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Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Aix-Marseille, emphasised the uselessness of certainty. He said that the idea of something being "scientifically proven" was practically an oxymoron and that the very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

"A good scientist is never 'certain'. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability."

physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University agreed. "In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigour and predictability. The fact that global warming estimates are uncertain, for example, has been used by many to argue against any action at the present time," he said.

however, uncertainty is a central component of what makes science successful. Being able to quantify uncertainty, and incorporate it into models, is what makes science quantitative, rather than qualitative. Indeed, no number, no measurement, no observable in science is exact. Quoting numbers without attaching an uncertainty to them implies they have, in essence, no meaning."

Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Bits and Atoms wants everyone to know that "truth" is just a model. "The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don't – they make and test models," he said.

Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It's a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom."

writer and web commentator Clay Shirky suggested that people should think more carefully about how they see the world. His suggestion was the Pareto principle, a pattern whereby the top 1% of the population control 35% of the wealth or, on Twitter, the top 2% of users send 60% of the messages. Sometimes known as the "80/20 rule", the Pareto principle means that the average is far from the middle.It is applicable to many complex systems, "And yet, despite a century of scientific familiarity, samples drawn from Pareto distributions are routinely presented to the public as anomalies, which prevents us from thinking clearly about the world," said Shirky. "We should stop thinking that average family income and the income of the median family have anything to do with one another, or that enthusiastic and normal users of communications tools are doing similar things, or that extroverts should be only moderately more connected than normal people. We should stop thinking that the largest future earthquake or market panic will be as large as the largest historical one; the longer a system persists, the likelier it is that an event twice as large as all previous ones is coming."

Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired, pointed to the value of negative results. "We can learn nearly as much from an experiment that does not work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but rather something to be cultivated. That's a lesson from science that benefits not only laboratory research, but design, sport, engineering, art, entrepreneurship, and even daily life itself. All creative avenues yield the maximum when failures are embraced."

Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine, wrote about the importance of thinking "bottom up not top down", since almost everything in nature and society happens this way.

But most people don't see things that way, said Shermer. "Bottom up reasoning is counterintuitive. This is why so many people believe that life was designed from the top down, and why so many think that economies must be designed and that countries should be ruled from the top down."

Roger Schank, a psychologist and computer scientist, proposed that we should all know the true meaning of "experimentation", which he said had been ruined by bad schooling, where pupils learn that scientists conduct experiments and if we copy exactly what they did in our high school labs we will get the results they got. "In effect we learn that experimentation is boring, is something done by scientists and has nothing to do with our daily lives."Instead, he said, proper experiments are all about assessing and gathering evidence. "In other words, the scientific activity that surrounds experimentation is about thinking clearly in the face of evidence obtained as the result of an experiment. But people who don't see their actions as experiments, and those who don't know how to reason carefully from data, will continue to learn less well from their own experiences than those who do

Lisa Randall, a physicist at Harvard University, argued that perhaps "science" itself would be a useful concept for wider appreciation. "The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we've learned – while appreciating and categorising the extent and limitations of what we know – plays a big role in how we think.

"Many words that summarise the nature of science such as 'cause and effect', 'predictions', and 'experiments', as well as words that describe probabilistic results such as 'mean', 'median', 'standard deviation', and the notion of 'probability' itself help us understand more specifically what this means and how to interpret the world and behaviour within it."

Three months later I was summoned to appear before an Examining Magistrate in Paris based on a complaint of criminal defamation lodged by the author. Why Paris you might ask? Indeed. The author of the book was an Israeli academic. The book was in English. The publisher was Dutch. The reviewer was a distinguished German professor. The review was published on a New York website.

Beyond doubt, once a text or image go online, they become available worldwide, including France. But should that alone give jurisdiction to French courts in circumstances such as this? Does the fact that the author of the book, it turned out, retained her French nationality before going to live and work in Israel make a difference? Libel tourism – libel terrorism to some — is typically associated with London, where notorious high legal fees and punitive damages coerce many to throw in the towel even before going to trial. Paris, as we would expect, is more egalitarian and less materialist. It is very plaintiff friendly.

In France an attack on one’s honor is taken as seriously as a bodily attack. Substantively, if someone is defamed, the bad faith of the defamer is presumed just as in our system, if someone slaps you in the face, it will be assumed that he intended to do so. Procedurally it is open to anyone who feels defamed, to avoid the costly civil route, and simply lodge a criminal complaint.  At this point the machinery of the State swings into action. For the defendant it is not without cost, I discovered. Even if I win I will not recover my considerable legal expenses and conviction results in a fine the size of which may depend on one’s income (the egalitarian reflex at its best). But money is not the principal currency here. It is honor and shame. If I lose, I will stand convicted of a crime, branded a criminal. The complainant will not enjoy a windfall as in London, but considerable moral satisfaction. The chilling effect on book reviewing well beyond France will be considerable.

The case was otiose for two reasons: It was in our view an egregious instance of ‘forum shopping,’ legalese for libel tourism. We wanted it thrown out. But if successful, the Court would never get to the merits –  and it was important to challenge this hugely dangerous attack on academic freedom and liberty of expression. Reversing custom, we specifically asked the Court not to examine our jurisdictional challenge as a preliminary matter but to join it to the case on the merits so that it would have the possibility to pronounce on both issues.

The trial was impeccable by any standard with which I am familiar. The Court, comprised three judges specialized in defamation and the Public Prosecutor. Being a criminal case within the Inquisitorial System, the case began by my interrogation by the President of the Court. I was essentially asked to explain the reasons for refusing to remove the article. The President was patient with my French – fluent but bad!  I was then interrogated by the other judges, the Public Prosecutor and the lawyers for the complainant. The complainant was then subjected to the same procedure after which the lawyers made their (passionate) legal arguments. The Public Prosecutor then expressed her Opinion to the Court. I was allowed the last word. It was a strange mélange of the criminal and civil virtually unknown in the Common Law world. The procedure was less formal, aimed at establishing the truth, and far less hemmed down by rules of evidence and procedure. Due process was definitely served. It was a fair trial.

we steadfastly refused to engage the complainants challenges to the veracity of the critical statements made by the reviewer. The thrust of our argument was that absent bad faith and malice, so long as the review in question addressed the book and did not make false statement about the author such as plagiarism, it should be shielded from libel claims, let alone criminal libel. Sorting out of the truth should be left to academic discourse, even if academic discourse has its own biases and imperfections.

So the question becomes "what is denialism?" Denialism is a mindset that chooses to deny reality in order to avoid an uncomfortable truth. Denialism creates a false sense of truth through the subjective selection of evidence (cherry picking). Unhelpful evidence is rejected and excuses are made, while supporting evidence is accepted uncritically - its meaning and importance exaggerated. It is a common feature of denialism to claim the existence of some sort of powerful conspiracy to suppress the truth. Rejection by the mainstream of some piece of evidence supporting the denialist view, no matter how flawed, is taken as further proof of the supposed conspiracy. In this way the denialist always has a fallback position.

Delingpole makes the following claim: Whether Goldacre chooses to ignore it or not, there are many, many hugely talented, intelligent men and women out there – from mining engineer turned Hockey-Stick-breaker Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick to bloggers Donna LaFramboise and Jo Nova to physicist Richard Lindzen….and I really could go on and on – who have amassed a body of hugely powerful evidence to show that the AGW meme which has spread like a virus around the world these last 20 years is seriously flawed.

So he mentions a bunch of people who are intelligent and talented and have amassed evidence to the effect that the consensus of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is a myth. Should I take his word for it? No. I am a sceptic. I will examine the evidence and the people behind it.

MM claims that global temperatures are not accelerating. The claims have however been roundly disproved as explained here. It is worth noting at this point that neither man is a climate scientist. McKitrick is an economist and McIntyre is a mining industry policy analyst. It is clear from the very detailed rebuttal article that McIntrye and McKitrick have no qualifications to critique the earlier paper and betray fundamental misunderstandings of methodologies employed in that study.

This Wikipedia article explains in better laymens terms how the MM claims are faulty.

It is difficult for me to find out much about blogger Donna LaFrambois. As far as I can see she runs her own blog at http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com and is the founder of another site here http://www.noconsensus.org/. It's not very clear to me what her credentials are

She seems to be a critic of the so-called climate bible, a comprehensive report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

I am familiar with some of the criticisms of this panel. Working Group 2 famously overstated the estimated rate of disappearance of the Himalayan glacier in 2007 and was forced to admit the error. Working Group 2 is a panel of biologists and sociologists whose job is to evaluate the impact of climate change. These people are not climate scientists. Their report takes for granted the scientific basis of climate change, which has been delivered by Working Group 1 (the climate scientists). The science revealed by Working Group 1 is regarded as sound (of course this is just a conspiracy, right?) At any rate, I don't know why I should pay attention to this blogger. Anyone can write a blog and anyone with money can own a domain. She may be intelligent, but I don't know anything about her and with all the millions of blogs out there I'm not convinced hers is of any special significance.

Richard Lindzen. Okay, there's information about this guy. He has a wiki page, which is more than I can say for the previous two. He is an atmospheric physicist and Professor of Meteorology at MIT.

According to Wikipedia, it would seem that Lindzen is well respected in his field and represents the 3% of the climate science community who disagree with the 97% consensus.

The second to last paragraph of Delingpole's article asks this: If  Goldacre really wants to stick his neck out, why doesn’t he try arguing against a rich, powerful, bullying Climate-Change establishment which includes all three British main political parties, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister, the President of the USA, the EU, the UN, most schools and universities, the BBC, most of the print media, the Australian Government, the New Zealand Government, CNBC, ABC, the New York Times, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, most of the rest of the City, the wind farm industry, all the Big Oil companies, any number of rich charitable foundations, the Church of England and so on?I hope Ben won't mind if I take this one for him (first of all, Big Oil companies? Are you serious?) The answer is a question and the question is "Where is your evidence?"

But even if there is no law prohibiting Jones’ action, isn’t he morally to blame for creating the environment that led to the murders? Didn’t he know Muslims would riot, and people might die? It seems ridiculous to assume that Jones could know such a thing, even if parts of the Muslim world have a poor track record in this area. But imagine for a moment that Jones did know Muslims would riot, and people would die. This does not make the act of burning a book and the act of murder morally equivalent, nor does it make the book burner responsible for reactions to his act. In and of itself, burning a book is a morally neutral act. Why would this change because some misguided individuals think book burning is worth the death penalty? And why is it that so many have automatically assumed the reaction to be respectable? To use an example nearer to some of us, recall when PZ Myers desecrated a communion wafer. If some Christian was offended, and went on to murder the closest atheist, would we really blame Myers? Is Myers' offense any different than Jones’?

the deep-seated belief among many that blasphemy is wrong. This means any reaction to blasphemy is less wrong, and perhaps even excused, compared to the blasphemous offense. Even President Obama said that, "The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry.” To be sure, Obama went on to denounce the murders, and to state that burning a holy book is no excuse for murder. But Obama apparently couldn’t condemn the murders without also condemning Jones’ act of religious defiance.

As it turns out, this attitude is exactly what created the environment that led to murders in the first place. The members of the mob believed that religious belief should be free from public critical inquiry, and that a person who offends religious believers should face punishment. In the absence of official prosecution, they took matters into their own hands and sought anyone on the side of the offender. It didn’t help that Afghan leaders stoked the flames of hatred — but they only did so because they agreed with the mob’s sentiment to begin with. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the U.S. should punish those responsible, and three well-known Afghan mullahs urged their followers to take to the streets and protest to call for the arrest of Jones

The typical establishment individual would refuse to contribute an article to an independent medium that is known to carry opposition party voices, for example. In Singapore’s political culture, it is assumed that any such medium would be blacklisted by people at the top, and that anyone who cooperates with it will be guilty by association. Or, perhaps it is simply that most establishment types lack the confidence to engage in debate on a truly level playing field.

Schmidt has refused to retract his comments and maintains that the majority of papers published in the journal are "dross"."I would personally not credit any article that was published there with any useful contribution to the science," he told the Guardian. "Saying a paper was published in E&E has become akin to immediately discrediting it." He also describes the journal as a "backwater" of poorly presented and incoherent contributions that "anyone who has done any science can see are fundamentally flawed from the get-go."

Schmidt points to an E&E paper that claimed that the Sun is made of iron. "The editor sent it out for review, where it got trashed (as it should have been), and [Boehmer-Christiansen] published it anyway," he says.

The journal also published a much-maligned analysis suggesting that levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could go up and down by 100 parts per million in a year or two, prompting marine biologist Ralph Keeling at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California to write a response to the journal, in which he asked: "Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science?"

Schmidt and Keeling are not alone in their criticisms. Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said he regrets publishing a paper in the journal in 2000 – one year after it was established and before he had time to realise that it was about to become a fringe platform for climate sceptics. "[E&E] has published a number of low-quality papers, and the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet," Pielke says. "If I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere."

Any paper published in E&E is now ignored by the broader scientific community, according to Pielke. "In some cases perhaps that is justified, but I would argue that it provided a convenient excuse to ignore our paper on that basis alone, and not on the merits of its analysis," he said. In the long run, Pielke is confident that good ideas will win out over bad ideas. "But without care to the legitimacy of our science institutions – including journals and peer review – that long run will be a little longer," he says.

she has no intention of changing the way she runs E&E – which is not listed on the ISI Journal Master list, an official list of academic journals – in response to his latest criticisms.

Schmidt is unsurprised. "You would need a new editor, new board of advisors, and a scrupulous adherence to real peer review, perhaps ... using an open review process," he said. "But this is very unlikely to happen since their entire raison d'être is political, not scientific."

European politicians have their own blind spots at the interface of science and policy.  For instance, several years ago former German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel claimed rather implausibly that: "You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don't have to have higher CO2 emissions."  His explanation was that Germany participates in emissions trading and this would necessarily limit carbon dioxide no matter how much was produced. Obviously, emissions trading cannot make the impossible possible.

We should expect policy makers to face difficulties when it comes to governance when it involves considerations of science, technology, and innovation for the simple reason that they are just like everyone else -- mostly ignorant about mostly everything.

in 2010, the US NSF reported that 28% of Americans and 34% of Europeans believed that the sun goes around the earth.  Similarly, 30% of Americans and 41% of Europeans believe that radioactivity results only from human activities.  It should not be so surprising when we learn that policy makers may share such perspectives.

A popular view is that more education about science and technology will lead to better decisions.  While education is, of course, important to a healthy democracy, it will never result in a populace (or their representatives) with expertise in everything.  

Achieving such heroic levels of expertise is not realistic for anyone.  Instead, we must rely on specialized experts to inform decision making. Just as you and I often need to consult with experts when dealing with our health, home repairs, finances, and other tasks, so too do policy makers need to tap into expertise in order to make good decisions.

it should be far less worrisome that the public or policy makers do not understand this or that information that experts may know well.  What should be of more concern is that policy makers appear to lack an understanding of how they can tap into expertise to inform decision making.  This situation is akin to flying blind. Specialized expertise typically does not compel particular decisions, but it does help to make decisions more informed.  This distinction lies behind Winston Churchill's oft-cited advice that science should be "on tap, but not on top." Effective governance does not depend upon philosopher kings in governments or in the populace, but rather on the use of effective mechanisms for bringing expertise into the political process.

It is the responsibility - even the special expertise - of policy makers to know how to use the instruments of government to bring experts into the process of governance. The troubling aspect of the statements and actions by the Gummers, Gabriels, and Bachmanns of the political world lies not in their lack of knowledge about science, but in their lack of knowledge about government.

One might think that such an esteemed organization would prove an insurmountable challenge for a bunch of disaffected kids to hack. World-renowned, government-recognized experts against Anonymous? HBGary should be able to take their efforts in stride. Unfortunately for HBGary, neither the characterization of Anonymous nor the assumption of competence on the security company's part are accurate, as the story of how HBGary was hacked will make clear. Anonymous is a diverse bunch: though they tend to be younger rather than older, their age group spans decades. Some may still be in school, but many others are gainfully employed office-workers, software developers, or IT support technicians, among other things. With that diversity in age and experience comes a diversity of expertise and ability.

Keith Kloor, blogging on the session  at Collide-a-Scape, included a sobering assessment of the scientist-journalist tensions over global warming from Tom Rosensteil, a panelist and long-time journalist who now heads up Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: If you’re waiting for the press to persuade the public, you’re going to lose. The press doesn’t see that as its job.

scientists have  a great opportunity, and responsibility, to tell their own story more directly, as some are doing occasionally through Dot Earth “ Post Cards” and The Times’ Scientist at Work blog.

Naomi Oreskes, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of “Merchants of Doubt“: Of Mavericks and Mules Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Realclimate.org: Between Sound Bites and the Scientific Paper: Communicating in the Hinterland Thomas Lessl, a scholar at the University of Georgia focused on the cultural history of science: Reforming Scientific Communication About Anthropogenic Climate Change

I focused on two words in the title of the session — diversity and denial. The diversity of lines of inquiry in climate science has a two-pronged impact. It helps build a robust overall picture of a growing human influence on a complex system. But for many of the most important  pixel points in that picture, there is robust, durable and un-manufactured debate. That debate can then be exploited by naysayers eager to cast doubt on the enterprise, when in fact — as I’ve written here before — it’s simply the (sometimes ugly) way that science progresses.

My denial, I said, lay in my longstanding presumption, like that of many scientists and journalists, that better communication of information will tend to change people’s perceptions, priorities and behavior. This attitude, in my view, crested for climate scientists in the wake of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In his talk, Thomas Lessl said much of this attitude is rooted in what he and some other social science scholars call “scientism,” the idea — rooted in the 19th century — that scientific inquiry is a “distinctive mode of inquiry that promises to bring clarity to all human endeavors.” [5:45 p.m. | Updated Chris Mooney sent an e-mail noting how the discussion below resonates with "Do Scientists Understand the Public," a report he wrote last year for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and explored here.]

Scientism, though it is good at promoting the recognition that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, also promotes communication behavior that is bad for the scientific ethos. By this I mean that it turns such communication into combat. By presuming that scientific understanding is the only criterion that matters, scientism inclines public actors to treat resistant audiences as an enemy: If the public doesn’t get the science, shame on the public. If the public rejects a scientific claim, it is either because they don’t get it or because they operate upon some sinister motive.

Scientific knowledge cannot take the place of prudence in public affairs.

Prudence, according to Robert Harriman, “is the mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action. Contingent events cannot be known with certainty, and actions are intelligible only with regard to some idea of what is good.”

Scientism tends to suppose a one-size-fits-all notion of truth telling. But in the public sphere, people don’t think that way. They bring to the table a variety of truth standards: moral judgment, common-sense judgment, a variety of metaphysical perspectives, and ideological frameworks. The scientists who communicate about climate change may regard these standards as wrong-headed or at best irrelevant, but scientists don’t get to decide this in a democratic debate. When scientists become public actors, they have stepped outside of science, and they are obliged to honor the rules of communication and thought that govern the rest of the world. This might be different, if climate change was just about determining the causes of climate change, but it never is. Getting from the acceptance of ACC to acceptance of the kinds of emissions-reducing policies that are being advocated takes us from one domain of knowing into another.

One might object by saying that the formation of public policy depends upon first establishing the scientific bases of ACC, and that the first question can be considered independently of the second. Of course that is right, but that is an abstract academic distinction that does not hold in public debates. In public debates a different set of norms and assumptions apply: motive is not to be casually set aside as a nonfactor. Just because scientists customarily bracket off scientific topics from their policy implications does not mean that lay people do this—or even that they should be compelled to do so. When scientists talk about one thing, they seem to imply the other. But which is the motive force? Are they advocating for ACC because they subscribe to a political worldview that supports legal curtailments upon free enterprise? Or do they support such a political worldview because they are convinced of ACC? The fact that they speak as scientists may mean to other scientists that they reason from evidence alone. But the public does not necessarily share this assumption. If scientists don’t respect this fact about their audiences, they are bound to get in trouble. [Read the rest.]

The right-wing ideologues were sorely disappointed, and reacted viciously in the political sphere by attacking their own scientist, but Muller’s scientific integrity overcame any biases he might have harbored at the beginning. He “called ‘em as he saw ‘em” and told truth to power.

it speaks well of the scientific process when a prominent skeptic like Muller does his job properly and admits that his original biases were wrong. As reported in the Los Angeles Times : Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which contributed some funding to the Berkeley effort, said Muller’s statement to Congress was “honorable” in recognizing that “previous temperature reconstructions basically got it right…. Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”

This is the essence of the scientific method at its best. There may be biases in our perceptions, and we may want to find data that fits our preconceptions about the world, but if science is done properly, we get a real answer, often one we did not expect or didn’t want to hear. That’s the true test of when science is giving us a reality check: when it tells us “an inconvenient truth”, something we do not like, but is inescapable if one follows the scientific method and analyzes the data honestly.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea.

Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time. I want my kids to admire him. To his credit, Sorkin gives him the only lines of true insight in the film: In response to the twins’ lawsuit, he asks, does “a guy who makes a really good chair owe money to anyone who ever made a chair?” And to his partner who signed away his ownership in Facebook: “You’re gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” Friends who know Zuckerberg say such insight is common. No doubt his handlers are panicked that the film will tarnish the brand. He should listen less to these handlers. As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world. If, that is, we allow that new world to continue to flourish.

US citizens face economic problems that are all too real, and the country's future crucially depends on education, science and technology as it faces increasing competition from China and other emerging science powers.

Physical means of amelioration, such as changing the planetary albedo, are the subject of other papers of this theme issue and I thought it would be useful here to describe physiological methods for geoengineering. These include tree planting, the fertilization of ocean algal ecosystems with iron, the direct synthesis of food from inorganic raw materials and the production of biofuels.

Tree planting would seem to be a sensible way to remove CO2 naturally from the air, at least for the time it takes for the tree to reach maturity. But in practice the clearance of forests for farm land and biofuels is now proceeding so rapidly that there is little chance that tree planting could keep pace.

Oceans cover over 70 per cent of the Earth's surface and are uninhabited by humans. In addition, most of the ocean surface waters carry only a sparse population of photosynthetic organisms, mainly because the mineral and other nutrients in the water below the thermocline do not readily mix with the warmer surface layer. Some essential nutrients such as iron are present in suboptimal abundance even where other nutrients are present and this led to the suggestion by John Martin in a lecture in 1991 that fertilization with the trace nutrient iron would allow algal blooms to develop that would cool the Earth by removing CO2

The Earth system is dynamically stable but with strong feedbacks. Its behaviour resembles more the physiology of a living organism than that of the equilibrium box models of the last century

For almost all other ailments, there was nothing available but nostrums and comforting words. At that time, despite a well-founded science of physiology, we were still ignorant about the human body or the host–parasite relationship it had with other organisms. Wise physicians knew that letting nature take its course without intervention would often allow natural self-regulation to make the cure. They were not averse to claiming credit for their skill when this happened.

The alternative is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state.

Global heating would not have happened but for the rapid expansion in numbers and wealth of humanity. Had we heeded Malthus's warning and kept the human population to less than one billion, we would not now be facing a torrid future. Whether or not we go for Bali or use geoengineering, the planet is likely, massively and cruelly, to cull us, in the same merciless way that we have eliminated so many species by changing their environment into one where survival is difficult.

even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return, partly for reasons outlined above. The authors (Pedro Carneiro, James Heckman, and Edward Vytlacil) make that point explicitly, stating “Some marginal expansions of schooling produce gains that are well below average returns, in general agreement with the analysis of Charles Murray.”  (p.29)

Once the economy improves, and history tells us it will improve within our lifetimes, those who already have a college degree under their belts will be better equipped to take advantage of new employment opportunities than those who don’t. Perhaps not because of the actual knowledge obtained through their degrees, but definitely as an offset to the social stigma that still exists for those who do not attend college. A college degree may not help a young person secure professional work immediately – so new graduates spend a few years waiting tables until the right opportunity comes along. So what? It’s probably good for them. But they have 40-50 years in the workforce ahead of them and need to be forward-thinking if they don’t want to wait tables for that entire time. If we stop encouraging all young people to view college as both a goal and a possibility, and start weeding out those whose “prior academic records suggest little likelihood of academic success” which, let’s face it, will happen in larger proportions in poorer schools, then in 20 years we’ll find that efforts to reduce socioeconomic gaps between minorities and non-minorities have been seriously undermined.

Bet you a lot of those janitors with PhDs are from the humanities, in particular ethic studies, film studies,…basket weaving courses… or non-economics social sciences, eg., sociology, anthropology of never heard of country….There should be a buyer beware warning on all those non-quantitative majors that make people into sophisticated malcontent complainers!

This article also presumes that the purpose of higher education is merely to train one for a career path and enhance future income. This devalues the university, turning it into a vocational training institution. There’s nothing in this data that suggests that they are “sophisticated complainers”; that’s an unwarranted inference.

it was mentioned that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would like 80% of American youth to attend and graduate from college. It is a nice thought in many ways. As a teacher and professor, intellectually I am all for it (if the university experience is a serious one, which these days, I don’t know).

students’ expectations in attending college are not just intellectual; they are careerist (probably far more so)

This employment issue has more to do with levels of training and subsequent levels of expectation. When a Korean student emerges from 20 years of intense study with a university degree, he or she reasonably expects a “good” job — which is to say, a well-paying professional or managerial job with good forward prospects. But here’s the problem. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, a society in which 80% of the available jobs are professional, managerial, comfortable, and well-paid. No way.

Korea has a number of other jobs, but some are low-paid service work, and many others — in factories, farming, fishing — are scorned as 3-D jobs (difficult, dirty, and dangerous). Educated Koreans don’t want them. So the country is importing labor in droves — from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, even Uzbekistan. In the countryside, rural Korean men are having such a difficult time finding prospective wives to share their agricultural lifestyle that fully 40% of rural marriages are to poor women from those other Asian countries, who are brought in by match-makers and marriage brokers.

Hashtags then began popping up outside of Twitter, in e-mails, chat windows and text messages.

Using a hashtag is also a way for someone to convey that they’re part of a certain scene.