Wolfhnd

What the I.P.C.C. recommendations are has been beat to death and as you say is not really on topic. What I guessed the topic to be was what the legal consequences of AGW might be. I admit I wasn't sufficiently careful of the social dynamic of the internet when reading the original post and ignored the attempt at sarcasm if that is what it was. I have a few links that deal with legal issues below. Climate change adaptation Guided by the Law A report on the Changing Winds: Climate Change & the Law workshops held in Suva, Fiji and Apia, Samoa, August 2013 https://files.dlapiper.com/files/Uploads/Documents/climate-change-adaptation-guided-by-the-law.pdf Liability and Redress for Human-Induced Global Warming "mitigation, adaptation measures have to be taken. Regardless of the adaptation measures taken, damages will occur. It is thus necessary to provide a framework for allocating responsibility for damage that has and will occur. The United Nations Framework Convention on Clamate Change (Climate Change Convention) does not mention the need for a liability regime. However a cmprehesive and effective international legal regime concerning global warming needs to include liability rules. " http://www.ielrc.org/content/a0701.pdf

Nice reply. I really wasn't trying to make a political point, I'm more interested in unintended consequences. You could argue that AGW over shadows other political and social issues but I would think everyone would agree that the policy decisions are not as simple as stop using fossil fuels.

Climate change lawsuits filed against some 200 US communities "Farmers Insurance filed class action lawsuit last month against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area for failing to prepare for flooding. The suits argue towns should have known climate change would produce more flooding." http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0517/Climate-change-lawsuits-filed-against-some-200-US-communities Lawsuits are just one of the unintended consequences of the current political atmosphere. The irony is that in this case it is not a social activist or environmental group doing the suing but a cooperation.

I didn't say it wasn't a fact. There is a huge difference between accepting AGW and predicting the consequences. Even if you accept that the models are highly accurate, which I would think scientists would be leary of doing, it's meaningless without knowing the background temperature which is proving difficult to predict. My point was simply that policy based on the current information assumes that the background temperature will be nearly constant and no science only history is needed to falsify that. For reasons I cannot explain historians and political scientist seem to be marginalized in the debate. Why the historical political and social upheaval caused by natural climate change is not part of the discussion eludes me. We know with some degree of certainty that cooling has been the cause of considerable human misery. For the most part these events are hard to see in the data due to resolution. Since climate change is a topic of interest these days surely it would be wise to consider short term as well as long term changes when discussing policy. To consider short term weather conditions on the order of months or a year doesn't require any scientific consensus because their consequences are in the historical record.

When it comes to AGW there is plenty to be skeptical about. The models and the background temperature AGW is plotted on to name two. Ocean acidification and sea level rise are less contentious for me personally but they too need additional study. Assuming that all the issues are settled is giving climatology too much credit and seems a bit like faith not evidence.

Many people feel that faith based systems are undesirable. It's not just a question of religion vs science but of ideologies of all descriptions that are based on faith. Faith basically mean believing in something you cannot prove to be reliable. Science is a system based on evidence and many non scientific endeavors are labeled as science for example political science. Whether or not you believe some field is a science depends on how rigorous your standards for evidence are. I would argue that there is a danger in setting the standard too high. Many people in the 21st century have set their standards for evidence high enough that religion cannot be part of their personal belief system. The success of hard science at answering fundamental questions has certainly played a part in this trend toward the rejection of religion. As I hinted at earlier though the problem is what you consider science to be. If it is simply any evidence based belief system then we probably can get along well without religion or philosophy. Philosophy is however a little tricker as it is not as well defined as religion. Some scientist would like to reduce human to machines incapable of free will or meaningful morality. As Daniel Dennett has pointed out their position is a bit premature. The practical aspects of free will and morality have not been killed off by science. We are moral agents as are all social animals and our membership in a "society" insures that we will always have behavioral flexibility sufficient to insure that the exercise of free will has consequences.

It may seem like pointing out the obvious but the answer to the original post is that police in the U.S. are armed. 5 countries where police officers do not carry firearms — and it works well http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/18/5-countries-where-police-officers-do-not-carry-firearms-and-it-works-well/ Firearms give people a false sense of security and escalate confrontations. 59 police officers were killed last year last year in the U.S. compared to the one or two a year who are killed in the UK. I would argue that by putting themselves at risk U.S. police officers significantly increase the risk of not only being shot themselves but of shooting suspects. It's not just the presence of weapons but the psychology that effect the rate of shootings. We have created a culture where first responders must be aggressive by demanding they always take immediate action when other more considered responses may be appropriate. Overconfidence is fueled by the demand for aggressive immediate action. It is this overconfidence on the part of the police culture in general that leads to many of their failures including the war on drugs. The gap between what can be done and what is demanded significantly interferes with practical solutions. ​I'm not suggesting we disarm the police in the U.S. but only that we take a look at the psychology behind policing and offer more support to our police forces in terms of better training and equipment.

There are so many tangents in this thread it is hard to know where to start. While the number of people killed in the US by firearms is tragic I think we need some perspective. The U.S. is indeed a violent country but according to the U.N. there are 110 countries with a higher murder rate. Some of which such as North Korea have strict gun control. No amount of gun control guarantees a reduction in the murder rate and prohibition proved that prohibitive laws can even backfire making criminality more prevalent not less. Here are some numbers from the CDC All unintentional injury deaths Number of deaths: 130,557 Deaths per 100,000 population: 41.3 Cause of death rank: 4 Unintentional fall deaths Number of deaths: 30,208 Deaths per 100,000 population: 9.6 Motor vehicle traffic deaths Number of deaths: 33,804 Deaths per 100,000 population: 10.7 Unintentional poisoning deaths Number of deaths: 38,851 Deaths per 100,000 population: 12.3 All suicides Number of deaths: 41,149 Deaths per 100,000 population: 13.0 Cause of death rank: 10 All homicides Number of deaths: 16,121 Deaths per 100,000 population: 5.1 Firearm homicides Number of deaths: 11,208 Deaths per 100,000 population: 3.5 If we compare the homicide rate in the US to Australia's overall murder rate as listed below we can see that it is 4 times higher in the US. "Over the past 18 years (1 July 1989 to 30 June 2007), the rate* of homicide incidents decreased from 1.9 in 1990-91 and 1992-93 to the second-lowest recorded rate, of 1.3, in 2006-07. *rate per 100,000 population." There are many cultural reasons why the US is more violent than other countries in addition to gun ownership. Racial inequality, poverty, and a mystique that extends the virtues of self reliance to criminals are all potential explanations. Any forecasted reduction in homicides would have to take these factors into consideration. Assuming however that strict gun control as implemented in Australia were introduced in the US and there were no other factors involved and the homicide rate was reduce at the same rate it would reduce the homicide rate by 5000 deaths. Of course that is an optimistic number but even so that would reduce the preventable death rate by 3 percent. No one would argue that 3 percent reduction in preventable deaths is not a worthy goal but if the same legislative attention were applied to all other area the reduction could save 41,000 lives. I would not argue that gun legislation is not important but only that the numbers tell us that it should not be the highest safety issue before congress. The idea that gun control is the only easy fix for the preventable death problem is misleading at best and distorts most discussions on the subject. The assumption that guns can even be controlled in the U.S. is worthy of debate considering the miserable failure of the war on drugs. One of the other ideas floating around in this thread strikes me as naive. The idea that the U.S. military is somehow going to suppress the gun owning population is absurd. One only needs to look at the Vietnam War, the defeat of Russia in Afghanistan, Irish resistance to English rule and numerous other examples to demonstrate that the relative strength of a Military compared to their adversaries does not insure victory. It is also worth noting that most of the military officers I know are as hostile to "big government" as your average tea party member. A sizable percentage of the U.S. military would simple refuse to participate in a suppression of a popular uprising. If you look at the reaction of the Russian military to the overthrow of the soviet government you get a picture of how unreliable militaries are a suppressing popular uprisings. There may be reasons why the 2nd amendment is outdated but it has nothing to do with the strength of the U.S. military.

When I think of conformity to social standards I always think of the hippies. It seems that not conforming to the "establishments" standards quickly became a standard of it's own. Dress, language, habits, and politics were remarkably standardized in the hippie culture. The scientific community is no different than any other tribe, with a hierarchy of individuals who set the rules and those that must conform or be shunned. As was the case with the hippies the creed of intellectual freedom is much overstated. I'm sure all of you have heard of the parliament of genes but it is a democracy that favors high fidelity replication. As with genes mutations in the science culture will most often be undesirable it's a question of the right balance between fidelity and novelty.

Thanks for replying. If you have time and the interest I would love to hear more about your experiences.

The degree or kind debate goes on . Chimps prefer roasted potatoes, hinting at origins of cooking "The animals frequently carried raw food across a room to cooking devices. Some chimps even saved food for later cooking opportunities. Mental abilities such as causal reasoning, self-control and planning enabled these behaviors in chimps, as in humans, the scientists contend." https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/chimps-prefer-roasted-potatoes-hinting-origins-cooking?tgt=nr The authors use of the terms causal reasoning, self-control and planning is sure to raise the hackles of many a philosopher and scientist. The question of how unique human consciousness is remains an important question. What do you think? I tend to think that language is a cognitive tool making culture an unavoidable barrier to human like consciousness in non human animals.

What original caught my attention was how necessarily speculative these type of theories are. Scientific speculation is not only healthy it is an essential part of the art of discovery. It becomes a question of motivation. If scientists speculate out of natural curiosity that is acceptable but I think that there is a tendency to speculate as an appeal for acceptance by the audience. The desire to be interesting to others is a natural part of our social predispositions. I think we need to stop censoring "idle" curiosity to remove the temptation to present it disguised as theory.

As always a very well thought out reply. CharonY Here is an article with more depth. Human speech and birdsong: Communication and the social brain http://www.pnas.org/content/100/17/9645.full I was brief in the OP because these ideas are constantly popping up and there isn't time to cover them all. I suppose the genus is not in coming up with plausible theories but in testing them.

This is not the kind of reply I had hoped for because it places a burden on me to explain cultural evolution. The idea that language was created with purpose is as silly as saying that the cells in your body know what their purpose is. Our cells go about their business absolutely ignorant of purpose. How does a cell know what it's purpose is if it has no consciousness? Yet all the individual cells in our brain self organize without purpose in an evolutionary process to allow for what we call consciousness. Children learn to speak before they know what the words they are speaking mean. Do the words children use have purpose? Does a child point at a cat and speak the word cat for some purpose? It's not until a fluent individual provides the appropriate feed back that the association becomes fixed. More importantly to the discussion at hand why does soft humming or a lullabye calm an infant? It's not speech but it is certainly vocal communication. The child does not understand the purpose nor does the parent understand what is being communicated both just respond to stimuli. Words are memes and they are selected for in the cultural environment. There are words that are created by intelligent design but often they are not selected for and fall out of usage. The kind of hocus pocus that sophisticated philosophy uses to say words are not memes is a kind of self delusion. The human mind looks for agency in everything the same way a deer jumps at the sound of a falling branch. The natural assumption that language was "created" with purpose is not evident any more than there is a predator behind every falling branch. We are simple wired to think that way. This is often referred to as the Darwinian inversion of reason. We see purpose in the world around us because we "feel" motive in our thought process and project it onto the world. The rationale exists not in the world but in the observer. Culture is the latest expression of an evolutionary continuum. Language is just one of many adaptive tools that have evolved over time. The different between genes and memes is that memes are not confined by physical existence. Just as we have domesticated animals over time we have domesticated language. It may be a bit confusing to see but it is still evolution by selection not "natural" selection but not entirely conscious either.

I was watch a documentary recently on human evolution and one of the scientist proposed that speech was likely a product of sexual selection. His theory rest on the idea that the utility of speech for activities like cooperative hunting seem dubious in it's early stages. He went on to explain that human speech more closely resembles bird song than the sounds animals make in cooperative defense or predation. By extension the suggestion is that music or rhythmic vocalizations precede coherent sentence structure. The utility then becomes attracting mates, soothing infants, and reducing aggression.

"A new paper by Stephen Rose of George Washington University that was picked up by the New York Times created a stir by claiming that inequality fell after the crisis. While the crisis proper did hit the well-off hard, and past accounts allow for that, a large range of analyses had found that income and wealth inequality rose after the crisis. That mean the Rose paper was potentially important, and even if not, it was useful to those who’d like to claim that the new normal is benign, even virtuous, so it has gotten quite a bit of attention." http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/debunking-claim-inequality-fell-crisis.html This seems to be a topic of increasing interests so I thought I would share this article.

Let me start by saying this has all been endlessly debated before and I can add very little to that debate. Here are two examples of opposite opinions from people that can add to the debate. Steven Weinberg: “Against Philosophy” "Physicists get so much help from subjective and often vague aesthetic judgments that it might be expected that we would be helped also by philosophy, out of which after all our science evolved. Can philosophy give us any guidance toward a final theory? The value today of philosophy to physics seems to me to be something like the value of early nation-states to their peoples. It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the introduction of the post office, the chief service of nation-states was to protect their peoples from other nation-states. The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers." http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/vladi/phys216/Weinberg_Against_philosophy.doc Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy "The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples. To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words. Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing." http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy/ So we know what the physicists and philosophers have to say to each other but how about the other sciences such as biology?

"Attempts to exempt speculative theories of the Universe from experimental verification undermine science, argue George Ellis and Joe Silk." Is this what you are talking about cladking? Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535 I have given this a little thought and the thing that came to mind was the cold fusion debacle. Good theory and good experiments kind of go hand in hand. The question really comes down to what is proof and when is a theory sufficiently supported. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Steven Weinberg and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well know physicists that have recently publicly dismissed the importance of philosophy. What they are saying is that purely mathematical theories can trap you in the "fly bottle". Then again Hawking co-authored the "Top-Down Cosmology" paper which seems a lot like philosophy. Then we have Wolfram saying "But what I suspect is that from the experimental results we have, we already know much more than enough to determine what the correct ultimate theory is—assuming that the theory is indeed simple. It won’t be the case that the theory will get the number of dimensions of space and the muon-electron mass ratio right, but will get the Higgs mass or some as-yet-undiscovered detail wrong. Now of course it could be that something new will be discovered that makes it more obvious what the ultimate theory might look like. But my guess is that we don’t fundamentally need more experimental discoveries; we just need to spend more effort and be better at searching for the ultimate theory based on what we already know." The debate about how much experimentation is needed will never end nor will the debate about ungrounded theories. A mathematical model however is just that a model and not the thing itself. I don't think that anyone confuses the model with "reality" whatever that is. It's a trivial point to make that math is just a tool. Like all good tools the question will always be if it is being applied properly.

Creationist aside it's still an interesting article

Right-handed Amino Acids Help Bacteria Adapt "In the overwhelmingly left-handed world of amino acids, the right-handed versions of a few such molecules act as signals that spur bacteria to adapt to changing conditions." http://www.hhmi.org/news/right-handed-amino-acids-help-bacteria-adapt

Oh sorry I was going to make a reply and got distracted.

"fleQ appears to be the highest-level activator in the hierarchical regulatory cascade involved in the flagellar biogenesis pathway. It is essential for flagellar motility as an fleQ mutant does not assemble a flagellum nor does it synthesize detectable amounts of flagellin."

Does it strain credulity to assert that the necessary two mutations, which repurpose a distantly related protein, occur predictably in each independent strain? That's one heck of a coincidence. Lucky flagellates. This is highly controversial. See "Arguments against a mutator phenotype" in this paper Do mutator mutations fuel tumorigenesis? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987827/. I have seen experiments that suggest normal mutation and selection can account for variable mutation rates. However there does seem to be an unexpectedly low lethal mutagenesis. Evolution at a High Imposed Mutation Rate: Adaptation Obscures the Load in Phage T7 http://www.genetics.org/content/184/1/221.abstract I think the answer to your question is no one knows for sure.

Most get repaired so it's not alarming and it could be that it was simply wrong or I misread it. I suppose the more interesting figure is covered in this article. Human mutation rate revealed "Every time human DNA is passed from one generation to the next it accumulates 100–200 new mutations, according to a DNA-sequencing analysis of the Y chromosome." http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090827/full/news.2009.864.html Here is an article on Rates of Spontaneous Mutation http://www.genetics.org/content/148/4/1667.full

I read that human cells on average have between 500 and 1000 mutations per day. Does anyone know the guess at what the mutation rate for Bacteria is?