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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change published their Fourth Assessment Report today. The report implicates anthropogenic CO2 emissions in its strongest language ever as being primarily responsible for the majority of average temperature increases in the past half century. The report largely provides refinements over previous assessment reports, narrowing the expected minimum and maximum ranges for various predictions with the most likely possibilities increasing across the board (with an expected sea level increase of a half meter over the next 50 years, compared to .2m in the IPCC TAR) It was authored by thousands of scientists in more than a hundred countries with thousands more peer reviewing their work. It provides the definitive scientific resource on climate change. Or so you would think! Apparently a US right-wing think tank, funded largely by ExxonMobil, is offering a $10,000 bounty to scientists willing to dispute the report: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070202/pl_afp/unclimateusdeny_070202142458 Does anyone else find this sort of thing sickening? No wonder so many are confused about how well understood the physical science behind climate change actually is.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published the first part of their Fourth Assessment Report, titled "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change" http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/index.html To summarize the first volume in a single sentence: Some quick stats: 2500+ peer reviewers 800+ contributing authors 450+ lead authors from 130+ countries 6 years of work The NAS conclusions from the TAR were: http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf (Edit: Post #3000! I'm officially a Scientist! Yay!)

The issue isn't so much that of arable land as having enough fresh water to grow the food you need, enough fresh water to drink, and enough fresh water to make the products that the societal infrastructure depends on. And at least for now, a reduction in the size of our fresh water supply is predicted, while demand for fresh water is predicted to increase.

I don't think even the most pessimistic of climate scientists thinks climate change will bring about the apocalypse, but it will have a negative effect on the lives of billions of people worldwide. Something doesn't have to be experimental to be predictive. The scientific method is about making successful predictions, namely those which can be described mathematically. That's not to say that there isn't an experimental basis for much of climate science, but clearly when you're trying to describe the operation of the global climate system short of creating your own earth to experiment on there's no way to test your hypotheses experimentally. But creating their own earth to experiment on is exactly what climate scientists have done, but rather than make it out of matter, they've built it inside of a computer. Dozens of such computer reconstructions of the global climate system (called general circulation models, or GCMs) have been independently created around the world and refined over the years. Now, they're giving very similar answers. Impacts and vulnerabilities are still being researched. They aren't understood nearly as well as the climate system itself. The main vulnerability climate scientists are concerned with is water. Fresh water will become increasingly scarce, and the population will continue to grow. The big worry is that there won't be enough water to go around, at least in many areas of the world. Depends where you live. You can look at it the same way King of the Hill's Dale looked at it: we can grow oranges in Alaska. But you can also look at it like Hank: if you live in Texas, you probably think it's hot enough already.

There's a state law against making a hoax device designed to instill panic. Which is probably the reason why both government officials and media continue to refer to the devices as a "hoax". It's from the wording of the law. The government failed to exercise common sense to the tune of $750,000, and now they want someone to pay for their stupidity.

Let me give you some better terms to work with here. There's a distinction that needs to be made. Sea ice floats on top of water. Like ice cubes in a glass, sea ice displaces as much water as it weighs, and for that reason when it melts the water level remains unchanged. So you are correct in your suspicion that melting polar sea ice will not alter the water level. Glaciers and ice sheets do not float on water. They sit on top of land. There are glaciers all over the world, and large ice sheets covering most of Greenland and Antarctica, like other people have mentioned. When glaciers and ice sheets melt, the water from them either flows into the ocean directly or evaporates and precipitates before flowing into the ocean. Either way, short of freezing again on top of land somewhere else, it's going to go into the ocean. The polar ice caps are made up of both sea ice and ice sheets. So long story short: polar sea ice is not a concern in terms of water level, but polar ice sheets are. That's not to say that sea ice isn't a concern in terms of global warming. One important property of sea ice is that it's highly reflective, having a reflectivity (known as an albedo) of about 90%. That's to say, 90% of the light hitting the ice bounces right back out into space. When sea ice melts and changes into ocean water, it becomes dark and thus highly absorbant. Rather than reflecting 90% of the light that hits it back into space, it absorbs 90% of the light. That light is retained by the water as heat. This increases the heat in the region, and helps cause nearby sea ice to melt and turn into light absorbing ocean water. This process is known as a feedback loop, because it feeds on itself.

The emergent behavior of large businesses, particularly large corporations where people like CEOs are not only absolved of moral responsibility due to the distribution of decision making among multiple parties, but may be morally motivated to make changes but incapible of doing so because such changes are shot down by the board (whose emergent behavior is inevitably to focus on the bottom line) follows the emergent principles of selfish gene theory. While I adamantly disagree with Sumner's assertion that the social classes owe each other nothing, his Darwinian take on capitalism provides an excellent platform for finding similarities between biological systems and economic ones (Dawkins mentioned this in the Selfish Gene as well) I wish Dawkins would've gone more into the application of selfish gene theory to corporations, but it's quite clear that short of a highly charismatic CEO who can sway the board to focus on things other than the bottom line, a corporation will just as inevitably underpay its workers as populations will grow ahead of the food supply. One of the great things about being conscious, moral beings is that we don't have to let natural tendencies be our better. We can legislate a minimum wage because we see the consequences of not having one as being socially undesireable (people working full time yet being paid below the poverty line, and having to sacrifice various essential goods/services in order to stay solvent)

(Like my new avatar? ) It was awesome seeing Ignignokt's visage on CNN, flipping off the entire country, and having them report on it with absolutely no idea what the image was or what it represented. A symbol which is instantly recognizable to a particular subculture confused and dumbfounded the public, DHS, and the media. At one point I saw a DHS spokesperson saying the devices were "probably" a bomb, after admitting he had not yet seen one himself. Had I not been a fan of ATHF (in the past, can't say I've really watched it lately) and the Mooninites in particular, my take on the story may be different. I've seen an awful lot of reporting about how this event was a "hoax" (ostensibly a bomb hoax). However, I don't think any connection between "cardboard covered with LEDs, D-cell batteries, and wires" and "bomb" was ever made by those who perpetrated the event. The connection was made by the media and DHS, and even after the gross stupidity of both agencies was revealed the word "hoax" was still used to describe the event (possibly because the media were too stubborn to admit their bumbling incompetence). Publicity stunt, yes. Hoax? Only if you fooled yourself. I greatly enjoyed the reaction of the marketing team involved in the stunt during their press conference following their initial court date. They realized the whole event was a bumbling media farce and responded to the media in kind. It was brilliant. If this event proves anything, it's that the terrorists have won: The public is terrified. I've heard several people trying to justify the three quarters of a million dollar reaction to the event as how we should be behaving status post-9/11, ignoring the fact that the devices no more resembled a bomb than, say, a neon sign or LED marquee. Were someone to call in a bomb threat on a neon sign, we'd call them a nut. When they call it in on a piece of cardboard with LEDs and D-cells attached, we call it a necessary part of the post-9/11 mentality. I'm not alone in this assertion. Here's how local law enforcement responded to them in Seattle: http://www.eatenbygod.net/Mooninites.jpg

vB's memcached implementation seems awfully gimped You think it'd just fall back on working without it if it couldn't connect

http://www.fdlreporter.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070130/FON0101/70130043/1985 Will this pass? If it does, will it work?

I've seen very little computer science talk in that forum. Maybe 1% of the total posts...

Yep. Or various Unix-based OSes vs. Linux

It was a better, proprietary system. VHS was an open, multivendor standard.

The thread was attempting to argue that global dimming may mitigate global warming, which is not the case (given the current situation) Filling the air with reflective aerosols has been suggested as an approach to global warming mitigation.

You're talking about global dimming. This is the result of various reflective aerosols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming Climate change attribution has been researched heavily. The latest research shows carbon dioxide having a significantly greater effect than dimming due to reflective aerosols: Your friend was guessing. Science says otherwise. Notice the volcanic and sulfate forcings (both of which contribute to global dimming) have a negative temperature anomaly. Also notice that the effect of carbon dioxide is substantially greater than either of these forcings.

What I suppose I'm confused on is if these are tests I've been hearing about for supersymmetry or whether these tests can falsify string theory without falsifying supersymmetry?

This is the best breakdown I've ever seen: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S62J0EQ9mVa6O_kEoi71E2-

http://cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/January/jan23_stringtheory.shtml Thoughts? (I can't find a link to their actual paper, that would be much appreciated, even if I'm too dumb to understand it)

Yes this is quite clearly a free speech issue and one of the areas where the PC crowd wants to whittle away our free speech rights

I think Courtney Love paid someone to murder Kurt Cobain, and has been pulling strings with her friends to cover up the fact for over a decade

I've heard Dawkins use it, but that's only to get across the idea of what a scientific theory actually means to people who seem to confuse the idea of theory with hypothesis. Testable predictions should give a real-world result. That's where empiricism comes in.

Charisma

Apparently you missed the part where the thread is about how they're not going to have investigations, much less impeachment proceedings

President Pelosi?

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/23/cheney-libby-trial/ Looks like "Scooter" Libby destroyed evidence prior to testifying. According to a new report Cheney is "deeply involved" in the Valerie Plame scandal