Yep... showing respect towards the 'proper' authorities and recanting is the way to go if you end up on the wrong side of a society that is starting to show many parallels with George Orwell's 1984 (or the Spanish Inquisition or similar). I know I would. Sad but true...

Nope. No one does. That is just a far too simple representation of what is going on. What is going on is subtle and actually quite understandable, and it has hit many scientists over the ages, in virtually any field of science. And not even science: any research is potentially victim of this. Let me explain:

Science is based on so called 'hypotheses'. Generally these hypotheses are proved or disproved based on observations/measurements/math or whatever method is appropriate. This is how science has worked for the past hundreds of years. Under normal circumstances, an unbiased scientist should arrive at the correct concluson for his researched hypothesis. The problem arises when a scientist is no longer unbiased. Once a scientist 'believes' his hypothesis too much, he is willing to look at his data in 'new and innovative' ways to prove he is right. This is good. That's how science works. However, there is a pitfall, best expressed in a saying: "If you torture your data long enough, it will, in the end, confess". This means that there will often be a way to present data in such a way that it LOOKS like the hypothesis is correct, but it really isn't. Of course there are many ways of looking at the same dataset that say otherwise, but when a scientist is biased this is likely to be ignored. The result is a scientific paper that looks solid, but really isn't. It is VERY difficult to verify such a paper, without actually repeating it and especially without access to the raw data (this raw data is suspiciously difficult to come by for climate-science, so it seems. The general tendency seems to be that 'to avoid confusion' the data is not supplied by the scientist, making verficiation of a paper virtually impossible) .

It also is the case that in the media and politically there is some kind of 'concensus' that man-made warming is a indisputable fact. On schools and science institutes young people are indoctriated very early with this 'fact'. Also, it is in many countries professionally very unhealthy to be openly critical on the assumption of man-made warming. Even in the Netherlands, where I live, there have been ample recorded cases where people's careers were hindered by political views of others, ending their job or throttling funds. What all this results into is a very specific type scientist being successfully active in the climate research field: The true 'believers'. It is these very 'believers' that are likely to fall into trap I described above that are currently overly represented in the field. This provides a feedback-loop that will become worse with the years, as we have seen in the past two decades. It will likely take very convincing evidence to make these believers question their faith and restore balance in the field. It will probably happen if temperature starts falling significantly again. Even then they will probably find explanations to prolong their beliefs, as is they way of all true believers ;-)

Now all this isn't new. It can be seen over the ages and even today in many situations, where evidence is hard to come by or difficult to obtain. To name a few:
- Try to prove/disprove the existence of God. Or the creation - evolution debate in which it has resulted.
- Many people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit because the detective in question was biased and presented skewed evidence. There are many recorded cases of this. Sometimes these people are later aquitted using the SAME evidence as was already available in the first trial, but now presented in an unbiased way.

With all this going on, it is not difficult to imagine some people are sceptical of climate science. I, for myself am one of them. Why? I read some of the papers and find that the evicence presented is either non-conclusive or cannot be easily verified. This is how I went to work (admittedly around 5 years ago): I skipped all the papers where no raw data was available or where unspecified 'corrections' were applied. I also skipped papers where the exact method of data manipulation was not described. There was surprisingly little that remained. My personal conclusions from what I have read: Warming? Yes, probably. Manmade? I don't think so...

I hear that a lot, but it is actually not true. 95% or more of what you can do with Excel can actually be done with Calc, just in a different way. Truth is, it tells me that you have not yet seriously looked into the program. I hear this argument almost exclusively from management/sales/hrm people and almost never from people that really have to work with numbers like engineers or programmers.... Draw your own conclusions.

I heard an interview with this guy on the dutch radio and he is obviously a moron. He managed to contradict himself three times in as many sentences and obviously has no idea about how SH works. His servers are on our blacklists too and with good reason...

It looks ok, but on my ipad 1 it load really slow. I know, i know the ipad 1 needs to be replaced by now, but still....

What part of "as well as other sciences" does not translate to "science" in general? If they didn't research science in general, they should not say they did. If they did research it, they have proven themselves that "climate" apparently doesn't have anything to do with it. However which way you look at it, it smells fishy. The fact that they did actually research the reactions to such a polarized and hyped field where unproven theories are floating around only makes matters worse. It is flamebait research and should be treated as such...

The paper was put forward in a slanted way. The report apparently concluded that: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from climate science as well as other sciences."

What it the report SHOULD have concluded is: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from science" which is exactly as valid, is a far more neutral observation, and does not single out a specific group.

By including the "climate science" as a specific category the researchers make themselves suspect and people may (perhaps not entirely without cause) assume that this report was not unbiased and perhaps targeting "climate sceptists" rather than being an honest report on the behaviour of conspiracists in general. And of course this fuels a discussion. The authors could have known this and probably did. Therefore the article's title should be renamed to: "Those who play at bowls, must look out for rubs".

Now every terrorist knows that they need to apply a simple high-pass filter to their recording before releasing it... I would have kept this from the public if I were the police, but hey... that's just me...

As a fallout from this news, the Bitcoin rate has dropped roughly 30% (even around 50% for a short while). Why? No one seems to know. Whatever the scam, this _should_ have had near-zero impact on the exchange rate of the Bitcoin and the drop can only be explained by people panicking and selling off their coins. No matter, I made a nice extra when the rates bounced back from -50% to -30%, but it goes a long way to show how many people do not have a real inkling of how financial markets really work.

Really... where is this any different from 'conventional' financial markets?

Under normal circumstances you can build a test-suite that will present the software with a large number of scenario's and see if it still gives the 'correct' answer after a code update. However, here the 'correct' answer is not really clear. You are trying to test the results in a highly chaotic system of which you do even understand the mechanics, cannot simulate correctly and cannot measure. On top of that, your software is going to actively influence the dynamics of the very system you are working in, making things even more difficult. Impossible to test anything but some basic stuff really...

You could create software monitoring the actions of the trading software to some extend however. This is probably the only way to go...

Once in my life I was honest in an exit interview and it came back to haunt me later...

I had an exit interview after I had worked for a automotive-related company in the Netherlands. At the time, it was promised to me that whatever I said in this interview would remain a private matter between me and the HRM department and would be used in an anonymous context to improve things. Even so, I refrained from making any remarks towards the functioning of individual colleagues or my boss, and only commented on the serious flaws in research and development strategy the company (and my department) deployed, which were actually the reasons I decided to leave. It was constructive feedback. No ranting, nothing of the kind. I outlined a strategy that would, in my opinion, work out. My arguments seemed to be taken seriously and I went away with the feeling that at least I did what I could to steer things in the right direction...

About three years later I was invited back for an interview by a different department of the same company who had specific needs for my expertise and I felt that in this department I could do some useful work. However, before I was hired, I was invited by my former department head for an interview. In this interview the gloves came off: He had an exact copy of everything I had said in the previous exit interview before him and he was NOT amused. He said the interview was "to see if I had learned something in the meantime" but it was blatantly obvious that he was going to block me from being hired back. Didn't need to because I declined immediately after I learned how HRM had handled this.

In the end, it turned out for the better, because it was one of the events that prompted me to start my own company and I am now making more money that I could ever have made over there and I am sure having a lot more fun doing it. Still it sucked at the time...

He can come work for me in the Netherlands any time. We don't care much about this kind of stuff... Even better... If you say "I didn't inhale" here everyone looks at you like you are really really stupid ;-)

Which is exactly what is missing in this research. Because given a choice, the mice might have started using a different drug to compensate for the loss of the effects of heroine. And this, I think, is exactly what addicted people will do. Possibly worse drugs. Instead of solving the problem you will have made it worse. Heroine is not such a bad drug, if you can pay for it. So make it dirt-cheap and your problems will at least be manageable. But then again, I am a Dutch boy and we are all addicts anyway. Or so most of you believe ;-)

It is actually quite simple provided you have at least some basic math skills. Don't try to wrap your head around the math involved just yet. Just do this:

1) Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform and only look at Definition and Introduction.
2) Get some tool like Matlab or Octave (the last one is OSS)
3) Generate a pure sine wave signal and put that through the formula's you found in 1). You should get a single spike in your results
4) Now add a second sine wave with a different frequency to the first signal. and put that signal through the same formulas. You should find two spikes.
5) Try experimenting with this, adding signals and experiencing how the amplitude and frequency impacts the spike height and position.

When you have a feeling for this, THAT is the time to read the entire article. You will find it easier to understand.

You now have a reasonable understanding of the Fourier Transform. The Fast Fourier Transform or classic FFT is no more than some mathematical trick to make these calculations faster and actually it has it's drawbacks, like your nr of sample must be a power of 2 and some other stuff I won't go into here, although these are acceptable in most practical cases. This new FFT transform seems to be a lossy variant of FFT which will impact the resulting signal, negating the contribution of frequency area's with low energy content. It could be especially useful in situation where that loss of information is acceptable as it is in sound and video to some degree. However, I did not really read up on this new method so I could be off the mark...

Nice argument, but it has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. Lets have a look at the facts:

1) The snow in the alps melts every year. All of it. All of it that matters for us anyway, since most of the glaciers are positioned SOUTH of the watershed line, and the water from these glaciers will never reach the Netherlands. This means there is no "extra" melting done every year, because of shrinking glaciers or everlasting snow melting off.
2) This means that the amount of water melting in spring does not increase (and should actually DECREASE if you believe global warming, since more warming means less snow during winter, right?)
3) More and more of our rivers are being channeled up the line, decreasing the number of natural overflow basins up the line and therefore the Netherlands will get more water in less time during spring.

The influx of melting water in the Netherlands therefore has nothing to do with global warming, but has everything to do with water management projects in the countries up the line and the Netherlands itself.

Can't speak for rising sea levels, but when it comes to melting water, the Netherlands has nothing to fear from global warming. Manmade or not. What we DO have to fear for is misinformed people trying to push every change in their surroundings into the shoes of as yet unexplained phenomena, leading to lots of wrong decisions in politics.

I am one of those people that sees the temperature rise as being well within expected statistical variance, when looking to the last 2000 years or so. I guess that makes me an "unbeliever" and will probably be modded down for it severely. So be it.... ;-)