I'm terrified to find myself supporting Romney here, but did you even read your own quote there? He said there was a lack of consensus on "the extent of the warming, the extent of the human contribution, and the severity of the risk."

Now let me quote from your linked article: "The study found that 97 percent of scientific experts agree that climate change is "very likely" caused mainly by human activity."

Nowhere does it say that 97 percent of scientists agree that the average global temperature rise will be X degrees, that the risk is extremely/moderately/not at all severe, or that "mainly" = 100%/90%/80%, etc.

As anti-republican as I am, I have to admit Romney hit this one exactly right. There is overwhelming evidence (which, btw, is way the hell more important than "consensus") that there is warming, and that we are the cause of some significant part of it. But predicting the specific effects, even the exact amount of temperature increase, necessitates a blind faith in models with a pretty poor track record so far.

Of course, the problem is that he's trying to use lack of certainty as an excuse to to avoid taking any action, despite the fact that the science doesn't say anything at all about the best way to fix the issue (or indeed whether it needs fixing...)

copyright law?

I suppose I could RTFA, but since when does burning natural gas produce less CO2 than gasoline? It's still a hydrocarbon. CxHy+O2->H2O+CO2...

While I agree with the general question about how "open" this device is, you don't have to root your android to install apps from unknown sources; that's one of the main selling points over ios in the first place!

When I read your second paragraph, I was really ecstatic for a minute there. You hit the nail on the head that so many climate change prophets are attacking with screwdrivers. There is a huge difference between the very well-demonstrated rising temperature and the significantly hazier predictions of future states based on extremely complicated and chaotic models. But based on very simple arguments, our actions are _likely_ to have an effect, and so doing what we can to minimize that possible effect is rational. (Unfortunately, the haze predictors are being used as justification for the degree of the response, which is not really justified.)

And then you negate all your rationality with the statement "We are directly responsible for this planet entering a new geological age with as much speed and force as the Cretaceousâ"Paleogene extinction event". It was a good job trying to sound rational, but you really need to keep your discourse consistent.

Obligatory XCKD ... errr, SMBC...

While I agree that models are frequently refined, leading to new results, there is a disturbing trend I see, not having to do with positive bias necessarily, but with uncertainty estimation.

One thing that I've found incredibly hard to beat into undergrads taking my physics lab courses is that getting your uncertainties (or error bars) right is far more important than getting the right central value. This is because uncertainties are the only way that two experiments can be compared against each other, or the only way to compare experiment to theory. If I have two models of climate change, one of which predicts a temperature rise of 3 C ± 5% and another that predicts 4 C ± 7%, those results are in large disagreement, whereas two studies that predict 20 C ± 15% and 40 C plusmn 35% are in much closer agreement.

But I see it seems much more frequently, especially in fields like astronomy, too little thought goes into the systematic uncertainties, and you'll get 4 experiments measuring the same thing with results that cannot be reconciled if you take their statistics at face value. This was a huge problem with many of the early global warming predictions as well; every year a new estimation would come out that was completely incompatible with the previous one. Yes, these models are insanely complicated, and it's damn hard to understand all the systematics. And of course you can't put in error bars for plain old mistakes. But do it too many times, and people begin to lose any faith that your estimates can be relied on for anything.

This is the problem I see; not necessarily bias toward a positive result, but a bias toward underestimating the uncertainty of your measurement, which I suppose could be different sides of the same coin. (E.g., a result of 2 ± 0.1 is a positive result; a result of 2 ± 5 is not!).

If only that were universally true. The THz or millimeter wave scanners are in use in some airports, and I have no problem going through them, although sometimes I opt out out of patriotic duty to make life difficult for TSA.

The problem is that most US airports in fact have the x-ray backscatter scanners. Now, I know that if the device is operating within it's design parameters, the dose you get from it is significantly less than the one you get from actually flying. But even before you start to include factors like a) the dose is concentrated all in the outer skin layers b) it's being operated by a high school dropout, the design dose is NOT ZERO. When you have two technologies, one of which uses ionizing radiation and one which doesn't, yet they accomplish the same goal, why in all the hells would you choose to subject everyone to ioniziing radiation?

I still cannot fathom why I have to have a prescription to order new eyeglasses or contact lenses. Yes, you should get your eyes checked out regularly, but a 2-year old prescription is still way better than no glasses at all!

I had a 6 GB Creative JukeBox mp3 player about 4 years before the ipod existed. All Apple did was make it pretty.

At first, maybe. Dark matter was proposed to explain the high velocity of stellar orbits, and dark energy to explain the redshift of distant stars. However, cosmologists later used dark matter and dark energy theory to predict the angular spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and the baryon acoustic oscillation peak in galaxy distributions.

Predictive power ftw!

FTFS: "...allowed researchers to select for only those XNAs that attached to certain target proteins from a pool of random samples — a process akin to evolution over multiple generations."

It sounds overreaching to call this "evolution" if the researchers are selecting the better-performing samples. Incredibly cool, amazing breakthrough, but not evolution...

I know it's a joke, and I'm already ducking the WOOSH, but you cannot ever in any circumstance prove a hypothesis to be true in science. Always, always, you can only fail to disprove; even if you do it so thoroughly that there's almost no room for alternative.

A thousand years of observation and experiment failed to disprove Newton's gravitational law, but did not prove it true.

I have a simple formula: if the autonomous cars cause fewer accidents (maybe weighted by severity in some way) than a similar model of cars driven by humans, they are good.

Why should autonomous cars have to be perfect, instead of just an incremental improvement over the norm?