"The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."(from /.)

And for those who still can't face reality, here's the empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming. It still amazes me how people don't realise the most fundamental and undeniable facts of nature. The deniers' arguments are always the same, poorly researched, very confuse, and sound like a broken record. Furthermore, science should be taken seriously, and unless you know what you are saying and have the factual backup to support, you should have the decency to shut up. That's why bloggers and journalists typically report what actual scientists say, by reading their publications or specialised magazines, but don't actually do research. Climate deniers, amazingly enough, do just the opposite. They don't study, they don't have any respect for the peer-review process, and they only present unproved, untested, original research, with the typical excuse: "It's only logical. No, it is not.

The confusion in their minds is probably caused by a sense of frustration, which is caused itself by other confused ideas they have. For instance, it's one thing to recognise the fact of global warming, and a completely different one accepting a carbon tax, a regulation, cap and trade or any other type of monetary reform. The former one is science, and the latter is politics, things that often take different directions, if not always being divergent. I don't think any of the proposed solution is going to solve the problem, to me they seem only badly designed patchwork, they don't address the real issues. The cause of the problem is the sick values that this society is proposing, the need for cyclical consumption of goods and services, the fact that it's economically convenient to pollute rather than not, that efficiency and sustainability are intrinsically enemies of a monetary based society.

I know what you are thinking. Here comes the idealist, the communist, the socialist, the utopian, or whatever label may come to a mind. Until we realise that social problems result from scarcity, that when a few nations control most of the world's resources, there are going to be international disputes no matter how many laws or treaties are signed. If we wish to end war, crime, hunger, poverty, territorial disputes, and nationalism, we must work toward a future in which all resources are accepted as the common heritage of all people.

Before you close this post, or mark it as nonsense, take some time to watch these videos. You might be surprised.

Peter Joseph: "Where are we going?" Nov. 15th '09 1/2 from peter joseph on Vimeo.

Peter Joseph: "Where are we going?" Nov. 15th '09 | 2/2 from peter joseph on Vimeo.

On this day, one of the greatest man of the history of mankind was born. It was December 25th, 1642,, when sir Isaac Newton came to this Earth.

Newton was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering.

Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.

In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he built the first “practical” reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.

In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed the so-called “Newton’s method” for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.

Newton’s stature among scientists remains at the very top rank, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain’s Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton was deemed much more influential than Albert Einstein.

A truly great man, let us remember him, on this day of secular jubilee.

Whenever there's something interesting happening, Slashdot is on the piece.

A recent article stated: In the wake of the CRU "climategate" leak, reader Geoffrey.landis sends along a New York Times blog profile of Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. "Curry — unlike many climate scientists — does not simply dismiss the arguments of 'climate skeptics,' but attempts to engage them in dialogue. She can, as well, be rather pointed in criticizing her colleagues, as in a post on the skeptic site climateaudit where she argues for greater transparency for climate data and calculations (mirrored here). In this post she makes a point that tribalism in science is the main culprit here —- that when scientists 'circle the wagons' to defend against what they perceive to be unfair (and unscientific) attacks, the result can be damaging to the actual science being defended. Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?"

The discussion generated, as of December 1, 2009, 795 comments. Normally this would imply two things:

1. People just repeat the same things over and over, with the typical comment being one or two-lines long (à la digg)
2. Most of them are SPAM (à la... well, most of the communities out there.)

Luckily, Slashdot is unlike any other community. To prevent abusive comments, a highly sophisticated comment moderation system has been implemented whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) has a starting score which can be incremented or decremented by semi-randomly chosen moderators. When moderating, the moderator chooses a given descriptor (such as "insightful", "funny", "troll") and each descriptor has a positive or negative value associated with it. As such, posts not only are scored, but characterized ("20% insightful, 80% interesting"). The book "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Esquire Magazine – Best book of the year) by Steven Berlin Johnson cites Slashdot's comment moderation system as an example of emergence and describes its operation in detail.

As a result of this, almost no useless comments are ever posted, and it's fairly easy to navigate though the most relevant ones. One of the most enlightening I found so far in the entire web is the following answer to the question posed in the article (Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?):

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Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I've got to say 'No'.
In a lot of cases, if not most, dialogue on the merits of your scientific work is simply impossible with a layperson.

I work with this stuff. Every day. 40 (well more like 50-60) hours a week. It took years of study for me (and everyone else)
just to get to the level where you can properly understand what it is, exactly, that I do. That's what being an expert at something entails.
Now when I get into a dispute with someone, they typically have the same level of expertise. They know more or less everything I do. I know what they're saying, and they usually know what I'm saying.

Now you bring into that situation some layperson with their religious reasons or ideological reasons or crank personality, who wants to dispute the results of my work. So they pore over it, and they simply don't understand it. (And ignorance breeds arrogance more often than humility, as Lincoln said) But they think they do. And then they formulate their criticism. Even if that criticism makes sense (often not), it's typically wrong at the most basic level. And that will practically always be the case - because there's virtually *nothing* in the way of criticism that a beginner would be able to think of that an expert hadn't thought about already. You're just not going to find a professor of physics having made a mistake of forgetting the first law of thermodynamics.

Now I'm happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism. But a scientific debate is *NOT* where anybody should be TEACHING anybody science. What kind of 'debate' is it if every answer amounts to "That's not what that word means, read a damn textbook." It's not the scientists who are being arrogant then. Hell, since when didn't scientists bend over backwards to educate the public? We write textbooks, and popular-scientific accounts. Research gets published in journals for everyone to see, etc. It's not like we're keeping it a big secret - The problem is that some people are simply unwilling to learn, yet arrogant enough to believe they should be entitled to 'debate' with me, and that I should be personally burdened with educating them in the name of 'open debate'!

(Just to pick one out of the climate bag. How often haven't you seen someone say "Yeah but climate change is cyclical!" - What? As if _climate scientists_ didn't know that?! Refuting someone's research with arguments from an introductory textbook)

The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn't even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of 'disproval' of global warming (which wouldn't have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they're simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate. And it's in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there's a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.

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There is only one more thing I can add: qui habet aures audiendi, audiat.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

My latest post "When science calls: Climategate, a lesson to learn" fired up quite a discussion.

I hope you will forgive me: I was amused by the hilarious and highly improbable photoshopped pictures of Al Gore posted by some fellow bloggers, and I could not resist to make one cheap and kitsch image of my own.

The Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident raised a few questions about the validity of the research of some of the most prominent climate scientists. While it seems absurd that a few out-of-context personal messages can suddenly invalidate the long-life work scientists such as Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, and Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, let's assume for a moment that they cannot be trusted, nor can their research institues (I'm taking a long shot in favour of the sceptics' argument here, folks).

In the comments I posted a list of peer-review publications that support the IPCC conclusions and that are not coming from the National Academy of Sciences, the Earth System Science Center, or the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Here's a small excerpt of such publications, in alphabetical order:

• Åkerman, H. J. & M. Johansson, (2008) Thawing permafrost and thicker active layers in sub-arctic Sweden. Permafrost and Periglacial Processes 19, 279-292.
• Alexander, L. V. & J. M. Arblaster, (2009) Assessing trends in observed and modelled climate extremes over Australia in relation to future projections. International Journal of Climatology 29, 417-435.
• Allan, R. P. & B. J. Soden, (2008) Atmospheric warming and the amplification of precipitation extremes. Science 321, 1481-1484.
• Allen, R. J. & S. C. Sherwood, (2008) Warming maximum in the tropical upper troposphere deduced from thermal winds. Nature Geoscience 1, 399-403.
• Allison, I. et al., (2009) Ice sheet mass balance and sea level. Antarctic Science, 21, 413-426.
• Andronova, N. & M. E. Schlesinger, (2001) Objective estimation of the probability distribution for climate sensitivity. Journal of Geophysical Research 106, 22605-22612.

Here's the challenge:

take every single peer review publication I posted in the comments and prove that they only used Mann's data to evaluate their results.

If you do, then I'll give you some more. And if you manage even those, I'll admit you have a point.

However, if you find any excuse not to accept the challenge, such as:

• I don't have time for this
• I don't know how to read scientific publications
• I don't know how to get the papers
• There is no space here in the comments
• I don't have to because it's obvious they ALL got their data from Mann

or anything as irrelevant as that, then you will have proven that all your arguments are based on superficial analysis which ride on emotion, faith, conspiracy and generally speaking nothing to do with serious science.

Bring it on, I'll be waiting.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

The recent events of the so called "Climategate" made the headlines in most of the newspapers and blogs around the world.

This is the moment people like Alex Jones have always waited for, a moment to finally call man made global warming a "Ponzi scheme", "a fraud", "a reason to tax beef", "total control of our society", and so on.

Just to be clear, as noted on realclimate.org, the emails contain "no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords." Period.

And even though the blogosphere is all fired up and the hypotheses are running wild for conspiracists, the science behind climate change is not at risk. But this is not the point. This was an organised effort by some scientists to discredit all dissidents, an orchestrated smear campaign, and it's not something to be proud of.

This reminds me of a story: back in 1950, a psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky (Иммануил Великовский) suggested that an object of planetary mass, which he called a comet, was somehow produced in the Jupiter system. After a very complicated game of interplanetary billiards is completed, Velikovsky proposed that this comet entered into a stable, almost perfectly circular orbit, becoming the planet Venus. We know that this idea is almost certainly wrong, as all the evidence we have suggests.

Nevertheless, however absurd and unsubstantiated his idea might have been, there is an important lesson to learn, and nobody can teach that better than Carl Sagan himself.

"There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly alright. It's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. The worst aspect of the Velikovski affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovski's ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there's no place for it in the endeavour of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system and the history of our study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources."

Knowledge is free, and data should always be made public, for anyone to read, without any restrictions, regulations and alterations. The pursuit of knowledge is based on these premises, and we shall never forget that this is the force of the scientific method. Let us not be blinded by our goal, or we will forget about what matters most, and stop being real scientists.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.