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Comment Re:Quantity, not quality, is often prioritised. (Score 1) 453

Whether the conclusions of those are true or false is not something that hiring committees will delve into too much

Rightly so. False conclusions are good for science, as long as they're honest. The pursuit for something new will eventually lead to the correct answer.

It's good that the protagonist of the article (Schooler) recognizes and admits the problem.

The people above who are focussing on pharma are missing the point, which is also the failure of the article. The author carefully avoids widening the perview which might then include other sciences which are hot topics these days.

Comment Re:Global climate != Local weather (Score 1) 571

Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself. A zip file containing speleotherm data has thoughtfully been provided here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/26/in-which-i-go-spelunking/

When I look at his graph, it sure looks like it's getting colder to me.

In addition, the following paper makes it clear that the warming since 1800 is a "rebound" from the little ice age with a multi-decadal oscillation superposed, and that we have now entered a downward swing in said oscillation, yet the underlying linear "rebound" continues.

(PDF)
http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperDownload.aspx?FileName=NS20101100004_10739704.pdf&paperID=3217

And this paper has an explanation for the power spectra of the temperature oscillations which fit the data better than CO2 based models:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639

Comment Re:Global climate != Local weather (Score 1) 571

I have no argument about what you point out. Mainly, because it doesn't seem relevant in light of the facts. Namely that our current temperature is almost back up to what it was 1000 years ago, but not yet back to what it was 5000 years ago. Apparently we are still below the average temperature for our current interglacial period. There are all kinds of implications here.

  • The Earth has been cooling since about the time of Christ. Shouldn't the people who claim CO2 is the boogey man explain that trend first?
  • We're starting to warm back up to conditions in which civilization best flourished: The Holocene Thermal Maximum allowed the beginning of civilization and agriculture, the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, and the Mediaeval Warm Period were times of plenty and advancement. Considering how well humanity did in warmer times than this, a finer grained assessment of the risk vs. rewards should be made, as opposed to a Hollywood scare treatment for the ignorant masses. That reeks of an ulterior motive.
  • And given the most of the Holocene has been warmer, any life forms which take longer than 10,000 years to evolve obviously have no problem with warmer temperatures than now, so what's with the crap about polar bears becoming extinct?

Comment Re:No Sunspots = Starvation... (Score 1) 571

Absolutely right. And when someone who actually knows math and statistics (as opposed to climate "scientists"), and who are knowledgeable enough to consider influences outside the earth's atmosphere (as opposed to climate "scientists"), find that the planetary and lunar orbits fit the temperature cycles better than the climate "scientists'" models do, why does anyone (except media whores) even bother to listen to them any more? http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639

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