TopOc is occupying Durham, for great win and/or lulz! One highlight on the horizon is a leet haxor skillshare – I want to show off the sweet alcohol stove I built! (via this video)
In the meantime, enjoy this pleasing image 
Praying mantis.... or preying mantis??? Clearly the tyrannosaur of the insect world. Photo via Ildar Sagdejev; clix four phool.
Yay!
Antiscience campaigns often share the characteristic that they
A schematic of a climate model - By NOAA via WikiMedia Commons; click for sauce.
complain about the open questions, anomalies, and experimental limitations inscience. Scientists, on the other hand, work
hard to resolve these issues. Creationists complain about uncertainties on the chemical origins of life; biochemists generate and test hypotheses, developing useful technology and techniques in the process. (Bullard et al. 2006) A paper, championed by climate change skuptix, (eg, here) complains about the use of large flux corrections in climate models. (Soon et al. 2001) It was published a decade ago.
What was the state of computation back in 2001? There were no iPhones; cellphones still had hinges and were just starting to become controversial in schools. I didn’t see an iPod until late 2002, and for a long time it was just one person who had one*. We had just started trading AIM screen names instead of phone numbers. There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, there was no YouTube. Xanga didn’t even appear on my radar until 2003. The Flash Revolution was in its infancy: StrongBad answered his first email in August 2001. It was, simply put, Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
Since then, while skuptix have done little more than whine, climatologists have been hard at work improving climate models. It’s 2011 and climate models no longer use flux corrections. They still confirm the obvious: blankets are warm. More blankets are warmer.
* <3 
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Bullard, T., Freudenthal, J., Avagyan, S., & Kahr, B. (2007). Test of Cairns-Smith’s ‘crystals-as-genes’ hypothesis Faraday Discussions, 136 DOI: 10.1039/b616612c
Soon, W., Baliunas, S., Idso, S., Kondratyev, K., & Posmentier, E. (2001). Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties Climate Research, 18, 259-275 DOI: 10.3354/cr018259
Supposedly posts with images get all the clix. So here is an image. Via PictureIsUnrelated; clix for sauces.
Part VI of John Everett’s testimony is a criticism of a geoengineering approach to ocean acidification. I agree with his conclusion (that adding alkaline calcium carbonate to the oceans is not a useful approach to ocean acidification) but nevertheless find this section to be problematic. I’ll return to it once I’ve finished with the rest of his testimony.
Part VII is a collection of research suggestions “that would go a long way toward establishing the likely effects of an increased CO2 world.” On the surface, it’s hard to take issue with his suggestions, but in the context of the rest of his testimony, they ring rather hollow.
For example, his first research suggestion is the development of
“a CO2/temperature timeline based on extant research on past climates, at least back to about 600 million years before the present. This effort would provide a critical review of candidate papers and unpublished work that goes well beyond a typical peer-reviewed journal publication, or prior summary reports of the IPCC.”
I think that it would be great to have a comprehensive review of the state of paleoclimatology and paleogeochemistry. But Dr. Everett ignores what we already know about those topics- so what good would such an effort be?
Suggestion #2:
A part of my John Everett series – read more: 0/I - II.0 - II.5 - II.75 - III.0 - III.3 - IV.0 - IV.4 - IV.8 - V - VII - VIII - Full Report
People who minimize or deny the threat of climate change (or ocean acidification, as in part IV of Dr. Everett’s testimony) will often demand that the change be “unprecedented” – that nothing like it has ever happened before in Earth history. (eg, here) The reasoning seems to be that if there have been ecological events like anthropogenic climate change in the past, then current events must not be alarming, since life on earth has each time survived and recovered:
“We know that the Earth has seen these conditions before, and that all the same types of animals and plants of the oceans successfully made it through far more extreme conditions. ” – Everertt (part V)
This has always seemed to me like it’s setting the bar a bit low: Do we only become alarmed when faced with the possibility of sterilizing the planet? And considering the amount of violence which earth life has withstood over the ages, it doesn’t seem a very strong statement that human impact is unlikely to wipe it out.
I’m going to take a break from our regularly scheduled debunking of John Everett’s Senate testimony, to pose a question for creationists and cDesign Proponentsists: Why do people catch swine flu but not tobacco mosaic virus?
I’m not asking why people get sick. I’m not interested in a rehashing of the tired old arguments about the coexistence of god and human suffering. I want an explanation of the fact that, despite the myriad pathogens which infect other branches of the tree of life, it’s only pathogens from other animals (usually other vertebrates) which make humans sick. Poxes, tuberculosis, and anthrax infect cattle. HIV is a mutant variant of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, which infects other primates. Why don’t we fall ill from Partitivirus, pathogen of fungi? Or T4 phage, parasite of bacteria?
