Tour de Turtles

If you've ever wondered where sea turtles go, now you can see. Jamur is quite the world traveller. Ginger, otoh, appears to have found her idea of paradise.

You coulda been a pufferfish

but nooooooo, you had to go and be a grossly bloated human instead.

Exo, Endo, what's the diff?

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

The intartubez are just full of global warming deniers these days. Some deny because they don't want us to stop driving our Hummers, some because they genuinely get taken in by these sincere and smart-sounding charlatans, some because they can only parrot what their overlords tell them to, and some because they just like poking hibernating bears with sharp sticks.

Anyways, I stumbled across this post [among many others] and started to say something in a comment there. As you can see, my "comment" got a bit out of hand. I didn't read all the comments there carefully, so forgive me if I repeat what somebody else has already said.


1. For the non-scientist [in comments] who asks to be pointed to a couple of good reference books to read: that's what Al Gore has put together for you. He made a movie of it, called it something something Inconvenient Truth. Something like that. Also, you should listen to Wendigo and Badtux.


2. If you're unwilling to take at face value what Gore, Wendigo, Badtux, et al are telling you, then you're just going to have to do your own homework.

You'll need to take a minimum of:

• 2 years of college chemistry [for chemistry majors, not "chemistry lite"]
• 1 year of college physics [for physics majors or engineers, not "physics lite"]
• 2 years of college calculus with differential equations
• 1 semester of advanced statistics
• 1 year of either oceanography, meteorology, or possibly geology [and not "oceanography lite" or "meteorology lite" either]
  

In other words, if you want to evaluate the evidence yourself, you'll need a minimum of a 4-year college degree in one of the physical sciences, and it will need to be at the level expected of a student who plans to go on for a PhD in one of the physical sciences.


3. Scientific "consensus" is a bit of a misnomer. Scientists, especially the top-tier researchers, are a rather contentious lot, and they thrive on trying to prove that the other guys' research is flawed. They endlessly pick apart the methods, the data, the conclusions of their competitors, and believe every other scientist is a competitor; getting and keeping grants for funding research, especially if it is abstruse or esoteric research, is a dog-eat-dog world.

So, as the evidence piles up, when a "consensus" appears to form, you can bet that everybody first tried six ways from Sunday to not believe the conclusions.

Does this process sometimes go awry, and a lone dissenter [or small group of dissenters] eventually prove everybody wrong? Sure, it happens, but very, very seldom. This "little guy wins out in the end" story is a romantic one and we humans do like our romances. For this reason we need to be extremely vigilant before buying into whichever scenario makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.


4. Not everybody wants to get physics degree just to be able to decode this one issue, which is fine. A useful proxy for deciding how much faith to put into a particular study: who funded the work? This is not infallible either, but the denialists that have been funded by [to name one example] big oil companies have had their work shown up as shoddy science often enough to make this a useful piece of information to have when trying to decide who to believe. Sourcewatch. org is a good place to start.


5. Those dissenting scientists... where to begin?

5a. That post at Popular Technology.net... the first link in their list refers to the infamous and thoroughly debunked OISM petition signed by 19,000 scientists.

Yes, that petition did get signed by all those intelligent and eminent scientists. I was horrified to see that even a couple of my professors had signed it. Ack! I'd always thought they were smarter than that!

What happened was that they were duped into signing that thing. They all belonged to a fairly prestigious group of scientists, the National Academy of Sciences, iirc. It's going to look like I'm contradicting myself here, but in this case they did all more or less blindly agree with their fellow academy members. It's not really a contradiction though, because they thought they were endorsing a paper that their organization had produced after careful and thoughtful study of all the evidence.

What really happened was that ONE scientist high up in the organization had his own agenda and used the organization's stationery, mailing lists, etc to make his petition look official.

I refuse to go through that entire list in that blog post and do ALL your homework for you. Chances are good that your Google-mining skills are at least as good as mine and with a couple of hours here and there googling up the pros and cons on each one and applying some critical thinking to the evidence you find.

5b. The recent Bali conference, where some dude called Monckton [he's a global warming denialist] whined about the conference officials not accepting his credentials and trying to stifle his scientific dissent. Now, I'm all about fostering dissent, I'm hugely against censorship, and I know that a lot of smart people in this world do not have the "proper" credentials but they know what they're talking about anyway because they made a point of learning everything they could.
So I got all up in arms over this and was ready to take up the guy's case, even though I'd never heard of him [google, google!] Wikipedia says he's a business consultant. Uh oh. But some business degrees require huge amounts of advanced calculus and statistics and if he had been an amateur scientist since childhood on top of that, well, maybe he did know what he was talking about.

Hmmm, studied classics and journalism. Another red flag, but some classics programs include archaeology [science! math!] and some journalism programs allow a student to specialize in science reporting if they take some extra math and science courses. So, he could still know what he's talking about.

Nope. Turns out he's either a complete idiot or else he's lying to us, hoping that we're the complete idiots. Here's his paper on the "errors" he found in the IPCC report.

"Error" 1. He claims they made a 10-fold change in the results in the table that he drew their attention to. Well, they did, sorta. Their proofreading was sloppy and in the original table they didn't notice that some of their numbers were in meters/100 years and others were in millimeters/year. In the corrected table they put all the numbers in millimeters/year, but if you know even a little about meters, millimeters, etc, you'll see right away that the 0.31 m/century in the old table is the exact same quantity as the 3.1 mm/year in the corrected table [observed sea level rise from 1993-2003].

To put it into everyday terms, if yesterday I told you that a piece of string was 1 foot long and today I told you that that same piece of string is 12 inches long, did I lie to you? Did that piece of string grow 12-fold? No. Nor did the reported sea level rise change 10-fold when the IPCC fixed the table in their report.

"Error" 2. Okay, that first one is an easy mistake to make, losing track of where the decimal point ought to be, and Monckton might just be an excitable boy who did catch one mistake, but got in a hurry and made another one of his own.

Nope. In this one he proves that he knows nothing nothing about using what is really a very elementary equation. Or maybe he's sure that we'll be too intimidated by the funny symbols and squiggly lines to even try to understand it.

Assume unity, he starts off. WTF? There's no need to assume anything [unless you want to assume some calming yoga position before tackling math]. We've got all the numbers, all we need to do is plug them into the equation he gives us:

dF = 5.3 ln (380/360) = 0.26

So the change in the radiative forcing due to the 20ppm increase in carbon dioxide concentration [from 360ppm in 1995 to 380ppm in 2005] is 0.26 watts/square meter. He goes on to tell us a little later that the change in radiative forcing due to CO2 from 1750 to the present is a total of 1.6 watts/square meter. I'm going to take his word for it. [I'm also going to assume that 1750 would be just before humans started producing CO2 by burning fossil fuels, coal early on, oil and natural gas later]. Plugging these values into the simple formula for calculating % increase in anything:

0.26/(1.6-0.26) = 0.23/1.34 = approximately 19.5% increase

B-b-b-but, isn't that awful darn close to 20%? Why yes. Yes, it is. QED.

I haven't done a very neat job here of showing you how to calculate radiative forcing, me being a bit of a dinosaur and vastly preferring to do math with pencil and paper [or on a *chalkboard], so if you want to consult Wikipedia for a better explanation, please do.


6. Economists. They might actually have an argument to make when they talk about comparing the costs we'll impose on developing nations if we limit their use [and ours] of fossil fuels to the costs we'll impose on them if we heat up the planet, drown their coasts, and drastically alter the weather patterns they've come to depend on to grow their food.

So far though, they seem bent on proving only that humans are not hurrying the warming of the planet. I know they call it The Dismal Science, but for purposes of this discussion, I think maybe economists ought to quit thinking of themselves as scientists.

Those competing costs are going to be tough to calculate, because we don't have all the data we need, nor all the equations, and we won't get any do-overs. Whatever we decide to do or not do, we're stuck with it. See ya in 50 years or so, and let me know how it turns out for you!


7. - 9759650. So many more claims to debunk, so little blogspace.... I think I'll stop here.









* yes, i did say chalkboard. get over it.

Is our childrens learning?

Florida, home of the lovably wacky and lightning rod for various and sundry wingnuts, is right now revising the state's standards for teaching science in the public schools, and predictably, the creationistas are frothing at the mouth. But then a miracle occurs and the Lakeland Ledger prints a good piece entitled Creationism — Evolution of a Flawed Notion [via].

Want to jump in? Here's a list of things you can do, or if you think you may fall under the rubric of Other interested person, have at it.

Meanwhile, is you smrter than our eighth grade science students? Take the test [PDF], check your answers [PDF]. When you're done with that, how do you stack up in math and reading?

Judgment Day

On Nov 13, Nova will be airing a re-enactment of Kitzmiller v. Dover, the trial that exposed [Un]Intelligent Design as Creationism wrapped up in the fine feathers of [pseudo]science. Interesting factoid: the judge in the case, who sounds like a pretty smart dude, was appointed by Dubya.

I think I'll skip the TV show and read some more of the blog, which is geeky to the max on paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution, but ya gotta wonder about somebody whose only non-science blogroll entry is Ann Althouse.

If you don't stop doing that, you'll grow three heads!

Gone herping lately? If so, maybe you've noticed that frog deformities seem to be on the rise, or at least in the news. Our amphibious friends are apparently the canaries in the environmental morass that we're all living in, and if extra legs can happen to them, how much longer till it happens to us?

So when some kids found a three-headed frog, the BBC sounded the warning and called on its resident wildlife expert, who was stunned by the ramifications. Now one would think that a naturalist with a masters in ecology would have recognized amplexus [that's amphibian for kinky sex] without having to consult color-coded pictures. Sheesh.



PS. Don't be too impressed by that PADI open water diver bit in his CV. It's their most basic certification. Heck, even I've got that one.

That's using your noggin!

macaca mulatta brain from brainmaps.org

birds can see magnetic fields [via]

giraffe fight club

[they look like landlubber plesiosaurs if you ask me]

breakthrough in alzheimers research?

My new favorite blog

cleek

Not just because I too want a pony [h/t] but also for The Web's Golden Bounty, a collection of links to surf for. The bounty includes [but is not limited to]:

No-Knead Bread from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen [I've had a link to this blog in my sidebar for some time now]

Milking the Lizard brought to you by Coturnix, whose other mission in life is the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science). My job is to try to motivate you to comment on the papers there. [I've got a link to PLoS in my sidebar too]

Also via Coturnix, if you're alert enough, you might win a trip to the the greatest science city in the world.

Crappy Graphs! which is really just way too much fun, not crappy at all. If I ever use that site to make a real graph maybe you'll get to see it. Meanwhile, you can do what I did, which was to draw a bunch of crappy graphs and then refrain from hitting Submit.

If you thought scientists were dangerous...

...you should see what their jobs are doing to them.

Everything you always wanted to know about sex,

but couldn't see. Until now.

US Petition for Public Access to Research

Check it out at Public Library of Science. Sign it, if not for yourself, then for me.

Public Library of Science

I hope this idea catches on and runs like wildfire through the entire scientific community.

PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. All our activities are guided by our core principles.

I have long wished for, and argued for, complete and open [read: free] access to peer-reviewed science and medical journals. I get into lots of arguments in blogs, on message boards, in real life, in which I'm challenged to back up my statements. I'm almost always right [April Fools Day jokes notwithstanding], and a quick Google Scholar or other search often turns up just the right article[s] I need to buttress my point. Voila! Click on the relevant link and get directed to an abstract [or sometimes an abstract of an abstract] and a link to buy a copy of the article.

WTF?! Twenty or thirty dollars to buy one article?! At that rate I could spend my entire paycheck between coffee break and supper time.

• Didn't my tax dollars already pay for you to not only do this research but also for you or your institution to subscribe to this [horrendously expensive] journal? Yes, they did, so don't tell me that's why you need to charge me such outrageous fees again.


• Nor am I buying the "it costs big $$ to store all that information" argument. Google and YouTube, and many more sites like them, let me and countless millions of other folks blog and vlog for free. That's a lot of server space, dudes; if they can do it so can you.


• And finally: No I do not trust the MSM* to read and accurately regurgitate scientific literature for me. I want to read it for myself.

* I've already forgotten which blog I saw it on, but we're being exhorted to stop calling it the "mainstream media" and start calling it the "corporate-owned media." It's a good idea, but MSM looks better than COM, and typing out the full phrase just increases my chances of making embarassing spelling mistakes. I'll be sticking with MSM for a bit longer I think.

Happy Bunsen Burner Day!

Best Wishes and have fun!

Grab a beer, pop some popcorn, it's 2 hours long.

The Collapse of Intelligent Design
Will the Next Monkey Trial be in Ohio?



found it at Red State Rabble

Piled higher and Deeper

Marcus R Ross, PhD

Ordinarily I find Slate to be just plain annoying [read: stupidity and sensationalism masquerading as reporting] on the subject of anything scientific, but just this one time I'm glad I read their article.

So, the $13 question today is: should a YECie be granted a PhD from a reputable secular institution in the field of -gasp!- paleontology?

Yes.

If a person does the required work, and does it well, the degree should be granted. Plenty of young scientists do well in grad school, under the watchful guidance of experienced scientists, then go on to make fools of themselves once they get out in the real world. It's the responsibility of scientists and scientifically-literate citizens to keep an eagle eye on them and be ready to bash them for any slop in their scientific work.

Under no circumstances should we be applying religious tests to a person's fitness for study at a secular and publicly-funded university. In any subject.


addendum 2-15-2007: Just in case you were wondering, yes I do believe that this is an attempt to legitimize "creation research" in the eyes of the gullible.

On the day that Percy L. Julian graduated ...

... at the top of his class at DePauw University, his great-grandmother bared her shoulders and, for the first time, showed him the deep scars that remained from a beating she had received as a slave during the last days of the Civil War. She then clutched his Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, “This is worth all the scars.”

Some days I wish my name were Steve.

Alas, none of my names, given or assumed, remotely qualifies.

But it would be fun to twist the tails of the creationistas just a bit. Oh, wait. Somebody just did. Figures it'd be the Irish. 'Zat you, ZB?

You may have heard of the lists of scientists that the creationists are circulating, scientists who publicly claim to doubt evolution. Project Steve is a countering list of scientists who have credentials, all named Steve [in honor of Steven J Goulding**], who support the following statement:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools.

So, if you are a Steve of one stripe or another, and you have a science PhD, the world is waiting to see your name on a T-shirt.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to subvert the minds of the children around me [I've given up on their elders] with my volunteer work: tutoring them in the four Rs -- Readin', Ritin', 'Rithmetic, and Reason.


Correction: Stephen Jay Gould! I meant Stephen Jay Gould! Will whoever stole my brain please return it? I'm obviously in need of one that works.