Albedo is currently 30%. Losing ice cuts the albedo (this is known as the "ice-albedo feedback"), but not anywhere like from 30% to 7%. Clouds provide a lot of albedo and they're not going anywhere.

55 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, the sun was almost as bright as today, there was about 4 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as today (basically, there was a carbon infusion into the atmosphere roughly equivalent to us burning all known coal reserves), and there was no permanent ice on Antarctica or Greenland, but there was no runaway greenhouse effect. We can also calibrate the strength of the ice-albedo feedback from its contribution to Pleistocene ice age cycles, during which as much as 30% of the earth's land mass was covered with ice and snow.

Don't get me wrong: Global warming is a very real and serious threat. But there is no plausible way it could possibly produce a boil-the-oceans-dry runaway greenhouse effect like we see on Venus. If you're looking for a good scientific treatment, see David Archer's textbook "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast" for an introductory-level treatment or Raymond Pierrehumbert's book, "Principles of Planetary Climate" for a very rigorous calculus-based Ph.D. level treatment. Also, Andrew Ingersoll, who discovered the runaway greenhouse effect, has a good primer, "Planetary Climates." Realclimate.org also has a good short and clear treatment.

Nope. The Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit says that a Venus-style runaway greenouse is not possible on earth because the sun isn't bright enough unless you brought the albedo down below about 7%.

This statement applies equally to driving while drunk. Lots of people do it every day and few have an accident. You might find it interesting to read up on low-probability/high-consequence risks.

The baseline probability of a fatal accident is about 1 / 1.2 million per mile traveled, so if something increases your risk by a factor of 20 (the estimated risk factor for texting while driving), you would not notice it from your experience. It would take statistical analysis of a large number of crashes to determine the excess risk. Increasing your chance of getting in a fatal accident by a factor of 20 is a significant added risk, but the baseline probability is so small that any individual driver is unlikely to notice the difference from experience.

I spend a lot of money on books. O'Reilly, Packt, etc. put out some very useful books documenting FOSS tools (and for statistical computing in R, both Springer and CRC publish a lot of really excellent books, although they can be very pricey). These books are mostly written by people who can really write and edited by people who can really edit.

And when I spend my money buying this kind of documentation, it supports a culture of good technical writing and ensures that good technical writers to get paid for their work.

It might be nice if there were a similar quality of documentation available for download under CC, but absent that it's nice that there is a thriving industry providing good, useful documentation in books.

If you are afraid to give evidence to back up your assertions, then why are you making those assertions in the first place?

If you were serious about contributing to this discussion, you could have said that there were two states that had this policy and linked to evidence of that policy, without ever saying that you lived there. But instead, you were more interested in making it a personal thing about "I experienced that and I am so important that if I told you what state I live in I would have to shoot you."

Get over yourself. You are not so important that someone is going to track you down and hurt you on the basis of a /. comment that reveals indirectly what state you live in.

I'm not going to defend damn_registrars because that post said a lot more (the masters had to be in education and a Ph.D. didn't count as "equivalent coursework), so what damn_registrars said might well be BS. But if you look at the text on p. 85 and figure 79 on p. 87, it looks to me as though the masters is required not for tenure, but to get a mandatory teaching license. Did I misunderstand that?

Ooops. I misread the GP post, so my answer did not address the real question of whether they would reject a Ph.D. as being equivalent. Sorry about posting an irrelevant answer.

One thing I will say is that getting a Ph.D. prepares a person for research, but most Ph.D. programs don't include anything about how to teach the material to high school students, so it's reasonable that a state would want to know not only do you know the technical material, but also do you know how to teach it, maintain classroom discipline, work with students who have learning disabilities, etc.

It's nice to be drawn to secondary teaching after getting a Ph.D., but there is an important step in actually getting training in how to teach before that Ph.D. will be useful to most high schools.

Since the commenter won't answer your question, here goes: Google points me to the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2013 State Teacher Quality Yearbook, which says that: "Connecticut, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New York and Oregon all require a master’s degree or coursework equivalent to a master’s degree" (p. 87).

In related news, John Carmack is using a BFG 9000 to compute the square root of -1.

So I'm curious: Since you have contempt for the way college educates kids, do you hire a lot of employees straight out of high school and provide the kind of real-world on-the-job learning that you extol? Or do you think that's just something OTHER employers ought to do?

What casino would go broke from five or ten slot-machine jackpots? They actually do understand the statistics of payouts. That's why I mentioned the law of large numbers above.

Why? Wouldn't a machine that happened to hit multiple jackpots in a row be a huge draw for customers? My impression is that Casinos want flashy payouts to get more people to come play because they damned well understand the law of large numbers.

Fascinating. We're talking about teaching scientific reasoning, yet this comment, its parent and its grandparent all infer principles about how to get better qualified teachers into a classroom on the basis of personal anecdotes.

No one cites systematic research on what produces effective teachers. None even says, "this is my experience, but it would take systematic research to tell whether it can be generalized." Instead, each one falls into exactly the fallacy identified in the article in the OP: using informal reasoning and thinking that it's principle-based scientific reasoning.