You say "most of it can be looked up in a book" and "the hard part is turning real world concepts into useful mathematical models."
I would argue that you have things inverted.
The hard part is in establishing that the mathematical model you have created or applied truly models real world conditions and assumptions.
As for being looked up in a book, most numbers are transcendental, yet most books deal only with natural, integer, real, complex or algebraic numbers. From this, one might expect that there is more mathematics yet to be written than has been written so far. Once the easy problems are solved, only the truly hard problems remain (whether for these, their solution involves beautiful simplifications for fundamental invariance due to symmetries in most aspects remains to be established).
Your point with regard to patents is well taken, but for a computer scientist to be finding excuses not to do mathematics would be like a runner shooting themselves in the foot before a big race. Mathematics is nothing more than thinking clearly and being able to recognize it as such. Perhaps if one can't think clearly and do proofs, then mathematics will seem confusing.
Algorithmics is little more than the making use of mathematical structures, expressions, and relationships in efficient and effective way, whether or not you have been trained to recognize it or not. Obviously, training can help. One of the most important aspects of mathematics is that it can instruct computer programs to recognize situations where it would be foolish to think that computable solution actually exists, when it does not, such as a "quick algorithm" for finding minimum length Steiner-trees (one of the key problems in computational biology).
Corporate evil-doers already have by getting a few of their lawyers involved in helping to disrupt Clearwire's obvious threat to their monopolies on connectivity. Get real folks, competition means war out there. Just because "some users are suing" doesn't mean that the full story has been told. Large competitors are leaning heavily on Sprint and Clearwire's bankers with the intent of blocking competition to monopoly land-line cable franchises. Don't be a dupe.
The irregularity of global weather patterns that are transitioning to a climate of a warmer world are rapidly reducing crop yields globally. Your diet will become a lot less diverse, whether you keep your auto or not. Keep in mind the contradictory nature of your response, since keeping your auto, which probably will cost you $5-6/gallon to fill up, thereby also reducing the diversity of your diet by virtue of diverting your income away from food and to the Koch Brothers and Exon Corporation.
In the future the price of living in a healthy environment will be extremely high, because there will be so little of it left to go around.
Ignore the consequences of republicanism at your peril.
"The real split here in the US is bigger government versus smaller government."
This canard is the generally accepted BS for the doctrine that somehow ignores the reality that there will be some kind of government large enough to do the job.Those too small will be displaced by larger governments elsewhere in time, such as is now being seen in the transition from a US dominated world to a Chinese dominated world.
The real question is whether public policy, call it government or whatever you like, will favor those private interests who can carve out special exemptions, privileges, and special benefits not available in general to other members of society, or those who believe that they should be dispensed more equitably, with laws designed to insure such equality. Corporations will gladly accept dollars from Uncle Sam, just as they would from your pension or health plan, so don't expect "big government" to go away as corporations want Uncle Sam as a captive customer. There only role in society for corporations is to take money from those who have any. "Small government" is just another name for the idea that if you don't have any money, you don't have any roll to play in public policy. Instead those rolls, whether it be managing the global ecosystem that supports life or other "economic" issues, will be "privatized" to be run by those with the right business connections and economic leverage.
What most people don't understand is that corporations are effectively small groups of people, who use their insider status and asymmetric social and economic relationships to simply put, "have things their way". Consequently, it is not a choice between big government or small government, but rather between those who want to see human affairs to be dictated by a special few and those who want to see a more equitable and reasoned dispensation of the riches of the natural world. Unless, you are a corporate insider, voting for more privatization (ie more corporate power) is just a way of saying that rather than a system where all the public gets to decide, only a few will decide and reap the cream. Its no accident that the "Tea Party"/anti-big government crowd primary benefactors and think/tank steering committees are the pet projects of billionaire corporatists.
Ignore reality and the perils of republicanism/corporatism at your peril.
Its the classic signs of a delusional paranoid about to implode. He fears Google because it will produce search results that reveal to him his worst fears about Glenn Beck. His only hope is that Ruppert Murdoch never learns to use Google.
" it's what scientists accept that will be taught."
This is total antithetical to science. The fact that scientists accept it is not the reason it should be taught, rather the reason is that all evidence scientists accept it is because ALL evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that evolution is a fact. We are the way we are because our ancestors evolved in ways that left us with the genetics that we have. There is no other rational explanation.
The teacher should have pointed out the fallacy in the student's reasoning. The student nor the teacher evolved from "monkeys", but it is virtually certain that both evolved from an ancestor that shared an ancestor with ancestor of monkeys. In this context the teacher would then be in a position to begin to enumerate the great many reasons scientists know this to be true. Namely, the many features their ancestors share in common. More importantly, not only do they share such features in common but what we know about the genetics of each of these features indicates that these features share their "similarity" all the way down to the molecular level of organization. Consequently, if they did not descend from a common ancestor one is forced to confront the necessity of developing an alternative explanation that doesn't involve anything about these organisms that science has been able to learn in the past 200 years, whether it be their anatomy, their physiology, their genetics, their ecology, their behavior, or any other known aspect of their biology. There is no testable, scientific alternative explanation that has yet been proposed. Scientists accept the theory of evolution 1) because there is no credible alternative explanation, 2) all efforts to scientifically reject Darwin's theory have been rejected as inconsistent with observable facts, and 3) because of its explanatory power. We can learn even more about the biology of these animals by examining the consequences of evolution by means of natural selection.
America hasn't jumped the shark. Sharks will probably outlast America, as it lets its education system fall behind in science and technology to other nations, such as the Chinese. In the end, survival of the fittest has some very real consequences.
They've struggled to get additional financing to continue to build out their system. However, once they do, these guys are poised to give cable operators some competition in otherwise closed markets. No wonder, that the cable companies are spreading as many rumors as possible and pressuring bankers and financiers to keep them from doing so. If they become competitive and Wi-Max takes off, it could drastically reduce the prices for local cable service.
This problem will get solved once they get financing to expand the density of their coverage. However, a big problem they are having is that other carriers and especially Cable monopolies are spreading false rumors about their service to keep them from giving potential customers an alternative to monopoly control that many cable companies have in various regional markets. The last thing that cable companies want is competition that would reduce the high prices they charge for service and thus reduce their astronomical profits.
I think you have answered your own question. Many of the AGW deniers are simply not sane and many others would argue that sanity is a personality defect.
Sadly, this is just how far many will go just to be able to continue to preen their ideologies. If many of them weren't being so well paid by the oil and gas lobby one could almost feel sorry for them.
"I live in the middle of England, where rising sea levels won't affect me directly".
Nonsense, warming of arctic waters is going to have a far more profound effect on all of Europe not to mention its agricultural sector. The instability is already decimating bird populations, particularly those whose habitats have shrunk as a result of human usurpation of their former ranges. I wouldn't want to be a farmer in the English country side these days. The unpredictability associated with a changing climate will have profound economic consequences. But perhaps, since you don't eat, you probably won't be affected as much as those in London.
You fail to take into account the rapid growth of hydrogen-sulfide producing bacteria that will begin to predominate many ecosystems as temperatures and carbon dioxide continue to rise, not to mention the many other bacteria and viruses whose growth will be facilitated . If you look at what hydrogen-sulfide bacteria did to other life forms at the the end of the Permian, its not a pretty picture to contemplate.
Most folks tend to underestimate how fragile life can be and how interdependent it is, usually because they simply have little knowledge of Biology. The fact that 30-40% of US citizens believe in creationism tells you how poorly equipped humanity is prepared to deal with the changes that are about to unfold.
The ignorance of this crowd is astounding. So many think that because the world is getting warmer, we will simply be able to plant crops there and grow lots of food. They never even bother to contemplate the fact that the life-cycles of most temperate and tropical plants would make it extremely difficult for them to survive a prolonged period of darkness as occurs near the poles, nor the fact that most of these species require rather fertile soils, which are about the last thing you will find in places like Greenland. Simple solutions for simple minds, I guess.
Perhaps it has escaped your attention that at the rate of melting suggested in the article, it will hardly be necessary to wait another 10,000 years to predict the outcome of the "experiment". Perhaps you want to tell the residents of Manhatten Island and perhaps 2-3 billion other inhabitants of coastal regions likely to be affected by the loss of the Greenland ice sheets that you don't give a ___ about them and they are just plumb out of luck as far as you are concerned.
All the ice in Greenland will have melted by then. The question for the climate change and increasing-CO2-in-the-atmosphere-makes-no-difference crowd is do they have ANY evidence that the current trends established by statistical reasoning should not be expected to continue.?
What would be so bad about another midieval warm period? You seem not to have made the connection between temperature and the spread of disease. Perhaps we must all wait until malaria and a host of other tropical diseases is endemic to Chicago, then perhaps the slow and poorly educated will begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.
As species do come and go, but normally over thousands and millions of years, not hundreds. When world fisheries disappear and when agriculture collapses (you need more than sunshine to make plants grow, you also need fertile soils, which are NOT found in Greenland, not to mention the fact that there is far too little sunlight for much of the year to sustain the life-cycles of most temperate and tropical plants at such lattitudes) and your species (any children and grandchildren that you may have) is being pushed against the brink of extinction, perhaps your perspective of "whats the big deal" will dramatically change.
The ability of species to adapt is rather narrow and is largely set by the narrowness of physiological tolerances. To survive large, long-term changes species must EVOLVE. Those who can not EVOLVE go extinct. Humans are going to have their hands full trying to evolve fast enough to survive the dramatic decline in the biodiversity that it historically has taken for granted and is largely clueless about.
Actually, the world would be better off nuking the Americans back to the stone age, since they are per capita the greatest producers of carbon dioxide.
Well look at it this way, there will be poetic justice. Probably, in a couple of hundred years oil and company executives will be roasted on a open spit, since they will be one of the few sources of protein left for the craven masses to eat.
You obviously know little of earth history. The work of Peter Ward and associates on fossil extinction periods make it clear that carbon dioxide increases are directly associated previous mass extinction events, except one at the end of the Cretaceous, which was associated with a bolide impact. In all other cases the world warmed dramatically from venting of carbon dioxide by extensive episodes of shield vulcanism and formation of plate basalts, stimulating dramatic growth of hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria as occur in many places on earth (same bacteria that lived during pre-oxygen atmospheric times and that better compete in relatively lower pH environments associated with higher CO2 levels).
The bad news for us is that humans produce far more carbon dioxide than does shield vulcanism per unit time, which is one of the reasons that most scientists who study earth history are so alarmed. We are doing in a few centuries what it took nature millions of years to accomplish. Carbon dioxide is rising faster than at any time in earth history.
You only need to look at what is happening in the Black Sea to get an idea of what is about to happen on a more global scale as carbon dioxide continues to warm the planet. Fisheries are already dramatically declining and moving toward a coelenterate dominated euphotic zone. Ultimately, they too will disappear. Major changes in phytoplankton compositions are already dramatically changing in arctic and near arctic seas, perhaps associated with release of methane from methane hydrates as the temperatures rise.
You can pretend not to notice, but it won't do you a lot of good.
You obviously don't have a clue as to what the "modest consequences" are likely to be. How about upwards of a billion people displaced from their homes and businesses within the next 50 years, dramatic declines in agricultural output and fisheries yields, total desertification of tens of millions of acres, lack of water for irrigration of crops, decline of biota of the planet by perhaps 20% within the next 100 years, one could go on nearly indefinitely.
Just think about the costs associated with a 2-3 ft sea level rise that will require virtually every port on earth to be rebuilt within the next 100 years, all at a time of tremendous political instability associated with great reductions in food supplies. Yet Americans complain about insufficient budgets for crumbling infrastructure and the effects are only now beginning to dawn on folks. As a professional biologist, my guess is that its 50-50 if humanity makes it past next 100 years. The odds get even worse from there.
They are shrinking naturally because it is getting warmer and warmer. There are virtually no glaciers on earth that are expanding, nearly all are in retreat and at record rates (even on geological time scales, since its not as if geologists haven't spent time studying moraine histories; indeed these histories match what we know about CO2 levels in earlier atmospheres as evidenced by both geological processes and gases trapped in ice cores).
If one "expects" no warming, then just what mechanism do you use to explain the rapid retreat of glaciers worldwide? Present data do not support the assumption that the coincident global retreat of glaciers is in anyway random, as the article clearly demonstrates for Greenland.
There is no question that earth mean temperatues are on the rise as a result of CO2 forcing, only real question is how much more warming will occur before the slow and financially motivated come to a realization of the consequences for humanity, particularly with respect to agriculture and fisheries, upon which humans largely depend for food.
You obviously haven't been measuring the pH of the world's oceans or studying the rates of extinction of the world's biota have you. I suppose you also believe that mountain top removal causes no adverse environmental effects either.
The reality is that the rate of loss of mass of Greenland's ice sheets will become of more concern as the sea level rises abruptly within the next 100 years, as it has done a number of times in the past, putting Wall Street below sea-level.
Don't worry about those public sector science jobs. Republicans particularly those who want to spend money for science on faith based initiatives will see to that. Attrition rates at public university labs are set to skyrocket. Like everything else, it can be done much more cheaply in China or India and don't pretend that all those poor little guys like Ramanunjan are not good at mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
Who in the hell is going to be foolish enough to get locked into an app store model?
Real geeks roll their own code. App stores are for those who can't program but like to be seen wearing bling.
Not to mention the cost of catastrophic failure in code.
You say "most of it can be looked up in a book" and "the hard part is turning real world concepts into useful mathematical models."
I would argue that you have things inverted.
The hard part is in establishing that the mathematical model you have created or applied truly models real world conditions and assumptions.
As for being looked up in a book, most numbers are transcendental, yet most books deal only with natural, integer, real, complex or algebraic numbers. From this, one might expect that there is more mathematics yet to be written than has been written so far. Once the easy problems are solved, only the truly hard problems remain (whether for these, their solution involves beautiful simplifications for fundamental invariance due to symmetries in most aspects remains to be established).
Your point with regard to patents is well taken, but for a computer scientist to be finding excuses not to do mathematics would be like a runner shooting themselves in the foot before a big race. Mathematics is nothing more than thinking clearly and being able to recognize it as such. Perhaps if one can't think clearly and do proofs, then mathematics will seem confusing.
Algorithmics is little more than the making use of mathematical structures, expressions, and relationships in efficient and effective way, whether or not you have been trained to recognize it or not. Obviously, training can help. One of the most important aspects of mathematics is that it can instruct computer programs to recognize situations where it would be foolish to think that computable solution actually exists, when it does not, such as a "quick algorithm" for finding minimum length Steiner-trees (one of the key problems in computational biology).
Corporate evil-doers already have by getting a few of their lawyers involved in helping to disrupt Clearwire's obvious threat to their monopolies on connectivity. Get real folks, competition means war out there. Just because "some users are suing" doesn't mean that the full story has been told. Large competitors are leaning heavily on Sprint and Clearwire's bankers with the intent of blocking competition to monopoly land-line cable franchises. Don't be a dupe.
The irregularity of global weather patterns that are transitioning to a climate of a warmer world are rapidly reducing crop yields globally. Your diet will become a lot less diverse, whether you keep your auto or not. Keep in mind the contradictory nature of your response, since keeping your auto, which probably will cost you $5-6/gallon to fill up, thereby also reducing the diversity of your diet by virtue of diverting your income away from food and to the Koch Brothers and Exon Corporation.
In the future the price of living in a healthy environment will be extremely high, because there will be so little of it left to go around.
Ignore the consequences of republicanism at your peril.
"The real split here in the US is bigger government versus smaller government."
This canard is the generally accepted BS for the doctrine that somehow ignores the reality that there will be some kind of government large enough to do the job.Those too small will be displaced by larger governments elsewhere in time, such as is now being seen in the transition from a US dominated world to a Chinese dominated world.
The real question is whether public policy, call it government or whatever you like, will favor those private interests who can carve out special exemptions, privileges, and special benefits not available in general to other members of society, or those who believe that they should be dispensed more equitably, with laws designed to insure such equality. Corporations will gladly accept dollars from Uncle Sam, just as they would from your pension or health plan, so don't expect "big government" to go away as corporations want Uncle Sam as a captive customer. There only role in society for corporations is to take money from those who have any. "Small government" is just another name for the idea that if you don't have any money, you don't have any roll to play in public policy. Instead those rolls, whether it be managing the global ecosystem that supports life or other "economic" issues, will be "privatized" to be run by those with the right business connections and economic leverage.
What most people don't understand is that corporations are effectively small groups of people, who use their insider status and asymmetric social and economic relationships to simply put, "have things their way". Consequently, it is not a choice between big government or small government, but rather between those who want to see human affairs to be dictated by a special few and those who want to see a more equitable and reasoned dispensation of the riches of the natural world. Unless, you are a corporate insider, voting for more privatization (ie more corporate power) is just a way of saying that rather than a system where all the public gets to decide, only a few will decide and reap the cream. Its no accident that the "Tea Party"/anti-big government crowd primary benefactors and think/tank steering committees are the pet projects of billionaire corporatists.
Ignore reality and the perils of republicanism/corporatism at your peril.
Its the classic signs of a delusional paranoid about to implode. He fears Google because it will produce search results that reveal to him his worst fears about Glenn Beck. His only hope is that Ruppert Murdoch never learns to use Google.
" it's what scientists accept that will be taught."
This is total antithetical to science. The fact that scientists accept it is not the reason it should be taught, rather the reason is that all evidence scientists accept it is because ALL evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that evolution is a fact. We are the way we are because our ancestors evolved in ways that left us with the genetics that we have. There is no other rational explanation.
The teacher should have pointed out the fallacy in the student's reasoning. The student nor the teacher evolved from "monkeys", but it is virtually certain that both evolved from an ancestor that shared an ancestor with ancestor of monkeys. In this context the teacher would then be in a position to begin to enumerate the great many reasons scientists know this to be true. Namely, the many features their ancestors share in common. More importantly, not only do they share such features in common but what we know about the genetics of each of these features indicates that these features share their "similarity" all the way down to the molecular level of organization. Consequently, if they did not descend from a common ancestor one is forced to confront the necessity of developing an alternative explanation that doesn't involve anything about these organisms that science has been able to learn in the past 200 years, whether it be their anatomy, their physiology, their genetics, their ecology, their behavior, or any other known aspect of their biology. There is no testable, scientific alternative explanation that has yet been proposed. Scientists accept the theory of evolution 1) because there is no credible alternative explanation, 2) all efforts to scientifically reject Darwin's theory have been rejected as inconsistent with observable facts, and 3) because of its explanatory power. We can learn even more about the biology of these animals by examining the consequences of evolution by means of natural selection.
America hasn't jumped the shark. Sharks will probably outlast America, as it lets its education system fall behind in science and technology to other nations, such as the Chinese. In the end, survival of the fittest has some very real consequences.
They've struggled to get additional financing to continue to build out their system. However, once they do, these guys are poised to give cable operators some competition in otherwise closed markets. No wonder, that the cable companies are spreading as many rumors as possible and pressuring bankers and financiers to keep them from doing so. If they become competitive and Wi-Max takes off, it could drastically reduce the prices for local cable service.
This problem will get solved once they get financing to expand the density of their coverage. However, a big problem they are having is that other carriers and especially Cable monopolies are spreading false rumors about their service to keep them from giving potential customers an alternative to monopoly control that many cable companies have in various regional markets. The last thing that cable companies want is competition that would reduce the high prices they charge for service and thus reduce their astronomical profits.
I think you have answered your own question. Many of the AGW deniers are simply not sane and many others would argue that sanity is a personality defect.
Sadly, this is just how far many will go just to be able to continue to preen their ideologies. If many of them weren't being so well paid by the oil and gas lobby one could almost feel sorry for them.
"I live in the middle of England, where rising sea levels won't affect me directly".
Nonsense, warming of arctic waters is going to have a far more profound effect on all of Europe not to mention its agricultural sector. The instability is already decimating bird populations, particularly those whose habitats have shrunk as a result of human usurpation of their former ranges. I wouldn't want to be a farmer in the English country side these days. The unpredictability associated with a changing climate will have profound economic consequences. But perhaps, since you don't eat, you probably won't be affected as much as those in London.
You fail to take into account the rapid growth of hydrogen-sulfide producing bacteria that will begin to predominate many ecosystems as temperatures and carbon dioxide continue to rise, not to mention the many other bacteria and viruses whose growth will be facilitated . If you look at what hydrogen-sulfide bacteria did to other life forms at the the end of the Permian, its not a pretty picture to contemplate.
Most folks tend to underestimate how fragile life can be and how interdependent it is, usually because they simply have little knowledge of Biology. The fact that 30-40% of US citizens believe in creationism tells you how poorly equipped humanity is prepared to deal with the changes that are about to unfold.
The ignorance of this crowd is astounding. So many think that because the world is getting warmer, we will simply be able to plant crops there and grow lots of food. They never even bother to contemplate the fact that the life-cycles of most temperate and tropical plants would make it extremely difficult for them to survive a prolonged period of darkness as occurs near the poles, nor the fact that most of these species require rather fertile soils, which are about the last thing you will find in places like Greenland. Simple solutions for simple minds, I guess.
Perhaps it has escaped your attention that at the rate of melting suggested in the article, it will hardly be necessary to wait another 10,000 years to predict the outcome of the "experiment". Perhaps you want to tell the residents of Manhatten Island and perhaps 2-3 billion other inhabitants of coastal regions likely to be affected by the loss of the Greenland ice sheets that you don't give a ___ about them and they are just plumb out of luck as far as you are concerned.
All the ice in Greenland will have melted by then. The question for the climate change and increasing-CO2-in-the-atmosphere-makes-no-difference crowd is do they have ANY evidence that the current trends established by statistical reasoning should not be expected to continue.?
What would be so bad about another midieval warm period? You seem not to have made the connection between temperature and the spread of disease. Perhaps we must all wait until malaria and a host of other tropical diseases is endemic to Chicago, then perhaps the slow and poorly educated will begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.
As species do come and go, but normally over thousands and millions of years, not hundreds. When world fisheries disappear and when agriculture collapses (you need more than sunshine to make plants grow, you also need fertile soils, which are NOT found in Greenland, not to mention the fact that there is far too little sunlight for much of the year to sustain the life-cycles of most temperate and tropical plants at such lattitudes) and your species (any children and grandchildren that you may have) is being pushed against the brink of extinction, perhaps your perspective of "whats the big deal" will dramatically change.
The ability of species to adapt is rather narrow and is largely set by the narrowness of physiological tolerances. To survive large, long-term changes species must EVOLVE. Those who can not EVOLVE go extinct. Humans are going to have their hands full trying to evolve fast enough to survive the dramatic decline in the biodiversity that it historically has taken for granted and is largely clueless about.
Actually, the world would be better off nuking the Americans back to the stone age, since they are per capita the greatest producers of carbon dioxide.
Well look at it this way, there will be poetic justice. Probably, in a couple of hundred years oil and company executives will be roasted on a open spit, since they will be one of the few sources of protein left for the craven masses to eat.
You obviously know little of earth history. The work of Peter Ward and associates on fossil extinction periods make it clear that carbon dioxide increases are directly associated previous mass extinction events, except one at the end of the Cretaceous, which was associated with a bolide impact. In all other cases the world warmed dramatically from venting of carbon dioxide by extensive episodes of shield vulcanism and formation of plate basalts, stimulating dramatic growth of hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria as occur in many places on earth (same bacteria that lived during pre-oxygen atmospheric times and that better compete in relatively lower pH environments associated with higher CO2 levels).
The bad news for us is that humans produce far more carbon dioxide than does shield vulcanism per unit time, which is one of the reasons that most scientists who study earth history are so alarmed. We are doing in a few centuries what it took nature millions of years to accomplish. Carbon dioxide is rising faster than at any time in earth history.
You only need to look at what is happening in the Black Sea to get an idea of what is about to happen on a more global scale as carbon dioxide continues to warm the planet. Fisheries are already dramatically declining and moving toward a coelenterate dominated euphotic zone. Ultimately, they too will disappear. Major changes in phytoplankton compositions are already dramatically changing in arctic and near arctic seas, perhaps associated with release of methane from methane hydrates as the temperatures rise.
You can pretend not to notice, but it won't do you a lot of good.
You obviously don't have a clue as to what the "modest consequences" are likely to be. How about upwards of a billion people displaced from their homes and businesses within the next 50 years, dramatic declines in agricultural output and fisheries yields, total desertification of tens of millions of acres, lack of water for irrigration of crops, decline of biota of the planet by perhaps 20% within the next 100 years, one could go on nearly indefinitely.
Just think about the costs associated with a 2-3 ft sea level rise that will require virtually every port on earth to be rebuilt within the next 100 years, all at a time of tremendous political instability associated with great reductions in food supplies. Yet Americans complain about insufficient budgets for crumbling infrastructure and the effects are only now beginning to dawn on folks. As a professional biologist, my guess is that its 50-50 if humanity makes it past next 100 years. The odds get even worse from there.
They are shrinking naturally because it is getting warmer and warmer. There are virtually no glaciers on earth that are expanding, nearly all are in retreat and at record rates (even on geological time scales, since its not as if geologists haven't spent time studying moraine histories; indeed these histories match what we know about CO2 levels in earlier atmospheres as evidenced by both geological processes and gases trapped in ice cores).
If one "expects" no warming, then just what mechanism do you use to explain the rapid retreat of glaciers worldwide? Present data do not support the assumption that the coincident global retreat of glaciers is in anyway random, as the article clearly demonstrates for Greenland.
There is no question that earth mean temperatues are on the rise as a result of CO2 forcing, only real question is how much more warming will occur before the slow and financially motivated come to a realization of the consequences for humanity, particularly with respect to agriculture and fisheries, upon which humans largely depend for food.
You obviously haven't been measuring the pH of the world's oceans or studying the rates of extinction of the world's biota have you. I suppose you also believe that mountain top removal causes no adverse environmental effects either.
The reality is that the rate of loss of mass of Greenland's ice sheets will become of more concern as the sea level rises abruptly within the next 100 years, as it has done a number of times in the past, putting Wall Street below sea-level.
Don't worry about those public sector science jobs. Republicans particularly those who want to spend money for science on faith based initiatives will see to that. Attrition rates at public university labs are set to skyrocket. Like everything else, it can be done much more cheaply in China or India and don't pretend that all those poor little guys like Ramanunjan are not good at mathematics.