The organism is not the data - the data is all the measurements you took of that organism and all the situations you subjected them to in order to reach the conclusions that you are publishing."
You simply don't understand and have a very naive view of biology and the complexity of life on planet Earth. If you don't have voucher material available to confirm the identity of the organisms under study, then there are no definite subsequent statements that one can make about any of the measures, observations, etc extracted from that species, since it may well be that the study at hand is actually based on another species entirely or a mixture of closely related species that have not been properly identified.
For many species, this is generally not regarded as a serious issue and great pains and expense have gone into establishing particular strains or lineages for purposes of experimentation so this issue can be set aside and assumed to be answered. However, for a great many more, it is always a very serious issue, since few organisms actually come with the correct scientific identification neatly printed on their backs for all to make an easy identification. Just ask yourself, of the 30,000 species of fishes, for example, how many do you think the average scientist can readily identify? Now ask that of coleopterans or even larger or more obscure taxa. In reality, the voucher is the data, since it is the only way one can with any certainty reproduce a biological study. Once you have the identity of the species involved determined and confirmed, then you can go about studying various measurable properties. However, without that critical piece, the rest is conjecture. One needs to recognized thousands of papers have been published in which the organisms in question have been misidentified. The only way one can be sure, is to have saved voucher material.
Excellent point. Given the modern GOP who are reluctant to even spend money on people, who are starving, its hard to imagine that they are going to be forthcoming with hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to maintain "all relevant data" in archives and repositories that are available on line in electronic form. Having lived through the era of Proxmier's "Golden Fleece Awards", it is totally predictable how politicians would howl at having to fund all sorts of projects that they could mischaracterize out of context as an excuse to cut science budgets further. In the current climate we would probably see legislation calling for the execution of scientists who somehow "mishandle" data. Look at the grief Michael Mann was put through for no good reason. I certainly wish it were true that politicians would see the value and benefit of funding the archival of data, but judging from the behavior of this GOP congress toward scientific research and its funding, such thinking is pure fantasy.
Asking that ALL data be saved is a very big requirement, especially for the molecular community. Although the sequences often find their way into Genbank, or at least those that are brought together from pieces of other data that may seldom gets into Genbank. To make maters worse the specimens from which the sequences are made are seldom saved and archived, so that it is often next to impossible to actually verify that the sequences in Genbank are actually from the species that are thought to have been sequenced. I know this is a major problem, since much of my time is spent trying to track down the source of such tissues so that the specimens, should they still exist, which they seldom do, can actually have their identities confirmed. In principle, if the original specimens are saved, since they are in fact the ultimate voucher that makes the data valuable in the first place and the published sequences useless without it, this will greatly benefit the scientific community. However, vouchering of specimens is even more costly than data, which evidently why the molecular community has done such a poor job of it for many species. The problem is large because there is no easy way to define the limits of what is meant by data.
Good point. However, even for data that only comes to gigabytes, all such data and the resources necessary to set up and maintain such repositories is going to cost a lot of money. Journals can demand it, but its not clear that authors will be able to pay to put it in the form that journals might like to see. There is also the question of archival costs. Any organization that accumulates such data is going to require a revenue stream to pay for it. This could well be yet another cost that needs to be given consideration, especially now that the cost of just conducting experiments and collecting and analyzing data is already extraordinarily difficult to come by as it is. Adding to these costs may well actually impede research, even though the motives are laudable. However, to the extent that such data can be archived and made available electronically all of science will benefit. PLOS doesn't really begin to address these issues. Its an old issue, that museum curators are all too familiar with, but as always still awaiting funds to actually address it properly. Just having such a good idea, isn't going to make it feasible until someone actually starts addressing the financial aspects of the issue in a realistic way, especially since the problem only gets bigger and bigger with time since data accumulates.
What is going to happen to all those secure credit card transactions that are the life-blood of internet commerce, when third parties figure out how to decrypt packets en-route by infiltrating the procedures of ISP's and alter them to "achieve efficiencies"?
You would think capitalists have a lot to loose if this proposal goes forward.
Perhaps since you are one of those prescient few who recognize that AWG isn't real, you are no doubt astute enough to tell me why if its not getting warmer, are the world's glaciers all receding? I can't get anyone to answer this question.
Keep in mind that these islands need to be underwater before they become uninhabitable. Large storm surges can make islands that are dry most of the time uninhabitable, particularly since these storms can deposit salts on otherwise fertile soils that are often limited at many oceanic islands. Likewise, saltwater encroachment into limited freshwater aquifers can make them uninhabitable as well. At the present rates of warming and sea level rise, 50-150 years is probably a conservative estimate for many low islands in the South Pacific.
The problem with global warming and what about it should be alarming is not just about factors of relevance to the physical sciences or confined to predictions about temperature changes on the surface of the planet we inhabit. It is also very much a problem concerning how the world's ecosystems will respond to these changes. In biology there are few simply linear relationships. Rather there are optimums and outside of these optimums things can change dramatically in very short periods of time.
What biologists throughout the world are finding is that the predicted effects of the rapid carbon dioxide buildup, particularly in the oceans, is alarming. Food production is not rising in response to global warming, but declining since the changes bring about extreme weather patterns that make agriculture even more difficult, not to mention fisheries from which humans obtain more than 50% of all protein. It also disrupts the delicate balance among the constituent species in ecosystems that can irreversibly change them for long periods of time, if not permanently. Increased temperatures are not the only thing we need to worry about. Falling pH is becoming an increasing problem and if we go back in geological time and look at instances where ocean pH levels were very low, such as the end of the Permian, the effects upon marine organisms was severe, with 80-90% of all life forms going extinct within as little as 10,000-20,000 years, but possibly over a 100,000. Likewise, dramatic changes in the availability of freshwater are already profound and the bulk of the warming that is built into a 400 ppm C02 levels has only begun to occur. Humans, however, are accelerating these kinds of changes by several orders of magnitude compared to what has been previously occurred in Earth history. It is not just that it is warming at a steady rate that we have to worry about, it is how sensitive the world's ecosystems are to such rapid changes, changes that are several orders of magnitude larger than species typically encounter.
"Politics needs to be taken out of the equation. Completely. Everything needs to be 100% transparent. The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand. Even if that happens, it will be decades before the damage the global warming alarmists have caused can be reversed."
Excellent idea. Now that we are back to breaking down the science in ways the average person can understand, can you explain to me why it is that if all the "global alarmists" are wrong and the world isn't getting hotter, all of the world's glaciers are melting?
"I am still waiting for someone, anyone on the Denier side to admit that they are, or even could be, wrong."
I am still waiting for anyone on the Denier side to explain, if they are right as they assert that the Earth isn't getting hotter, why all the world's glaciers are melting?
From a scientific perspective they have an even bigger problem to worry about than missing energy in the system. Obviously, they haven't looked at the oceans, but that aside, they seem to be totally and completely unable to explain how it is, if its not getting hotter, why all the world's glaciers are melting? If its not getting warmer, then how could this possibly be happening?
I have discovered that this is one aspect of their "alternative theory" that proves global warming is a hoax that they seem unable and totally unwilling to explain. Even worse, they slink away from any attempt to answer the question. Its almost like cockroaches immediately rushing to a dark spot to avoid the light. Here they stand poised to become some of the greatest scientists of their day by providing a cogent explanation and showing the entire world of science why virtually everyone but them got it wrong, and yet they are struck dumb and mute, unable to answer such a simple question. Why is that?
I'm sure Ben Stein can tell me why all the glaciers are melting even though its not getting any warmer. It seems no one is able to answer this question. If global warming is a hoax and its not warming, why are all the glaciers melting?
"Your clarification that the climate scientists were trying to hide the decline of the tree ring data as opposed to hiding the decline of the temperatures isn't very reassuring."
Since now that you have clearly demonstrated that all climate scientist who believe that the Earth is warming are frauds and totally wrong, can you now tell me why if its not getting warmer, all the glaciers are melting?
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly, when you consider that the results are typically posted every day online and in the newspapers. Its not as if world temperature data is being kept secret. Are you suggesting that scientists are hiding temperature data from the public? Surely you must be joking.
You missed my point entirely. Many scientists work for the public and it is the public who pays, yet it is typically a handful of capitalists that profit. Why should scientists be expected to share, but not those capitalists who get to profit form the work of others?
Perhaps the solution is for scientists to simply patent and copyright everything themselves. Now that there is electronic publishing, except for reviews is there really the need to pay publishers 7 figure salaries just to gather up the work of others, copyright it, and distribute it with no tangible benefit to the scientists that their work wouldn't gain beyond what they would have received if they published it themselves? Scientists are already doing the reviewing and the editing.
More rapid sequencing and hopefully much less expensive sequencing will greatly improve our knowledge, but the reality is that species identification will always be an issue since there are so many similar species often difficult to tell apart. So care must be taken with the identifications to ensure that the correct name is being attached to the sequences generated. The need for vouchers will be with us for a very long time to come and this may be a good thing, since it will shift the focus from simply obtaining and describing sequences or simply describing morphology toward understanding the functional, ecological, physiological, and evolutionary relationships between the different kinds of data that can be used for identification.
And to make it worse, someone then discovers that many of the original specimens from such a study were not saved and hence the identifications used in the study can not be duplicated, making the study worthless, because no one can be sure from which organism or linneage the sequences were actually collected from.
"Where's the down side?"
Well one area of concern is how the data are used in litigation. Take a particular ecological or molecular study, any that you might think of. Say the data is curated and made available via PLOS or some other archive or entity. Now a good lawyer notices that the data are incomplete, since they do not cite the repositories of any voucher materials that would permit the reidentification of any of the species in the study. None were saved, because it was too costly. Without the vouchers, such studies are essentially useless since a case could be made that the original identifications are suspect or the original tissues were contaminated by the genes of other species not correctly identified. A good corporate lawyer will have an easy time showing any environmental studies are indefensible and incomplete and in now time, there are no environmental studies or laws that can pass a rigorous voucher test. Why weren't vouchers saved? For many of the same reasons most data is not archived for posterity and freely available: the cost in time and effort that is simply unavailable.
Often museums and scientists would love to save the material, but can't afford to do so, since they have become no longer vast collections of well curated and intensively studied materials, but expensive headaches that the public isn't really interested in since they are more fascinated with youtube.com. Perhaps, we will all just be able to watch as humanity bends over and kisses its arse good bye.
This is a tall order, since scientists are held to a much higher standard than capitalists, and consequently always at a disadvantage. Scientists are expected to give away the product of their labor for free for all to use as they wish, but others are permitted to extract all the profits they may be able to get from the scientist's work, without any of the funds flowing directly to the scientist, who generated the data in the first place. One might ask why government contractors aren't likewise expected to turn all their profits and records over to the public, since their profits are derived entirely from public money?
Perhaps scientists wouldn't be so squeamish about releasing ALL of their data just to publish a single paper, if they can be guaranteed a minimum of 50% of all profits that may derive from their work. My guess is that GOP politicians would immediately object to this a limiting the religious freedom of capitalists to worship money as they see fit. I freely admit, however, that this is just a hunch, based entirely on past performance.
Yes, but increase the amount of reading necessary for each paper by orders of magnitude.
"What? The organism is not the data - the data is all the measurements you took of that organism and all the situations you subjected them to in order to reach the conclusions that you are publishing."
You simply don't understand and have a very naive view of biology and the complexity of life on planet Earth. If you don't have voucher material available to confirm the identity of the organisms under study, then there are no definite subsequent statements that one can make about any of the measures, observations, etc extracted from that species, since it may well be that the study at hand is actually based on another species entirely or a mixture of closely related species that have not been properly identified.
For many species, this is generally not regarded as a serious issue and great pains and expense have gone into establishing particular strains or lineages for purposes of experimentation so this issue can be set aside and assumed to be answered. However, for a great many more, it is always a very serious issue, since few organisms actually come with the correct scientific identification neatly printed on their backs for all to make an easy identification. Just ask yourself, of the 30,000 species of fishes, for example, how many do you think the average scientist can readily identify? Now ask that of coleopterans or even larger or more obscure taxa. In reality, the voucher is the data, since it is the only way one can with any certainty reproduce a biological study. Once you have the identity of the species involved determined and confirmed, then you can go about studying various measurable properties. However, without that critical piece, the rest is conjecture. One needs to recognized thousands of papers have been published in which the organisms in question have been misidentified. The only way one can be sure, is to have saved voucher material.
Excellent point. Given the modern GOP who are reluctant to even spend money on people, who are starving, its hard to imagine that they are going to be forthcoming with hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to maintain "all relevant data" in archives and repositories that are available on line in electronic form. Having lived through the era of Proxmier's "Golden Fleece Awards", it is totally predictable how politicians would howl at having to fund all sorts of projects that they could mischaracterize out of context as an excuse to cut science budgets further. In the current climate we would probably see legislation calling for the execution of scientists who somehow "mishandle" data. Look at the grief Michael Mann was put through for no good reason. I certainly wish it were true that politicians would see the value and benefit of funding the archival of data, but judging from the behavior of this GOP congress toward scientific research and its funding, such thinking is pure fantasy.
Asking that ALL data be saved is a very big requirement, especially for the molecular community. Although the sequences often find their way into Genbank, or at least those that are brought together from pieces of other data that may seldom gets into Genbank. To make maters worse the specimens from which the sequences are made are seldom saved and archived, so that it is often next to impossible to actually verify that the sequences in Genbank are actually from the species that are thought to have been sequenced. I know this is a major problem, since much of my time is spent trying to track down the source of such tissues so that the specimens, should they still exist, which they seldom do, can actually have their identities confirmed. In principle, if the original specimens are saved, since they are in fact the ultimate voucher that makes the data valuable in the first place and the published sequences useless without it, this will greatly benefit the scientific community. However, vouchering of specimens is even more costly than data, which evidently why the molecular community has done such a poor job of it for many species. The problem is large because there is no easy way to define the limits of what is meant by data.
Good point. However, even for data that only comes to gigabytes, all such data and the resources necessary to set up and maintain such repositories is going to cost a lot of money. Journals can demand it, but its not clear that authors will be able to pay to put it in the form that journals might like to see. There is also the question of archival costs. Any organization that accumulates such data is going to require a revenue stream to pay for it. This could well be yet another cost that needs to be given consideration, especially now that the cost of just conducting experiments and collecting and analyzing data is already extraordinarily difficult to come by as it is. Adding to these costs may well actually impede research, even though the motives are laudable. However, to the extent that such data can be archived and made available electronically all of science will benefit. PLOS doesn't really begin to address these issues. Its an old issue, that museum curators are all too familiar with, but as always still awaiting funds to actually address it properly. Just having such a good idea, isn't going to make it feasible until someone actually starts addressing the financial aspects of the issue in a realistic way, especially since the problem only gets bigger and bigger with time since data accumulates.
What is going to happen to all those secure credit card transactions that are the life-blood of internet commerce, when third parties figure out how to decrypt packets en-route by infiltrating the procedures of ISP's and alter them to "achieve efficiencies"?
You would think capitalists have a lot to loose if this proposal goes forward.
It wasn't just the delta smelt that got saved, but the entire San Francisco Bay ecosystem.
Here's the actually data, rewritten for the lay person.
January 2014, 4th warmest on records but don't let that fact get in the way of your sophism.
"food production is only going up."
especially in California.
Perhaps since you are one of those prescient few who recognize that AWG isn't real, you are no doubt astute enough to tell me why if its not getting warmer, are the world's glaciers all receding? I can't get anyone to answer this question.
Here's the data:
Keep in mind just because it snowed somewhere in California, doesn't mean all of California was snowed in.
Keep in mind that these islands need to be underwater before they become uninhabitable. Large storm surges can make islands that are dry most of the time uninhabitable, particularly since these storms can deposit salts on otherwise fertile soils that are often limited at many oceanic islands. Likewise, saltwater encroachment into limited freshwater aquifers can make them uninhabitable as well. At the present rates of warming and sea level rise, 50-150 years is probably a conservative estimate for many low islands in the South Pacific.
The problem with global warming and what about it should be alarming is not just about factors of relevance to the physical sciences or confined to predictions about temperature changes on the surface of the planet we inhabit. It is also very much a problem concerning how the world's ecosystems will respond to these changes. In biology there are few simply linear relationships. Rather there are optimums and outside of these optimums things can change dramatically in very short periods of time.
What biologists throughout the world are finding is that the predicted effects of the rapid carbon dioxide buildup, particularly in the oceans, is alarming. Food production is not rising in response to global warming, but declining since the changes bring about extreme weather patterns that make agriculture even more difficult, not to mention fisheries from which humans obtain more than 50% of all protein. It also disrupts the delicate balance among the constituent species in ecosystems that can irreversibly change them for long periods of time, if not permanently. Increased temperatures are not the only thing we need to worry about. Falling pH is becoming an increasing problem and if we go back in geological time and look at instances where ocean pH levels were very low, such as the end of the Permian, the effects upon marine organisms was severe, with 80-90% of all life forms going extinct within as little as 10,000-20,000 years, but possibly over a 100,000. Likewise, dramatic changes in the availability of freshwater are already profound and the bulk of the warming that is built into a 400 ppm C02 levels has only begun to occur. Humans, however, are accelerating these kinds of changes by several orders of magnitude compared to what has been previously occurred in Earth history. It is not just that it is warming at a steady rate that we have to worry about, it is how sensitive the world's ecosystems are to such rapid changes, changes that are several orders of magnitude larger than species typically encounter.
"Politics needs to be taken out of the equation. Completely. Everything needs to be 100% transparent. The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand. Even if that happens, it will be decades before the damage the global warming alarmists have caused can be reversed."
Excellent idea. Now that we are back to breaking down the science in ways the average person can understand, can you explain to me why it is that if all the "global alarmists" are wrong and the world isn't getting hotter, all of the world's glaciers are melting?
"I am still waiting for someone, anyone on the Denier side to admit that they are, or even could be, wrong."
I am still waiting for anyone on the Denier side to explain, if they are right as they assert that the Earth isn't getting hotter, why all the world's glaciers are melting?
From a scientific perspective they have an even bigger problem to worry about than missing energy in the system. Obviously, they haven't looked at the oceans, but that aside, they seem to be totally and completely unable to explain how it is, if its not getting hotter, why all the world's glaciers are melting? If its not getting warmer, then how could this possibly be happening?
I have discovered that this is one aspect of their "alternative theory" that proves global warming is a hoax that they seem unable and totally unwilling to explain. Even worse, they slink away from any attempt to answer the question. Its almost like cockroaches immediately rushing to a dark spot to avoid the light. Here they stand poised to become some of the greatest scientists of their day by providing a cogent explanation and showing the entire world of science why virtually everyone but them got it wrong, and yet they are struck dumb and mute, unable to answer such a simple question. Why is that?
I'm sure Ben Stein can tell me why all the glaciers are melting even though its not getting any warmer. It seems no one is able to answer this question. If global warming is a hoax and its not warming, why are all the glaciers melting?
"Your clarification that the climate scientists were trying to hide the decline of the tree ring data as opposed to hiding the decline of the temperatures isn't very reassuring."
Since now that you have clearly demonstrated that all climate scientist who believe that the Earth is warming are frauds and totally wrong, can you now tell me why if its not getting warmer, all the glaciers are melting?
So if all these scientists are wrong and are little more than frauds and its not getting warmer, can anyone tell me why all the glaciers are melting?