Cap'n Refsmmat

Have you gotten out when visiting any other pages? For example, you click to edit a post after a few minutes away, and you come back logged out? Have you noticed problems when, say, adding a category while editing a post?

No, you've misapplied swansont's argument. You don't seem to understand what we're saying. We are not arguing against making a correction or adjustment to data when it is shown that one is necessary. We are arguing that if you correct/adjust one piece of data, but do not adjust the other, you will get the wrong answer when you compare the two. Polish your apples all you want, but don't go comparing them to oranges.

There should now be an icon visible when you bookmark either the mobile version or the regular site.

Hope this gets fixed in the future version -- the rich text editor can be handy. If you're going to give up your iPhone and iPad, I wouldn't mind if you sent them along. I could use the help.

It's simple. The goal of Knappenberger's article -- and your purpose in this thread, according to the quote in the OP -- is to account for much of the warming trend with causes other than man-made GHGs. For example, if giant space mirrors were burning the Earth with focused sunlight, that clearly wouldn't be a manmade problem. (Unless we did something to piss off the aliens.) Now, suppose we're focusing on warming from 1950-the present. Suppose the temperature in 1950 was depressed due to non-anthropogenic forcings. For example, suppose aliens spent all of 1950 lobbing gigantic chunks of ice into the Atlantic ocean. If we wish to determine anthropogenic climate change over Earth's history, we must account for non-anthropogenic forcings. If we account for non-anthropogenic forcings and determine that the temperature in 1950 would have been cooler, the anthropogenic warming since then would be larger. Likewise, if we account for non-anthropogenic forcings and determine that the temperature in 2010 would have been cooling, the anthropogenic warming must have been smaller than previously expected. My objection applies regardless of whether water vapor is a feedback of GHGs, global mean surface temperature, or the average penguin density in North American zoos. It is not I that suggest that there may be other feedback mechanisms, it is Solomon: I am simply pointing out what Solomon pointed out. Perhaps you should contact Solomon.

This is a known bug: http://community.invisionpower.com/index.php?app=tracker&showissue=24561 If you don't mind typing in BBCode, you can go to your settings and uncheck "Enable visual (RTE) editor?" and it should work.

You could post the SHA-1 hash of your sequence somewhere, so people know you had the exact sequence but they don't know what it is.

There could have been zero net change, but there also may not have been. Knappenberger uses the data to make conclusions about warming from 1950 to the present, so what was happening in 1950 is clearly relevant; with unknown effects on the 1950 data, there is a large margin of error on Knappenberger's conclusions about warming from 1950-present. It is possible that the GHG warming from 1950-present is greater than Knappenberger estimates, or less than. With no data, we simply do not know. It is silly to pretend otherwise. No, I do not agree with this. Solomon's paper points out that the effect of water vapor appears to have reversed in relation to global surface temperatures, implying a complex relationship involving outside factors. There would not necessarily be a simple cause/effect relationship between GHGs and water vapor, and one could not expect to draw a simple graph and see immediate correlation. Again, from Solomon: The computations Solomon makes of the effects of water vapor are "diagnostic" and assume it is a forcing, whereas it may also be a feedback or other combination of factors.

Since Knappenberger is accounting for warming from 1950 to the present... supposing water vapor conditions in 1950 were such that Earth was much warmer than it would have been with only GHGs? This would imply that the warming purely due to GHGs is much larger than expected, rather than smaller. This is why it's unwise to reach any conclusions based on data from only the past few decades. (Also, the "correction" I speak of is "correcting" the total warming due to GHGs) Also, of course: If water vapor change is a feedback to global climate change, it is caused by whatever drives global climate change -- such as GHGs. So the water vapor effects may merely be an extension of the GHG effects. We simply do not yet know.

Couldn't the universe be infinite, thus needing no beginning?

Six days does not constitute necromancing.

I didn't suggest there was a GHG connection. Thanks for pointing at the right figure 3; I was mixed up. However, I see an issue. Knappenberger is comparing 1950 to 2009; the 2009 figure has been corrected for atmospheric water vapor, whereas the 1950 figure has not been. If the water vapor fluctuations are a decadal variation as Solomon suggests -- and limited data means we cannot draw a valid conclusion about that -- it's possible that the "corrected" 1950 would be warmer or cooler than the value in the chart. Comparing uncorrected data to corrected data is apples and oranges; I wouldn't trust the numbers to be very accurate one way or the other. I'm not saying you're wrong -- perhaps water vapor changes have accounted for some of the warming since 1950. But since we have good data for only a third of that time period, we can only speak of the trend over that last third, rather than the trend over the entire period. Particularly if it appears the data may fluctuate on short scales, and that the effect can reverse, as the authors suggested. So: water vapor is an issue that needs research. But I wouldn't jump to any conclusions yet. (Also, how did Knappenberger arrive at 15%? I don't see a specific calculation in Solomon's paper.)

I think the greater act of hubris is to assume one has successfully solved every scientific question. That claim was made in the late 1800s ("we've nearly finished everything in physics!") and it hasn't turned out so well.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I see this in the paper. Here's what I see in the discussion about figure 3: The paper supports the idea that stratospheric water vapor was increasing until the year 2000; however, it has since declined, resulting in increased warming. The paper also points out that the pre-1990 dataset was based off of balloon measurements in Colorado, and does not necessarily represent a global mean. Finally, the authors caution against using their work to make evaluations of global climate change: I'm not sure if this work represents a demonstration of altered global rates of climate change or merely shorter-term variability, as the authors state. Certainly it's something that should be paid closer attention to in future research.

I made a change or two, and I cannot reproduce this problem. I don't know if that means it's fixed or not. If you experience it agan, give me as much detail as you can: how long ago you visited the forum, what you were doing on your blog, and so on.

If you're using SFN Blue, that should be fixed now, unless there's another lurking Internet Explorer bug...

He must have copied and pasted something into the WYSIWYG editor. The line spacing comes from subscripts and superscripts. Gah. View New Content appears to be very fickle.

Ah, good. So here's what happened: I adjusted the layout of posts, moving the user title down below the avatar and re-aligning the post username. However, since everything was "floated" to the left or right in the blue bar, browsers thought the bar had no actual content -- they doesn't count floats toward content. I didn't notice this because staff have an IP listing in each post, which counted to make the bar have content. To fix this, I added an invisible empty box that still took up space, which forced the blue bar to be big enough to fit usernames. Unfortunately, on Internet Explorer this invisible empty box forced everything else down and out of the blue bar, screwing up post layout. Moral of the story: Internet Explorer is evil.

Force refresh and see if it gets better? (Ctrl-F5 for Windows, Cmd-R for Mac.) Also, user agent? http://whatsmyuseragent.com/

Good. I think I've fixed the Internet Explorer problems as well. Let me know if other issues pop up.

When I get back I'm going to fire up my Windows laptop and run some tests. edit: wait, no difference under SFN Blue? Are you certain? I can see that the user titles ("Mr Wizard" and such) are hard to see, but I don't see why the name or date would be messed up...

Ah. Yes, that should be back to normal now that I've switched back. I'm not sure if I set up searching incorrectly or if the software has a bug. I'll have to experiment. Have you been able to get posts from the last 24 hours or so correctly, or is it still messing up?

There is also "Today's active content" on the front page. I'll check on the blogs. I'm going to be out of town today, but perhaps tomorrow I'll get around to things. Also, at what point did your View New Content break? I had temporarily switched to a different search system to see if it was better on Friday evening, but reverted Saturday because it broke View New Content for me.

By your phrasing, you imply that the imported active information from the "designer" contains information on how to solve the problem. This is not so. The imported information is the fitness function, which specifies the optimal goal of the algorithm. How the genetic algorithm reaches this goal, and the mechanisms developed through random mutation, are up to random chance. The solution information, such as the specific arrangement of chemicals to complete a certain reaction, is indeed generated by the genetic algorithm. The problem-specific information is the fitness function that evaluates the arrangements of chemicals as they converge on an ideal. In short, the randomness of the genetic algorithm is responsible for generating the solution, while the fitness function is responsible for defining what solutions are acceptable. But in the end, yes, genetic algorithms require fitness functions to be defined for them to succeed. This is not a surprise. With a defined fitness function, genetic algorithms are indeed examples of what you requested: "random processes generating functional digital code." The implied question is whether completely natural, non-designed processes can replicate this success and generate information. Natural selection is a specific case of a genetic algorithm, so it is useful as an example. "Absence of a target" is misleading. Natural selection defines targets -- reproductive success, for a start -- which can be met. These targets can be broken down into simpler, more specific targets, such as "metabolizing sugar" or "breathing oxygen" and so on. Now, natural selection is at a disadvantage compared to most genetic algorithms: its fitness function is comparatively complex, situation-dependent, and unpredictable. However, recall the advantages I also pointed out, such as parallel development and gene transfer through breeding. Dembski and others have not yet demonstrated that a fitness function such as those defined by natural selection cannot succeed in the same way that those in a simpler genetic algorithm can. (The characteristics required of fitness functions, such as problem-specific information about what will or will not succeed, seem to be met. Natural selection kills what will not succeed by definition.) They also have not demonstrated that a natural system sharing the characteristics of an intelligently designed fitness function -- like natural selection -- cannot behave in the same way as a designed function. In other words, is the problem-specific information necessarily defined? Can "knowledge" of the solution arise simply from "whatever isn't a solution dies naturally"?

Dembski's paper you cited states that genetic algorithms work faster than a blind search to achieve optimization against a given fitness function. "When subjected to rounds of selection and variation, the [naturally selected] agents can demonstrate remarkable success at resolving the problem in question." On the other hand, Dembski cites other work as showing that search algorithms cannot generate new information "without problem-specific information about the search." This is unsurprising. The problem-specific information in genetic algorithms is the fitness function, which "knows" about the desired result. With this information, genetic algorithms can create information, according to Dembski's paper. Several examples are given of genetic algorithms that search faster than a "blind" search. Again, do you have any evidence that natural selection functions differently, and cannot generate new information where a genetic algorithm can? Or that natural selection's fitness functions are somehow invalid, or incorrect, or unusable?