I entirely agree: I keep telling people that it means "an implement for hacking, chopping wood, or breaking up earth", as it has done since the 1400s, but there's always some twat whining that it's got something to do with computer programming. Don't these people know that once a word is coined, its meaning is set in stone for eternity?
It proves nothing, and isn't even very good as a publicity stunt.
On the contrary. It proves that with the right link-bait buzzwords and sufficiently lazy editors, even the most pointless project can make the Slashdot front page -- twice.
Wagner: "it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents."
Wagner apparently wanted Spencer and Braswell to rebut any rebuttal of their work before publishing.
No, they needed to address the existing evidence which contradicted their work. If there is strong support for a hypothesis "A" and you write a paper saying "not-A", it needs to contain some explanation for why all those previous papers were wrong and you're right -- rather than just presenting your conclusions as if you're the first person ever to think of this problem. Wagner considered that this had not happened in this case, and that he had failed in not enforcing it.
how would you falsify the hypothesis "mitigating climate change will be cheaper and less painful than adapting to it"?
How would you falsify the hypothesis that adaptation is cheaper than mitigation? Unfortunately we only have one world, so we don't get to do this as a lab experiment, and we will both be denied definitive falsification. So we just have to go on the current balance of evidence. If you were living in the projected path of a hurricane, would you demand a lab experiment to show that it was going to hit before agreeing to evacuate?
nobody ever experiences the average weather over 30 years.
We've been round this, what, three or four times now? Yes, we both agree that climate's not weather and that long-term regional/global climate models don't make accurate local weather predictions. Neither do local weather models make long-term global climate predictions. I don't know why you expend such effort arguing for perhaps the only point that we do agree on.
How different do you think the next 200 years is going to be?
I refer you (again) to IPCC AR4.
Even in the most dramatically exaggerated claims of sea level rise, you're not going to see anything that would interfere with say, a specific building lasting for 200 years.
Unfortunately, as you keep pointing out, weather varies a lot more than climate in the short term: so while (say) a 1m sea-level rise might not seem like much, it's going to vastly increase the frequency of catastrophic events -- for instance, your hundred-year floods may now be ten-year floods. To take a more specific example: in Bangladesh, a 1m sea level rise would take out >15% of the country and displace ~20 million people.
You can hardly expect them to publish Spencer's re-rebuttal before the actual rebuttal.
Wasn't that the prima facie reason for the resignation? That Spencer had not considered his own rebuttal before publishing?
I'm afraid this is making less and less sense to me. How could Spencer consider a non-existent rebuttal to an unpublished paper? In his own words, Wagner's reason for resignation was publishing a paper which was "problematic in both aspects" of "fundamental methodological errors or false claims" and "fundamentally flawed".
You stated, "I'm happy that the science is sufficiently settled for action to be warranted now." Why would action be warranted if it's just AGW, rather than it's bigger and badder cousin CAGW?
Again, you refuse to define your terms, but based on the research I've seen (IPCC AR4 chapters 2 & 3, economic reviews by Stern, Weitzman, and others), mitigating the climate change will be both cheaper and (by various measures) less painful than adapting to it.
Are you really arguing that seasons are *weather*?
Yes; climate's usually taken to encompass a longer term (I believe the World Meteorological Organization goes with 30 years).
What we need to do is monitor temperature across the globe - the actual averaging of that data into a single number is actually a *loss* of important information.
Nobody's suggesting we throw out the raw data! But if you want to argue about the relative effects of global temperature drivers (such as solar irradiance and carbon dioxide concentration) then you have to consider global averages. And it seems to me that you do want to argue about this.
But if, say, you are a planner, it might help you to put infrastructure in a place where it won't be underwater in 200 years...
"For example, over the past 100 years, the rate of sea level rise varies...
You are neglecting the rather crucial point that I'm talking about the next 200 years, whereas you are talking about the previous 100 years. I suspect that our opinions differ as to the likely variation in sea level during the coming centuries, but let's at least try to agree on which time period we're actually discussing.
the warmists seem to have fast tracked a rebuttal without even offering Spencer et. al. a chance to respond to critiques.
He's responded online to online critiques; presumably he will respond in peer-reviewed media to peer-reviewed critiques. You can hardly expect them to publish Spencer's re-rebuttal before the actual rebuttal.
So, I take it you *do* then subscribe to a belief of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Again, you've failed to define it, so I'm afraid I still can't answer that; we'll have to stick at AGW.
Furthermore, there is no clear correlation of CO2 to temp (over the 20 million year time scale)
The very paper you link to argues against the assertion you make! (Although of course the WUWT comments tend to the opposite view.) If you mean "I can't draw a straight line through it" -- no, of course not. Even if CO2 were the only climate forcing, there are all kinds of entertaining feedbacks which can exacerbate the effects. That doesn't mean that it isn't an important forcing.
Let me give an example - we experience large scale climate changes called "seasons".
Sorry, no. That's not climate, that's weather. I live in a temperate climate, for instance; it doesn't turn into a polar climate when the temperature drops below zero for a few days per year.
[a long piece on how climate is not weather]
Thank you, I'm aware of that.
If you truly believe that average global temperature has no relevance, why on earth are we discussing a paper about it?
This paper is about whether or not you can judge CO2 as a forcing or a feedback (and when).
... and to do that, we need to monitor global temperature. And evidently you think that making this judgement is important, or you would surely have better things to do than arguing with me about it.
Would it [a global temperature trend] help someone sail around the Cape of Good Hope?
No, of course not. But if, say, you are a planner, it might help you to put infrastructure in a place where it won't be underwater in 200 years. That's why the IPCC reports come with a "summary for policymakers", not a "summary for sailors".
an argument that the model was too simple is, in general, disingenuous
As I said -- if you want a peer-reviewed rebuttal, you'll have to wait (but not much longer) for it to get through GRL's publication pipeline...
You seem like a reasonable person, and perhaps you've never stated that the "science is settled", but that has been the mainstream argument for a while.
I'm happy that the science is sufficiently settled for action to be warranted now.
To summarize: climate is unknowable to any level of detail important to humanity, and while humans certainly affect their surroundings (as all living beings do), the level of that effect is on the boundary of undetectable.
I'm still not sure that I get your meaning (surely large-scale changes in climate -- i.e. the more knowable ones -- are more important to humanity that small-scale ones?). But I really don't know what makes you so sure we're on the "boundary of undetectable". We're already up to CO2 concentrations not seen for 20 million years -- do you really think that's not going to have an effect?
To clarify: average global temperature has zero relevance for anything experienced by humans - perhaps it is an interesting artificial statistic, but because we are affected by specific distributions of temperatures, not some imaginary average, it provides little functional use.
If you truly believe that average global temperature has no relevance, why on earth are we discussing a paper about it?
(If you are interested in regional-scale effects of global temperature rise, they are dealt with in some detail (976 pages) in Section 2 of the IPCC's fourth assessment report.)
A model without an ocean does seem rather over-simplified to me.
My rejoinder is that a model without clouds does seem rather over-simplified to me as well,
Originally your argument was "nobody has explained what's wrong with this paper"; now it appears to be "all other models are crap so it's OK if this one is crap too". I was arguing against your initial assertion.
... but you never see that kind of critique against models that promise extreme warming trends.
Nonsense. Clouds are a hot research topic now precisely because scientists are aware that they are poorly handled by existing models. IPCC reports represent the best predictions that can be made by current science rather than unattainable perfection; that's why a new one comes out every few years, and that's why the conclusions are labelled with probability levels.
In either case, we are presented with a system that is disturbingly simple no matter how complex we make it - natural climate systems are well beyond the complexity we could simulate
...
I would take it as adequately proven that humans have a vanishingly small impact on global temperature, primarily through the UHI effect, but even with say, contrails from airplanes.
To summarize: climate is unknowable, but fortunately you happen to know that humans have nothing to do with it.
Realclimate is difficult to take seriously - simply asserting that a model is too simple seems a critique
They don't "simply assert" that the model is too simple; they point out that has "no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave". A model without an ocean does seem rather over-simplified to me.
In any case, that's far from being the only issue: "The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results." No error bars and insufficient detail to reproduce? Doesn't sound very much like science.
...that should be heeded by the various climate modelers out there who don't have any sort of realistic cloud modeling at all.
I'll grant you that clouds are not yet fully understood, but the IPCC models do take account of them.
Appeal to unnamed authorities. "Respected climate scientist" is not a title which is required to falsify a hypothesis, or critically examine a scientific proposition.
The authorities were named at the top of the article I linked to; Drs. Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo. I was answering your question as to why "argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs" was sufficient to cause so much trouble for this paper: some of the arguments against it were solid, and they were solid in part because they were constructed by people who had expertise in the relevant field. Not all "arguments on the intarwebs" are created equal.
Speaking of which, how would you concisely state a falsifiable hypothesis of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Perhaps embarrassingly, I'd never come across that term before reading your comment, and (while the general idea is clear) I've been unable to find a solid definition for it -- particularly important since the term "catastrophic" is often used differently in scientific and general contexts. Do you have a definition handy?
By the way, since you appended the "Catastrophic", I take it that you regard the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming (sans "Catastrophic") to be adequately proven?
For all the drama of the editor's resignation letter, he seems to be awfully vague about any actual flaws in the paper.
If you want a peer-reviewed rebuttal you'll have to wait till next week when Andrew Dessler's paper is due to appear in Geophysical Research Letters -- the wheels of peer review grind slowly, which is why blogs tend to get used for more instantaneous responses. If you are happy with a non-peer-reviewed rebuttal by two respected climate scientists go here.
Citing argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs as a reason not to publish it is like asserting that no pro-AGW papers should ever be printed because of wattsupwiththat.com.
The difference here is that Anthony Watts is not only not a respected climate scientist but not in fact a climate scientist at all.
New editions of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are now available, and being purchased by school districts, that remove every instance of the word "nigger" judging young people too imbecilic to differentiate the use of it as a racial slur, and its use in an work of fiction...
Depressing. I note from the list that it will be impossible to write about Moby Dick, but maybe we could produce a censored version called Moby Dong or Moby Schlong which would comply with the word-list.
I swear, I've read between 2-3 stories per month for the last 5 years on how someone has revolutionized the process of producing solar cells, at a fraction of the cost it was last week... By this point, I should be able to pick up a 2 by 4 ft. panel from the side of the street by the peaches stands.
Take a look at this graph, from this article about solar price trends. From 1980 to 2009, the cost of photovoltaics decreased by about 85%, from $22/W to below $3/W. As of approximately now, solar is cheaper than nuclear per kWh, and the price decline shows no sign of stopping.
Maybe you should quantify your expectations, then you can check them against future price decreases.
What I'd like to to *only* hear about innovations that are likely to pan out and hit the market
Yes. Also, when reading the racing news, I would like to *only* read about the horses that are going to come in first.
There's a LOT of companies out there who come up with "innovations", make a few nice pictures of their invention (but never a real working prototype), and make a lot of hype so they can get investor money, and then just disappear.
Doubtless. But in this case the development was by a university, not a company, and the story is precisely about the fact that they've built a working prototype.
... and then when they hit the market, the Slashdot discussion will consist of 50 comments along the lines of "This isn't news, this is old tech, I remember reading about this back in 2011"...
Seriously, if you *only* want to hear about innovations once they've hit the market, why are you reading a tech news site? Just browse the Amazon electronics department instead and you'll be safe.
Set a bunch of these loose in the Sahara printing out solar panels.
The Sahara Solar Breeder Foundation is aiming at something rather similar: "Large scale/low cost production of solar-grade silicon from desert sand," on a truly impressive scale. It remains to be seen whether they can find the money and political will to get it on track, though.
He writes: "While I use Facebook and other sites, I always keep local copies of photos or anything else that I share."
OK, human stupidity is boundless, so I'm sure there's someone out there who uploads all their photos to Facebook and then deletes the local copies... but seriously, anyone that stupid is not going to make it three-quarters of the way through that article to read Mr Brockmeier's sage advice.
How in hell this can be definitively attributed to "global warming" is beyond the pale. It's much more likely that the lack of whaling activity would eventually lead to increase in population and hence migration.
It's pretty simple: ice melts, whale swims through water. Whales don't magically gain the ability to teleport just because there's a moratorium on whaling. Whatever the population dynamics, the whale physically requires a channel of water to swim through if it's going to get from one ocean to another. The recently de-iced route through the North-West Passage provided this channel. What's your alternative hypothesis? It swam clear across the Pacific, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and approached the Mediterranean from the South? Possible, but as I'm sure you've seen from reading the original research paper, highly unlikely. Occam's Razor favours a northern route.
Oh, and it's not "definitively attributed"; it's just the most likely scenario.
So they're going back to their old feeding grounds. Nature reclaiming where it was before.
Not exactly: the Atlantic population didn't migrate to the Pacific, it just died out. It doesn't really matter, though. The point of the paper is to demonstrate that species are now able to traverse the North-West Passage due to the lack of ice, with possible consequences for the Pacific and Atlantic ecosystems. There isn't really a "whales should be here" / "whales shouldn't be here" aspect to it, it's just analysing what actually happened.
The article's claim that they returned as a result of higher temperatures isn't very well supported (it certainly doesn't provide any citations).
Here you go. Scheinin, A. P. et al. (2011) Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) in the Mediterranean Sea: anomalous event or early sign of climate-driven distribution change? Marine Biodiversity Records, 4: e28. (Spoiler: they reckon it's probably climate-driven distribution change.)
I am baffled as to why Slashdot insists on linking to the shittiest, vaguest intermediary sites for any scientific research, but I find that 30 seconds with Google usually turns up the relevant paper.
Clearly, if the Gray whales migrated back in the 1800's to the northern Atlantic. And they're "just now" doing it again. Then our global temperatures have really just become on par with the 1800's again.
Grey Whales didn't "migrate" to the North Atlantic in the 1800s; there was a pre-existing native population there which died out in the 18th century (probably due to whaling). Reference here. Temperature didn't have anything to do with it.
I like the details on materials for the parabolic reflectors: "Reflective surface materials included chicken wire, woven stainless steel mesh and window screen." -- now *that's* what I call a mesh network!
Oh good, I see we've got today's mandatory link to Michael Cooney's Layer 8 blog at NetworkWorld, the convenient middleman between Slashdot and news. This time he hasn't even bothered linking to the actual press release he's regurgitating, as far as I can tell. Still, more hits for NetworkWorld, that's what matters.
It would be a perfect place to keep your Bitcoin wallet. You could carry it around in your pocket to keep your bitcoins safe from hackers.
In fact, I'm surprised the summary didn't read something like Potential Bitcoin wallet goes wireless. In Bitcoin news today, Bitcoin experts said that Bitcoin uptake of Bitcoins could increase with the addition of Bitcoin wireless to a device which might, potentially, at some point, be used to store Bitcoins. Asked to comment on the development, a Bitcoin-using Bitcoin promoter replied "Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin. And furthermore, Bitcoin."
Slashdot Mirror
I entirely agree: I keep telling people that it means "an implement for hacking, chopping wood, or breaking up earth", as it has done since the 1400s, but there's always some twat whining that it's got something to do with computer programming. Don't these people know that once a word is coined, its meaning is set in stone for eternity?
It proves nothing, and isn't even very good as a publicity stunt.
On the contrary. It proves that with the right link-bait buzzwords and sufficiently lazy editors, even the most pointless project can make the Slashdot front page -- twice.
Come back Bitcoin stories, all is forgiven...
Wagner: "it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents."
Wagner apparently wanted Spencer and Braswell to rebut any rebuttal of their work before publishing.
No, they needed to address the existing evidence which contradicted their work. If there is strong support for a hypothesis "A" and you write a paper saying "not-A", it needs to contain some explanation for why all those previous papers were wrong and you're right -- rather than just presenting your conclusions as if you're the first person ever to think of this problem. Wagner considered that this had not happened in this case, and that he had failed in not enforcing it.
how would you falsify the hypothesis "mitigating climate change will be cheaper and less painful than adapting to it"?
How would you falsify the hypothesis that adaptation is cheaper than mitigation? Unfortunately we only have one world, so we don't get to do this as a lab experiment, and we will both be denied definitive falsification. So we just have to go on the current balance of evidence. If you were living in the projected path of a hurricane, would you demand a lab experiment to show that it was going to hit before agreeing to evacuate?
nobody ever experiences the average weather over 30 years.
We've been round this, what, three or four times now? Yes, we both agree that climate's not weather and that long-term regional/global climate models don't make accurate local weather predictions. Neither do local weather models make long-term global climate predictions. I don't know why you expend such effort arguing for perhaps the only point that we do agree on.
How different do you think the next 200 years is going to be?
I refer you (again) to IPCC AR4.
Even in the most dramatically exaggerated claims of sea level rise, you're not going to see anything that would interfere with say, a specific building lasting for 200 years.
Unfortunately, as you keep pointing out, weather varies a lot more than climate in the short term: so while (say) a 1m sea-level rise might not seem like much, it's going to vastly increase the frequency of catastrophic events -- for instance, your hundred-year floods may now be ten-year floods. To take a more specific example: in Bangladesh, a 1m sea level rise would take out >15% of the country and displace ~20 million people.
You can hardly expect them to publish Spencer's re-rebuttal before the actual rebuttal.
Wasn't that the prima facie reason for the resignation? That Spencer had not considered his own rebuttal before publishing?
I'm afraid this is making less and less sense to me. How could Spencer consider a non-existent rebuttal to an unpublished paper? In his own words, Wagner's reason for resignation was publishing a paper which was "problematic in both aspects" of "fundamental methodological errors or false claims" and "fundamentally flawed".
You stated, "I'm happy that the science is sufficiently settled for action to be warranted now."
Why would action be warranted if it's just AGW, rather than it's bigger and badder cousin CAGW?
Again, you refuse to define your terms, but based on the research I've seen (IPCC AR4 chapters 2 & 3, economic reviews by Stern, Weitzman, and others), mitigating the climate change will be both cheaper and (by various measures) less painful than adapting to it.
Are you really arguing that seasons are *weather*?
Yes; climate's usually taken to encompass a longer term (I believe the World Meteorological Organization goes with 30 years).
What we need to do is monitor temperature across the globe - the actual averaging of that data into a single number is actually a *loss* of important information.
Nobody's suggesting we throw out the raw data! But if you want to argue about the relative effects of global temperature drivers (such as solar irradiance and carbon dioxide concentration) then you have to consider global averages. And it seems to me that you do want to argue about this.
But if, say, you are a planner, it might help you to put infrastructure in a place where it won't be underwater in 200 years...
"For example, over the past 100 years, the rate of sea level rise varies...
You are neglecting the rather crucial point that I'm talking about the next 200 years, whereas you are talking about the previous 100 years. I suspect that our opinions differ as to the likely variation in sea level during the coming centuries, but let's at least try to agree on which time period we're actually discussing.
the warmists seem to have fast tracked a rebuttal without even offering Spencer et. al. a chance to respond to critiques.
He's responded online to online critiques; presumably he will respond in peer-reviewed media to peer-reviewed critiques. You can hardly expect them to publish Spencer's re-rebuttal before the actual rebuttal.
So, I take it you *do* then subscribe to a belief of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Again, you've failed to define it, so I'm afraid I still can't answer that; we'll have to stick at AGW.
Furthermore, there is no clear correlation of CO2 to temp (over the 20 million year time scale)
The very paper you link to argues against the assertion you make! (Although of course the WUWT comments tend to the opposite view.) If you mean "I can't draw a straight line through it" -- no, of course not. Even if CO2 were the only climate forcing, there are all kinds of entertaining feedbacks which can exacerbate the effects. That doesn't mean that it isn't an important forcing.
Let me give an example - we experience large scale climate changes called "seasons".
Sorry, no. That's not climate, that's weather. I live in a temperate climate, for instance; it doesn't turn into a polar climate when the temperature drops below zero for a few days per year.
[a long piece on how climate is not weather]
Thank you, I'm aware of that.
If you truly believe that average global temperature has no relevance, why on earth are we discussing a paper about it?
This paper is about whether or not you can judge CO2 as a forcing or a feedback (and when).
... and to do that, we need to monitor global temperature. And evidently you think that making this judgement is important, or you would surely have better things to do than arguing with me about it.
Would it [a global temperature trend] help someone sail around the Cape of Good Hope?
No, of course not. But if, say, you are a planner, it might help you to put infrastructure in a place where it won't be underwater in 200 years. That's why the IPCC reports come with a "summary for policymakers", not a "summary for sailors".
an argument that the model was too simple is, in general, disingenuous
As I said -- if you want a peer-reviewed rebuttal, you'll have to wait (but not much longer) for it to get through GRL's publication pipeline...
You seem like a reasonable person, and perhaps you've never stated that the "science is settled", but that has been the mainstream argument for a while.
I'm happy that the science is sufficiently settled for action to be warranted now.
To summarize: climate is unknowable to any level of detail important to humanity, and while humans certainly affect their surroundings (as all living beings do), the level of that effect is on the boundary of undetectable.
I'm still not sure that I get your meaning (surely large-scale changes in climate -- i.e. the more knowable ones -- are more important to humanity that small-scale ones?). But I really don't know what makes you so sure we're on the "boundary of undetectable". We're already up to CO2 concentrations not seen for 20 million years -- do you really think that's not going to have an effect?
To clarify: average global temperature has zero relevance for anything experienced by humans - perhaps it is an interesting artificial statistic, but because we are affected by specific distributions of temperatures, not some imaginary average, it provides little functional use.
If you truly believe that average global temperature has no relevance, why on earth are we discussing a paper about it?
(If you are interested in regional-scale effects of global temperature rise, they are dealt with in some detail (976 pages) in Section 2 of the IPCC's fourth assessment report.)
A model without an ocean does seem rather over-simplified to me.
My rejoinder is that a model without clouds does seem rather over-simplified to me as well,
Originally your argument was "nobody has explained what's wrong with this paper"; now it appears to be "all other models are crap so it's OK if this one is crap too". I was arguing against your initial assertion.
... but you never see that kind of critique against models that promise extreme warming trends.
Nonsense. Clouds are a hot research topic now precisely because scientists are aware that they are poorly handled by existing models. IPCC reports represent the best predictions that can be made by current science rather than unattainable perfection; that's why a new one comes out every few years, and that's why the conclusions are labelled with probability levels.
In either case, we are presented with a system that is disturbingly simple no matter how complex we make it - natural climate systems are well beyond the complexity we could simulate
...
I would take it as adequately proven that humans have a vanishingly small impact on global temperature, primarily through the UHI effect, but even with say, contrails from airplanes.
To summarize: climate is unknowable, but fortunately you happen to know that humans have nothing to do with it.
Realclimate is difficult to take seriously - simply asserting that a model is too simple seems a critique
They don't "simply assert" that the model is too simple; they point out that has "no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave". A model without an ocean does seem rather over-simplified to me.
In any case, that's far from being the only issue: "The basic material in the paper has very basic shortcomings because no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results." No error bars and insufficient detail to reproduce? Doesn't sound very much like science.
...that should be heeded by the various climate modelers out there who don't have any sort of realistic cloud modeling at all.
I'll grant you that clouds are not yet fully understood, but the IPCC models do take account of them.
Appeal to unnamed authorities. "Respected climate scientist" is not a title which is required to falsify a hypothesis, or critically examine a scientific proposition.
The authorities were named at the top of the article I linked to; Drs. Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo. I was answering your question as to why "argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs" was sufficient to cause so much trouble for this paper: some of the arguments against it were solid, and they were solid in part because they were constructed by people who had expertise in the relevant field. Not all "arguments on the intarwebs" are created equal.
Speaking of which, how would you concisely state a falsifiable hypothesis of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Perhaps embarrassingly, I'd never come across that term before reading your comment, and (while the general idea is clear) I've been unable to find a solid definition for it -- particularly important since the term "catastrophic" is often used differently in scientific and general contexts. Do you have a definition handy?
By the way, since you appended the "Catastrophic", I take it that you regard the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming (sans "Catastrophic") to be adequately proven?
For all the drama of the editor's resignation letter, he seems to be awfully vague about any actual flaws in the paper.
If you want a peer-reviewed rebuttal you'll have to wait till next week when Andrew Dessler's paper is due to appear in Geophysical Research Letters -- the wheels of peer review grind slowly, which is why blogs tend to get used for more instantaneous responses. If you are happy with a non-peer-reviewed rebuttal by two respected climate scientists go here.
Citing argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs as a reason not to publish it is like asserting that no pro-AGW papers should ever be printed because of wattsupwiththat.com.
The difference here is that Anthony Watts is not only not a respected climate scientist but not in fact a climate scientist at all.
New editions of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are now available, and being purchased by school districts, that remove every instance of the word "nigger" judging young people too imbecilic to differentiate the use of it as a racial slur, and its use in an work of fiction...
Depressing. I note from the list that it will be impossible to write about Moby Dick, but maybe we could produce a censored version called Moby Dong or Moby Schlong which would comply with the word-list.
Idiots.
I'm not sure what is wrong with nokia these days.
Simple answer: Stephen Elop.
RIP Nokia, I'll miss you.
I swear, I've read between 2-3 stories per month for the last 5 years on how someone has revolutionized the process of producing solar cells, at a fraction of the cost it was last week... By this point, I should be able to pick up a 2 by 4 ft. panel from the side of the street by the peaches stands.
Take a look at this graph, from this article about solar price trends. From 1980 to 2009, the cost of photovoltaics decreased by about 85%, from $22/W to below $3/W. As of approximately now, solar is cheaper than nuclear per kWh, and the price decline shows no sign of stopping.
Maybe you should quantify your expectations, then you can check them against future price decreases.
What I'd like to to *only* hear about innovations that are likely to pan out and hit the market
Yes. Also, when reading the racing news, I would like to *only* read about the horses that are going to come in first.
There's a LOT of companies out there who come up with "innovations", make a few nice pictures of their invention (but never a real working prototype), and make a lot of hype so they can get investor money, and then just disappear.
Doubtless. But in this case the development was by a university, not a company, and the story is precisely about the fact that they've built a working prototype.
... and then when they hit the market, the Slashdot discussion will consist of 50 comments along the lines of "This isn't news, this is old tech, I remember reading about this back in 2011"...
Seriously, if you *only* want to hear about innovations once they've hit the market, why are you reading a tech news site? Just browse the Amazon electronics department instead and you'll be safe.
Set a bunch of these loose in the Sahara printing out solar panels.
The Sahara Solar Breeder Foundation is aiming at something rather similar: "Large scale/low cost production of solar-grade silicon from desert sand," on a truly impressive scale. It remains to be seen whether they can find the money and political will to get it on track, though.
He writes: "While I use Facebook and other sites, I always keep local copies of photos or anything else that I share."
OK, human stupidity is boundless, so I'm sure there's someone out there who uploads all their photos to Facebook and then deletes the local copies... but seriously, anyone that stupid is not going to make it three-quarters of the way through that article to read Mr Brockmeier's sage advice.
How in hell this can be definitively attributed to "global warming" is beyond the pale. It's much more likely that the lack of whaling activity would eventually lead to increase in population and hence migration.
It's pretty simple: ice melts, whale swims through water. Whales don't magically gain the ability to teleport just because there's a moratorium on whaling. Whatever the population dynamics, the whale physically requires a channel of water to swim through if it's going to get from one ocean to another. The recently de-iced route through the North-West Passage provided this channel. What's your alternative hypothesis? It swam clear across the Pacific, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and approached the Mediterranean from the South? Possible, but as I'm sure you've seen from reading the original research paper, highly unlikely. Occam's Razor favours a northern route.
Oh, and it's not "definitively attributed"; it's just the most likely scenario.
So they're going back to their old feeding grounds. Nature reclaiming where it was before.
Not exactly: the Atlantic population didn't migrate to the Pacific, it just died out. It doesn't really matter, though. The point of the paper is to demonstrate that species are now able to traverse the North-West Passage due to the lack of ice, with possible consequences for the Pacific and Atlantic ecosystems. There isn't really a "whales should be here" / "whales shouldn't be here" aspect to it, it's just analysing what actually happened.
The article's claim that they returned as a result of higher temperatures isn't very well supported (it certainly doesn't provide any citations).
Here you go. Scheinin, A. P. et al. (2011) Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) in the Mediterranean Sea: anomalous event or early sign of climate-driven distribution change? Marine Biodiversity Records, 4: e28. (Spoiler: they reckon it's probably climate-driven distribution change.)
I am baffled as to why Slashdot insists on linking to the shittiest, vaguest intermediary sites for any scientific research, but I find that 30 seconds with Google usually turns up the relevant paper.
Clearly, if the Gray whales migrated back in the 1800's to the northern Atlantic. And they're "just now" doing it again. Then our global temperatures have really just become on par with the 1800's again.
Grey Whales didn't "migrate" to the North Atlantic in the 1800s; there was a pre-existing native population there which died out in the 18th century (probably due to whaling). Reference here. Temperature didn't have anything to do with it.
Hmm...food for thought rather than hysteria.
I didn't see any hysteria in the article.
TFA states:
The (re)introduction of a species into any ecosystem is a potentially disruptive phenomenon.
I don't think any ecologist would disagree with that. Somehow you got from that to
can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Where did you find that? I can't see it anywhere in the article.
I like the details on materials for the parabolic reflectors: "Reflective surface materials included chicken wire, woven stainless steel mesh and window screen." -- now *that's* what I call a mesh network!
Oh good, I see we've got today's mandatory link to Michael Cooney's Layer 8 blog at NetworkWorld, the convenient middleman between Slashdot and news. This time he hasn't even bothered linking to the actual press release he's regurgitating, as far as I can tell. Still, more hits for NetworkWorld, that's what matters.
Anyone know if he's done a post on Bitcoin yet?
This pithy and insightful summary should be appended to every Shitcoin slashvertisement.
It would be a perfect place to keep your Bitcoin wallet. You could carry it around in your pocket to keep your bitcoins safe from hackers.
In fact, I'm surprised the summary didn't read something like Potential Bitcoin wallet goes wireless. In Bitcoin news today, Bitcoin experts said that Bitcoin uptake of Bitcoins could increase with the addition of Bitcoin wireless to a device which might, potentially, at some point, be used to store Bitcoins. Asked to comment on the development, a Bitcoin-using Bitcoin promoter replied "Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin. And furthermore, Bitcoin."