Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin

Don't get me wrong, I understand why this is cool. But I'd still much rather hear that there'd been a breakthrough in making skin from stem cells.

If you're really a mathematician and you disagree with the premise that economic growth cannot continue in perpetuity against a finite resource base, then you need to ask for your money back from whatever 'institution' gave you a degree.

Population growth remains the single greatest driver of unsustainability on our planet. To date there is no socially acceptable method for enforcing population growth control anywhere on Earth, whether in Africa as you so disparagingly suggest in your fruitcake allusions to the Club of Rome New World Order conspiracy theory nonsense, or right here in the United States.

Since apparently my imagination is lacking, I invite you to suggest an balancing feedback loop likely to stabilize the system in the face on continue population and economic growth drawing from a finite (and dwindling) resource base. Good luck.

Economists don't tell me what to do.

Is that right? Economists don't tell you to, say, work for below a liveable wage? That's funny because they seem to have convinced congress there's no need for a minimum wage in a 'free' market. Maybe that's why congress gave themselves raises every year or two for the last 15 years while the minimum wage stagnated until last year. Economists don't tell you that you don't need universal health care? That's funny, because last time I checked there were 50 million people in this country without health insurance and millions more who have private insurance but who can't get benefits out of their insurers, all while economists say that universal healthcare is the work of the Devil and the free market is the solution to everything. Economists don't tell you to invest in the stock market or in junk securities backed by subprime mortgages? They sure told a lot of investors to do that - millions of people who are just slightly pissed at the moment. Economists don't tell you to buy shoes made in sweatshops by children instead of shoes made sustainably here at home? That's funny, because they sure seem to trumpet the cause of globalization pretty loudly and they seem to have done a good job of convincing congress that it's more important for Phil Knight and other Nike shareholders to make money off of foreign sweatshops than for US citizens to earn a living from jobs at home.

People who see the writing on the wall about climate change and degradation of essential ecosystems services are advocating for personal responsibility. Economists advocate for maximizing self-interest, irrespective of the consequences to others or to future generations.

No one likes to be told what to do. But when our entire society has shifted into a mode where the 'right' thing to do is act like a sociopath, me-me-me-fuck-everyone-else-and-the-planet-and-anything-that-gets-between-me-and-my-latte-and-SUV then it's time to smack some sense into folks before the whole ship goes down.

I think what you mean is that economic theory has proven itself to be completely flawed. Or maybe the Wall Street collapse I recall from a few months ago is just a figment of my imagination. Or maybe the growing gap between rich and poor both in the United States itself and between rich and poor countries over the last 50 years is just a figment of my imagination, despite economic theory claiming that globalization and freeing of markets would close the socioeconomic equity gap.

The reason why climate science has had little impact on human society is that climate changes slowly. Plate tectonics is slow too. I suppose just because you can't see it happening in front of your eyes means it must be false too, right?

If you don't understand the link between humans and global warming, your internet 'research' deserves a FAIL tag on fark.com.

Here, let me save you some time and embarasment: look up "radiative forcing" on wikipedia. There's an explanation there that a 10-year-old could understand.

If you can understand why a bathtub can overflow when you leave the faucet running, even if the drain is open at the same time, then you should be able to understand why greenhouse-induced climate change is inevitable. If this is beyond your powers of comprehension, I think they're probably hiring janitors at Rush Limbaugh's radio station...

Your reference to the petition signed by "9,000 PhD's and 31,000 respected people" is total bullshit. There's no verification process, no vetting, no counter-argument with alternative peer-reviewed data sets, no nothing. For all you know, I could have signed all 9,000 of these claiming to be a PhD climate scientist.

Here's the site Moryath is referring to: www.petitionproject.org. Judge for yourself what a joke it is.

"Minimal bit of research and understanding" - yeah, I'd say that's your problem right there...

If you honestly believe there is no agreement or consensus among climate scientists and that the entire field of scientific discipline is just a sham put-up job, then I can't really help you. There's just no cure for conspiracy loons like yourself who think it's all a plot to make Al Gore and a few crackpot scientists rich.

If, on the other hand, you're actually interested in how the scientific evidence informs the issue of climate change, then you have to honestly review all of the available data - some is good, some is bad. The consensus among the thousands of climate scientists around the world is that the data overwhelmingly point in the direction of anthropogenic climate change. This is in agreement with theory both at a broad level of overarching generalization (read: simplicity), and at the finer level of detail (read: complexity).

You can cherry-pick the bad data and use them to negate the entire findings of the field if you like, but that is a logically flawed strawman argument.

I'm not a proponent of anthropogenic climate change because it's what I believe or because it's something I want to be true. I acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is likely to be occurring because the overwhelming majority of climate scientists whose job it is to sift through all of the data, good and bad, and critic all of the theory have reached a consensus that it is a real phenomenon. In the same way, I acknowledge that evolution by natural selection seems to be a real phenomenon, despite some bad data here and there and some present uncertainties in small parts of the fossil record; as opposed to, say, asserting that evolution is a giant conspiracy by which Richard Dawkins has made himself and other biologists rich through scaremongering tactics like warning about antibiotic resistance. I don't know if you're an evolution denier also, but it's functionally equivalent.

Planets orbiting the sun can be modeled quite simply, despite the complexity of what's happening on those planets. That's the cool thing about scalar analysis, complexity theory, systems dynamics and emergent properties: you get nested levels of simplicity and complexity; nested levels of symmetry. Think of what a hurricane looks like, and then think of what a galaxy looks like. Similar simple patterns, different scale, massive complexity lying between them.

Sorry, but reality is far more interesting than your either/or kindergarten view would make it out to be.

Wrong.

All I'm saying is that most of the 'studies' I've seen floating around the press smell fishy to me

The problem is that you rely on the news media for your information, and what you're going to get is information cherry-picked for its entertainment value, not for its scientific content.

Climate science is just as rigorous a discipline as any other, and the scientists working in the field are just as serious about their work as scientists working in genetics or neuroscience or anything else.

The problem is that the stakes are extremely high and in general the theory and data are converging on a very unpleasant prognosis for the future of our world. People really, really, REALLY don't like the prognosis. And it's understandable. If astronomers saw a swarm of Everest-sized asteroids heading our way that had a good chance of clobbering us in 50 to 100 years, people would react negatively to that too.

I suspect this reaction by the fearful and ignorant members of the public is a consequence of the fact that in the vast majority of the realm of human experience, our perceptions strongly shape reality. What we believe really can end up shaping what we see. Economics is a good example, with it's many self-fulfilling prophecies. But in the case of asteroids or climate change, it matters not one iota what people think or how they feel. What's going to happen is going to happen, and we'd better understand it if we want to stand a chance of coping with it.

Climate change does have the advantage of being theoretically quite simple - simple enough for just about anybody to understand if they're willing to open their eyes just a little bit. Radiative forcing is a simple stock-and-flow box model. If you can understand why the bathtub overflows when you leave the faucet running, even though the drain is open at the same time, then you should be able to understand that anthropogenic climate change is inevitable.

It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied. Economics - a far softer science with a (so far) vastly greater impact on human society - gets a staggering amount of leeway by comparison. And when it's practitioners (who outnumber climate scientists 100 to 1) get things catastrophically wrong, as in the case of the recent Wall Street collapse, there is surprisingly little criticism of the theoretical underpinnings, nevermind little details like bad data.

The science of climate change, by contrast, is on very solid theoretical footing; but sometimes every science has to deal with bad data, as in this case. The notion that this somehow discredits the theoretical basis of radiative forcing and the greenhouse effect is sheer lunacy. Simple stock-and-flow box models are enough to understand that anthropogenic climate change is inevitable. If you can understand how a bathtub overfills when you leave the faucet running, you should be able to understand that climate change is real and unavoidable.

The reactions of laymen and the ignorant masses who follow Limbaugh et al can only be explained as propaganda-induced hysteria, to which only the profoundly ignorant and/or fearful are vulnerable. The reactions are similar to those of the North Atlantic fishermen who vehemently asserted that since they'd been fishing the Georges Bank for 250 years it was 'obvious' it could never be depleted. Changes in fish populations, if there were any, were 'natural'. They ignored scientists and continued to produce record catches - right up until the entire fishery collapsed a few years ago.

Any one who is genuinely interested in learning about how and why complex systems change catastrophically should read "Limits to Growth" - the classic by the MIT team headed by Donella Meadows.

Hydroponics works well only for some types of plants. Plants with roots that have evolved to extract oxygen don't do well when submersed in water all the time, even if the water is hyper-oxygenated. Vegetables we're familiar with grow well hyroponically, as do some grasses like rice, but other grasses (wheat, maize, etc) present problems. Fruit trees (apples, oranges, etc) are also not so easy to grow with hydroponics.

Note also that the chart of higher yields on wikipedia's page are extrapolated estimates from 1975. Hydroponics is not a viable solution for all agricultural products, only for some, and that reality is clearly evident in the market - which has had more than 30 years since the wikipedia source to test the promise of those higher yields.

There seems to be a cognitive disconnect in scale when folks view proposals like these. Hydroponics and aeroponics work at the scale of gardening, not industrial agriculture. So of course you're not going to get massive monocrop yields out of a building like this. But then, that's not the point of a garden.

After all, the amount of light the building can receive is limited to the area of its footprint plus the area of the shadow it sweeps out multiplied by the duration of time that light falls on that area, adjusting for rates of luminal energy influx (so those long shadows at the end of the day aren't worth much...). Compared to even a modest size farm, that area is going to be small. Compared to industrial farming where crops are planted on tens of thousands of acres, well, projects like this are a drop in the bucket by comparison.

Think of it as community gardening, and then the scale of your thinking will match up correctly to reality.

Your arguments and those of the parent poster are both entirely dependent on the types of plants being grown. You can grow some vegetables and flowers with hydroponics, and you can grow certain grasses with a thin veneer of soil. But if you want to grow corn, potatoes, apples or coconuts you're obviously going to need a significant layer of soil.

"Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour"

I call total BS on this too. My PC is rated for a peak power draw of 400 watts. At idle the wattage is under 50 and with casual usage it's probably not doing more than 100. It'd be a stretch to boil five kettles of water in an hour with 100 watts.