1485 replies to this topic

[armor]

EPA considers revising exposure limits

EPA again, Canada turns off radiation monitoring
The Health Canada page is a 404 so I don't really know what to say about this one, Natural News is typically a good source but they are also routinely guilty of hyperbole and jumping to conclusions.

Japanese revise exposure limits
Exports of tea from japan were banned after detecting Cesium at 500+ units (I can't remember the units) but are acceptable at 499, that's kind of fucked, and that's just for export, people are probably eating all kinds of shitty stuff over there that doesn't go through quality control at all.

[armor]

I guess it's worth noting that as we reduce mortality to other issues cancer and heart disease will increase. eg: seatbelts increase the number of cases of cancer without actually causing cancer.

If the Chernobyl death toll lies somewhere between 4000 and a million, the bottom say 100000 would be 'more related', with the last ones included being more dubious associations of whether it's Chernobyl cancer or unrelated cancer in the shadow of Chernobyl. I think the nature of issue makes it's impossible to deliver a definitive answer.

[armor]

TED David Keiths Unusual Climate change idea, geoengineering

I think I may see a problem with this technique, if it doesn't decrease atmospheric CO2 the ocean will still be acidifying, atmospheric CO2 would probably be worse if our activities hadn't converted so much land to C4 autotrophs. A catastrophic change to the most important ecosystem on earth could still be falling apart while people continue to pollute believing we have the problem licked. Aha, he gets around to covering that near the end. Moral hazard.

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I skimmed through the actual journal article about the 14,000 deaths, and it seems to actually say that 822 are related to fukushima, 1/4 of which are reported as increase over average infant/fetus death rates with 3/4 assumed unreported, guess it's best to look through the source not the fringe news reporting it, nor the others debunking it.

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TED Bilal Bomani plant fuels

Ideas which don't use fresh water, arable land or food crops seems like pretty solid points.

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Markus Kayser Solar Sinter Makerbot

Are you guys ready for the future? We're going be living in castles made of glass.

[Demonstray]

I don't want to scratch my glass castle with my glass armour. I don't want to have to go back to wearing PEOPLE clothes! Hopefully it's that non-reflective glass that doesn't scratch easily.

[Rize]

Understanding the Global Warming Debate

[XMark]

Whoa... apparently the stock markets are basically being run by automated computers working so fast that the actual humans barely have any idea what the hell is going on:

http://gizmodo.com/5...kets-go-haywire

There have been thousands of stock market crashes and recoveries lasting less than a fraction of a second because of all the automated systems at work.

You know, I think this is how the computers are really going to take over the world. Grab us by the financial balls and resistance is futile.

[Radioeyes]

Microtraders effectively bet on the noise in market prices. You win and lose fractions of a cent at a time, but do this millions of times. Statistically, you lose as much money as you make (seeing as it's nearly random at that level) but securities and hedges absorb their losses, making it a net-win as long as the market is rising.

It's really quite ingenious, but detractors can imagine millions of scenarios where this comes back to bite you. There was a major dive last fall because of this system's inability to handle things like power glitches, and a human can't possibly hit the panic button fast enough to avoid a runaway selloff. I'd imagine the algorithms are built to expect shit like that, but it's the unexpected that computers aren't able to deal with. In short, it's only as safe as the programmer makes it. If you're a banking firm, do you trust a programmer any more or less than the day trader?

Regardless, I'd strongly suspect Ian Malcolm would hate this whole betting on chaos!

[Radioeyes]

Understanding the Global Warming Debate

Thank you for bringing this to the science thread and not the government thread.
This article makes a LOT more sense than the I feel he misinterprets the two famous "97% of scientists accept ACC" surveys (which I have written extensively about HERE) and disregards their conclusions and methods, treating them as "soundbites" and unable to be understood by the rest of the world. I strongly disagree with this. Each of those papers address the EXACT 'question' which he claims is ambiguous. True, the question of Anthropogenic Climate Change being real (or not) may be ambiguous for laypeople like you, me and Mr. Meyer, but those polled thought long and hard about semantics of the question because the surveyors make absolutely sure they were asking a concise, clear and explicit question. When you get a paper refereed for a scientific journal, you are EXTREMELY careful to only comment on what you have evidence for, as any loose or poorly-worded claim is an open invitation for 30 papers countering your arguments.

Mr. Meyer posits intriguing questions, and talks a lot about a few methods that went into this research. However, I don't think we can walk away any wiser from reading this article except for more evidence that laypeople don't know what the hell they're debating. His conclusion is that the experts' advice and recommendations can't be understood? Maybe it's just a call for more surveys of those scientists. Even if they continue to say the exact same thing, I'm sure we'll still have this debate.

[Shervz0r]

A scientist's voter registration or sexuality matters not. It also matters not whether his or her research was funded by the industrialist Koch Brothers or Greenpeace (the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature report, counter-intuitively, was sponsored in part by the Koch Brothers). The scientific method's only job is to look at the theories or measurements, the data, the analysis and the conclusions. As most of us are not climate scientists by trade, the best we can do is to listen to the advice of their consensus. Rest assured, if there were a bullet-proof refutation of anthropogenic climate change or cosmic acceleration, I'd bet the barn that it would make the cover of Nature the very next month.

I am a scientist as well and I wholeheartedly agree with you in theory but but have to disagree with you here because of how easily science can be manipulated and biased. Asking carefully calculated questions and then framing the results in such a way to benefit a particular agenda is done over and over again, especially when a special interest group is involved with funding. This betrays the point of science, as does the falsification of data, but that's an acceptable casualty when a special interest is looking to prove or refute a point critical to its platform.

It's for this reason (amongst many) that I would love to see critical, independent thinking instilled at a far younger age in schools and for the general public to learn and appreciate how to question much of what we're presented with. Alas.

[Rize]

Hmm, I didn't take the article that way at all. For me it exposes the fundamental difficulty of climate study: you rely on a complex computer model to represent the even more complex world and the only thing you have to verify your results is a few of decades of measurements (earlier measurements not being trustworthy) plus the new measurements trickling in year by year. Climate study is closer to psychology or nutrition than chemistry or physics. Imagine trying to tease out the effects of nutrition in the human body with only a single human to run tests on. Your tests can only consist of drawing blood and doing whatever you want with that, and making observations of the person's body chemistry. You can't control what the person eats or how much they exercise. Good luck!

As for scientific papers and establishments, they can be corrupted by money and other pressures. Politically charged study (including the humanities) has succumbed to political pressures. All scientists get their money (research or otherwise) from somewhere. If the science has no political implications, then it can be about simple progress and results, though the sort of things you're researching are still directed by the funding (military funding is really big in my field for example) and whether or not they catch on often depends on if their is any profit to be made (that explains why the humanities are underfunded).

I had already read that post you made. It was convincing when I read it, but I was approaching it with no significant knowledge other than what it already contained (CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we emit a significant amount of it, so we must be causing some amount of warming). But I had misgivings even then. Look at how badly economists failed us? In economics, there is no magic bullet that will prove one or another theory correct. All you have is systematic thinking and computer models. You can figure out who the best thinkers (or models) are based on the accuracy of their predictions. Again, much like climate science. In economics who turned out to be right? The minority. There were voices of dissent speaking logically about the economy and accurately predicting each "unpredictable" event before it happened (internet bubble crash, housing bubble, 2008 crash) but they were a marginalized group, because those who control the narrative didn't want to hear it (or didn't want it to be widely known).

If you have any links to in depth articles that can shed more light on the subject, I'll be happy to read them.

[raubhimself]

In short, it's only as safe as the programmer makes it. If you're a banking firm, do you trust a programmer any more or less than the day trader?

I'm really wondering if anyone asked the programmers how it works. Quite a bit of the mystery there is "Oooh a computer's doing it! Who knows what's going on in that magic box!?" But there's no mystery or smoke and mirrors to code and algorithms. Someone came up with an algorithm and a set of parameters and some coders implemented it. It certainly doesn't mean it's a valid or safe way to trade stock, but it's not like they put a computer in the NYSE and it started learning on its own.

[Guy In Rubber Suit]

Hmm, I didn't take the article that way at all. For me it exposes the fundamental difficulty of climate study: you rely on a complex computer model to represent the even more complex world and the only thing you have to verify your results is a few of decades of measurements (earlier measurements not being trustworthy) plus the new measurements trickling in year by year. Climate study is closer to psychology or nutrition than chemistry or physics. Imagine trying to tease out the effects of nutrition in the human body with only a single human to run tests on. Your tests can only consist of drawing blood and doing whatever you want with that, and making observations of the person's body chemistry. You can't control what the person eats or how much they exercise. Good luck!

As for scientific papers and establishments, they can be corrupted by money and other pressures. Politically charged study (including the humanities) has succumbed to political pressures. All scientists get their money (research or otherwise) from somewhere. If the science has no political implications, then it can be about simple progress and results, though the sort of things you're researching are still directed by the funding (military funding is really big in my field for example) and whether or not they catch on often depends on if their is any profit to be made (that explains why the humanities are underfunded).

I had already read that post you made. It was convincing when I read it, but I was approaching it with no significant knowledge other than what it already contained (CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we emit a significant amount of it, so we must be causing some amount of warming). But I had misgivings even then. Look at how badly economists failed us? In economics, there is no magic bullet that will prove one or another theory correct. All you have is systematic thinking and computer models. You can figure out who the best thinkers (or models) are based on the accuracy of their predictions. Again, much like climate science. In economics who turned out to be right? The minority. There were voices of dissent speaking logically about the economy and accurately predicting each "unpredictable" event before it happened (internet bubble crash, housing bubble, 2008 crash) but they were a marginalized group, because those who control the narrative didn't want to hear it (or didn't want it to be widely known).

If you have any links to in depth articles that can shed more light on the subject, I'll be happy to read them.

Phil Plait usually does a great job at explaining global warming.

http://blogs.discove...climate-change/

I really wouldn't equate global warming with economics. For one, scientists regularly change their models when new valid information is gathered. How often do economists change their predictive models based on new valid information? The climate itself is pretty well understood, as are the effects that mankind is doing to it. What's really changing is how quickly the changes are happening and what sort of changes are occurring.

[Rize]

Honestly, I think global warming is much harder to determine than what is going on with the economy. We shall see if Bad Astronomy can convince me. Can you recommend any particular articles as a primer (hopefully something fairly recent)? EDIT: Actually at this point I would like to see a point for point refutation of the Forbes article I linked. The quality of the response to a high quality counter claim would say a lot about which side is being honest.

As for the economy, it's not as hard to figure out as you think. It's just that most economists are on the take in one form or another. If you want good info, check out this independent website http://www.itulip.com

[XMark]

sun tornado.
SUN TORNADO!

[armor]

more perspective