Posts by rakdver 8 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2011
Yes, in addition to the space itself expanding, the galaxies move within it. Andromeda galaxy is too close to us for the expansion of space to matter too much (it contributes about 70km/s to its speed). The proof of expansion comes from observations of galaxies that are about 1000x times as far, and thus the expansion of space affects their distance from us about 1000x as much.
Ehm... there were many papers with (wildly different) temperature predictions published in 80's (several of them by Hansen -- and no, they are not getting more accurate over time). It is pretty much obvious that some of them would approximately match the reality. Note that this conclusion holds whether any of the papers is correct or not :-)
Scientific publishing these days is not really about publishing (it is really rare for me to have to read papers in a journal -- essentially everyone either puts their papers on arxiv or makes them freely available in some other way). It is basically about rating the researchers. When one applies for a job at a university, they will look at your cv and see how many papers you published and where, and use this to form an opinion on how good you are at research. When one applies for tenure or habilitation or whatever, again, your publications will be judged. This is the main reason why attempts to form new journals (possibly with better publication policies) fail -- people do not send good papers to unknown journals, as they would not gain as much prestige as by getting it accepted in a well-known journal. This means that new journals are usually forced to accept lower quality papers, and in long term, this establishes them as lower quality journals. Which further discourages people from publishing good results there.
Why do the people feel need to write titles like that? Given the contents of the article, title "CSIRO: warming possibly by as few as 1 degree" would be about as accurate. Why not report the facts and say "CSIRO predicts warming by 3 degrees, with large uncertainty"? Even better, if you check the original report, the list of references shows that the temperature projections are based on papers from 2007 and 2008. Perhaps it would be better to base the title on something that is new in the report?
"Consider reading this"... actually, what the study confirmed is the temperature reconstructions. I.e., that there have been warming during the 20th century and that its progress and magnitude was correctly estimated. However, there have been very little controversy about this. The issues that most skeptics (or denialists, or whatever you want to call them) raise are more about
1) Is the climate change mostly anthropogenic, or are there some natural effects at play that we cannot affect?
2) Will it continue at the current rate or slow down (or speed up, although that is more of a favourite for the other side of the discussion)?
3) Assuming it continues, how will it affect us? And what are the most politically and economically effective ways to deal with the changes or prevent them?
Given the complexity of the systems in play, I have trouble believing that we have a complete and definitive answer to either of these questions.
Compared with the "natural" occurrence of cancer (which is something like 1 in 5), 1 in 4000 seems negligible. My problem with these numbers is that in principle, they cannot be measured (there are hundreds of other things that affect cancer occurrence to much greater degree), so pretending that we know anything about the matter seems a bit pointless.
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