How the belief in beauty has triggered a crisis in physics - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05374-9 <comment><USER3> The crisis (if it exists) is not triggered by a belief in beauty, but by the simple fact that LHC hasn't yet seen anything "new" (beyond the very-important success of the Higgs discovery).

The observation of the apparent non-existence of something (supersymmetry, in this case) is at least as important as the existence of something. Supersymmetry is one of high-energy physics' best guesses as to the nature of the universe. If that turns out not to be true, we have learned something very important.

      "Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
      It is the center hole that makes it useful.
      Shape clay into a vessel;
      It is the space within that makes it useful.
      Cut doors and windows for a room;
      It is the holes which make it useful.
      Therefore profit comes from what is there;
      Usefulness from what is not there."
      Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - Chapter 11
      (translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

Physics is alive and well; there are plenty of big open problems with strong experimental backing:

How does gravity connect with the rest of physics?

What is the nature of dark energy?

What is the nature of dark matter?

Where is the rest of the CP violation?

What gives neutrinos mass?

(And, the doozies that are so hard to answer that nobody touches them: Why does time have a direction? Is there something underlying quantum mechanics?)

<comment><USER4> The crisis that Hossenfelder is addressing is that there has been no significant progress that's been experimentally verified in fundamental physics since the birth of string theory in the 1980s. Yes, there are a lot of big open problems, but they remain open. Yes, we have recently found experimental evidence for things like the Higgs boson, but that was first predicted in the 1960s. Yes, we can rule out some versions of string theory thanks to LHC results, but there are a vast multitude of string theories, and that's not a lot to show for nearly 40 years.

<comment><USER5> Some results that I remember just now:

* There is a recent 4.5+4.8 sigma excess in neutrinos oscillation that hints a new neutrino [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/weird-neutrino-exces...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/weird-neutrino-excess-wont-go-away-hints-at-new-physics/) [technical note, you can't add sigmas naively, 4.5+4.8=6.1]

* The value of the magnetic moment of the muon (g) is too high. IIRC this result has only a 2.5 or 3 sigma, so it's far from confirmed.

* There are some experiment to prove that the neutrino is a majorana particle and that the neutrino and the anti-neutrino is the same particle. I don't remember any good announcement, so I think that the experiments have still too early results or the results are not interesting. [I don't like this theory, but many people that knows more than me like it.]

<comment><USER6> Sorry to nitpick but if we're adding variances, 4.5^2 + 4.8^2 = 6.6^2

<comment><USER5> Essentially yes (unless you are nearby an tactician or a journal referee). I just copied the number from the article, I guess there is some rounding.

Also, the 6.2 or 6.1 is "unofficial" because it's difficult to mix results from different experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"Why should the laws of nature care about what I find beautiful?"_

My suspicion is this is something we will forever wrestle with because "beauty" is a proxy shorthand measurement for things of real value, but it is confounded by an enormous and oft abused potential to use this fact fraudulently. That which has real value is often appreciated for its beauty, but the street doesn't run both ways. Seeking to make something look good doesn't necessarily give it the more valuable underlying properties.

In GIS school, I learned that a good map will typically be described as _beautiful_ , but a beautiful map isn't necessarily good. A good map is elegantly designed to effectively convey information. When the goal is achieved, high quality design also has inherent aesthetic appeal. But trying to just make a map pretty doesn't make it more useful. In fact, it often makes it less useful.

I think the same principle generalizes. I was born with serious respiratory problems. I always had really lousy fingernails. With getting healthier, my fingernails have grown stronger and prettier. This makes me suspect that manicures and painted nails are about trying to enhance a signal of baseline good health that is inherently valuable and attractive. But painting your nails doesn't actually improve your respiratory health. Fake glued on nails can give an appearance of health that isn't real.

<comment><USER8> Maybe we should care about beauty because Nature cares about beauty the way she cares about symmetry. I'm just spitballing here, but maybe Emily Noether's intellectual heir will find a link between the conservation of energy and Kolmogorov complexity (if this hasn't already been shown).

<comment><USER7> Maybe _beauty_ is merely a word for "my brain has crunched vast amounts of data and concluded that something very, very fundamentally appealing is going on here and I shall call that by a word suggesting visual appeal because I assessed that appeal with my eyes."

<comment><USER9> Maybe "beauty" is ultimately a name for symmetry, where symmetry is a name for invariance under some transformation. And there is always a new type of transformation to consider and therefore a new and perhaps more subtle form of beauty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >"Why should the laws of nature care about what I find beautiful?"

I find this question to be missing the fundamental point of scientific endeavour. Nature obviously does not care about beauty, but scientists do because extracting meaning and order (laws) from observations and building models is the _very essence_ of scientific insight.

The goal of science is not to replicate nature, it is to build a model of nature from which we can collect insights and make predictions, the model does not need to 'conform to' nature. That's not the point. If that were the case we could just dump the LHC data into a textbook. There is a great story writen by Borges called _The Exactitude of Science_ where he creates the analogy of a large, but useless map:

 _"... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."_

<comment><USER11> Such a map is far from useless - if you want to see any other area you don't have to travel there; you can "visit" all areas, you can duplicate any one area and experiment on how changes will affect it, etc.. It's only the bulk of the map that makes it impractical, we actually now have maps that are pretty close to that, we just found a way to make them less bulky.

I think the end goal of science actually is very close to the 1:1 scale map in Borges' story [1] - we want to be able to say in any situation "if I take this scenario and run it forward then what are the outcomes".

We can do this to some extent. We can predict paths of simple objects, we can predict how macroscopic systems will play out to some degree of accuracy. We can even predict the existence of particles and confirm the consistency of such predictions in later observations.

Surely the goal is to make our predictions better, up to any limit the universe gives. We want to be able to perfectly simulate the world - we don't just want the 1:1 map, we want a 1x10^20:1 map with moving people, with weather, with every possible feature that we can measure so that instead of travelling to Ulaanbaatur and dropping a rocket motor from the troposphere we can do that in the "map", and measure the effects in the map and so know what the effects would be if that were to happen for real.

We can't use the Universe as it's own map, we can't arbitrarily look at it at any scale, we can't run it back or duplicate it when we want to re-run experiments, we can't visit any part without travelling, etc. - so we seek to simulate it, through simplification because we can't currently simulate it any other way. As we uncover ever better models we learn to simulate limited sections or limited facets to a greater and greater degree.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science)

<comment><USER10> but the predictability in this example comes from the function that maps one state of the map to the next through time, not from any visible or high- resolution feature in any particular snapshot of the map. You don't determine the function and the skeleton of the map by increasing its resolution, you obtain its functions by abstracting the unnecessary details away to figure out what the important objects and regularities are.

If you want to figure out how the tube in London works you don't need a photorealistic, lifelike copy of the subway system, you need an abstraction of the network, its congestion, routes and so forth. Those are idealised mental models that are simplifying the real system, but they are much more useful to you than the real thing.

<comment><USER11> Assuming you want to know how the tube works, as a passenger, independently of other systems, then yes.

But if you're building a grand unified model of how London works then not only do you want to be able to abstract certain facets, you also want to be able to combine the models those abstractions create with data points to build a more complex systemic model. You want to look at where the stations are in relation to others, how the different transport networks link, what happens when a tube-train stops - how does the effect ripple through the system and alter what time a particular Pret-a-manger have to restock the sandwiches.

At that point the abstraction in to a simplified system that only describes the tube is useless you need to combine the abstractions to model the entire system - and you may be able to get there, except your model missed out sunspot activity and a bus-driver turned the wrong way because their GPS was marginally out and the Pret-a-manger manager missed the start of the shift and now you have to eat Cheese instead of Mexican chicken.

In short you want your abstraction to be able to construct a model that is as close as necessary for the purpose to the "photorealistic, lifelike copy" of whatever it is you're seeking to predict. If you only wish to predict how many stops you'll need to stay on the tube for then a simple tube map suffices. If you want to predict airflow through the tube system and how it affects heat exchange then a more complex model will be needed, with different abstractions (preserving length of tunnels for example).

If you want to predict everything that it's possible to predict ...

[Disclaimer I've no idea what Pret's menu is.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Beauty", in this context, means "concise". Basic physical laws used to be very short, with no arbitrary constants. "F = m _a ". "E = i_r". "E = m*c^2". Kepler's laws. Maxwell's equations. The Schroedinger wave equation. When researchers discovered the general rules that described how things worked, they could be expressed as simple expressions. Physics progressed by discovering such simple expressions.

Then that stopped working. That's the crisis.

<comment><USER13> > _Then that stopped working. That 's the crisis._

It didn't stop working. There isn't any unexplainable data - the opposite in fact, too many explanations for the data we have.

<comment><USER14> And in the case of string theory, we have explanation for data we don't have.

<comment><USER13> Every theory "explains data we don't have," for example F=ma makes a prediction about the motion of a 10^100^100^100kg particle under a 10^100^100^100N force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I may be biased by the selection of physicist I watched lectures of, but they would probably tend to disagree with the statement that physics got lost in mathematics. Especially Nima Arkani-Hamed convincingly argues that we are fundamentally looking at the universe from the wrong perspective. Relativity and quantum theory are build around a few very fundamental principles like locality and unitarity and somewhat surprisingly those principles single out a very small set of possible theories that are compatible with those principles.

But on the other hand those principles seem to obscure a more fundamental and simpler truth behind them. For example calculating scattering amplitudes may require hundreds or thousands of terms from different Feynman diagrams with more and more virtual particles but in the end they all cancel out. Surprisingly again there are ways to arrive at the same results - <USER2> recursion relations and the amplituhedron - but with comparatively extremely simple calculations. But unlike Feynman diagrams, which suggest a picture of particles interacting locally in space, those calculations provide no picture that can be easily matched against recognizable things.

The results are the same but there is nothing that looks like locally interacting particles in there. This then suggests that things we currently considered fundamental, for instance locality, are not fundamental, that they emerge from something more fundamental. And this is where mathematics might be really useful, you try to reformulate existing theories in new ways and maybe you find a representation that is much simpler than what we have and maybe that is what the universe is really like as compared to what it looks like to us. And maybe that will also suggest new experiments to be done and which do not require energies far beyond our current reach.

<comment><USER16> I have a question that didn't get answered when I talked to people about amplituhedron. Do the higher k (dimension, I'm unsure) Grasmannian calculations have any bearing on a world without super symmetry. Because Nima's tool is only useful for super symmetric calculations then honestly it's not very compelling. I want to be wrong, it's very beautiful math, but it seems holy impractical for "real world" standard model physics.

<comment><USER15> I am a total layman, so I don't know. But if I understood it right, the nice final results relies on the use of Grassmannn variables which eventually cancel out. Whether or not there is a path to non-supersymmetric theories, I have no idea. But even if it fundamentally requires supersymmetry, the jury is still out on whether or not the universe is supersymmetric even though the best versions have now been ruled out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Happens to the best of us: [http://www.georgehart.com/virtual- polyhedra/kepler.html](http://www.georgehart.com/virtual- polyhedra/kepler.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Having studied both pure physics and pure mathematics, my impression is that physicists don't really do mathematics, they use a pidgin form of symbolic expression related to mathematics with the specific goal of studying natural systems. And this is a pretty subtle point to explain to anyone who has not experienced both cultures significantly. But the MO of studying systems that can be measured in physical reality, is a constraining principle. Mathematics is not constrained to so-called reality and as a result can fly higher and see farther; it has a better imagination, if you will.

Burden me not with any reminders about reality, people needing to get up to make the donuts or whatever. I know all that. I'm not knocking reality, reality's great. Nor do I need reminding how beautiful and strange and wild and cool some of the math in physics really can be. Utterly, utterly rad, without a doubt. But working with such high-dimensional spaces, such high- rank/high-variable transformations, and such high-density symbolic representations, as physics seeks to do, requires a much freer and more "artistic" approach than some kind of mental slavery to what can be seen. (By which I mean, what can be measured.) Physicists need more pure math, and when I say pure, I actually prefer the term theoretical math. Because physicists need to design their own math, and that is in one sense what theoretical mathematics means.

Physicists are better at what laypeople think of as mathematics--huge whiteboards, filled with esoteric symbols, furrowed brows and chalk-stained hands jittering through the air in some magnificent, halting dance of frustration & eureka. That's what people think of when they think of "doing mathematics". But physicists don't really do what mathematicians do, not really, not completely. And all those purely esoteric maths that no one except pure mathematicians ever get to see, say, topology, homology, algebraic geometry, abstract algebra, etc, are hiding some real gems of thought.

I'd like to see Physics, finding itself at a halt, go and start to study all the Mathematics it's been putting off.

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure guys like Ed Witten are doing real math. Or at least he fooled the mathematicians thoroughly enough that they gave him a fields medal. I'm neither a physicist nor a mathematician, but your characterization seems a bit unfair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "Why should the laws of nature care about what I find beautiful?"

This article is a nice counterpoint to Paul Dirac's speech in favour of mathematical beauty in physical theories. [0]

Some quotes from Dirac:

> What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of > its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical > beauty. [...] We now see that we have to change the principle of simplicity > into a principle of mathematical beauty.

Interestingly, he also says:

> For example, only four-dimensional space is of importance in physics, while > spaces with other numbers of dimensions are of about equal interest in > mathematics.

> It may well be, however, that this discrepancy is due to the incompleteness > of present-day knowledge, and that future developments will show four- > dimensional space to be of far greater mathematical interest than all the > others.

His prediction here was almost correct. Except it was physics that started to take an interest in a higher number of dimensions.

[0] [http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/events/strings02/dirac/speach.htm...](http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/events/strings02/dirac/speach.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> You get this in mathematics too. The four colour theorem for example has an "ugly" brute forced machine checked proof that's impractical for humans to check.

Elegance and simplicity should be sought after, and ugly proofs can be an indication that you're missing the right abstraction but I don't see why all true statements should have an elegant proof.

</comment><comment><USER22> Goal of science is to predict as many phenomena with least amount of assumptions. And minimizing assumptions usually makes a theory more beautiful.

But it is only my opinion and it is very subjective :).

</comment><comment><USER23> Supersymmetry has not been found; however the top quark is an encouraging precedent.

The top quark was predicted in the early 70s, and was expected to be found soon. However colliders failed to find them, and its minimum mass kept getting pushed up. It wasn't found until 1995, at a much higher energy than was initially expected.

<comment><USER24> How did they account for the additional, unpredicted energy?

<comment><USER11> AIUI ...

The presence of Top was predicted with the finding of Bottom, in order to maintain symmetry. It was expected to have a higher energy otherwise it would have been found ... but the energy turned out to be much higher. It wasn't that it was predicted to be low energy and was found to have a higher energy, it was that we knew it had higher energy than Bottom, but just not how high - like climbing a convex hill covered in cloud, one can't see the top, and one isn't sure until you reach it how high it's going.

It's my understanding that the unpredictably high energy hasn't properly been accounted for but is believed to relate to Yukawa couplings.

The energy _was_ predicted within certain lower+upper bounds in '94 just prior to the confirmation of the Top in '95, and a Nobel was awarded for that work [relating to T parameters ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peskin%E2%80%93Takeuchi_parame...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peskin%E2%80%93Takeuchi_parameter)) which I don't claim to understand! 't Hooft and someone, erm, ...].

In part I believe it relates to how the Higgs works and whether the Higgs is composite - possibly being comprised of Top and Anti-Top in one theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Peter Woit writes regularly about this crisis on his blog "Not Even Wrong". He wrote about Sabine Hossenfelder's new book "Lost in Math" here [https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314)

Feynman reminds us that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

</comment><comment><USER26> What are we going to replace the word 'crisis' with, once we've used it to describe everything in modern life?

</comment><comment><USER11> Beauty is a feature of our Universe. It's not that surprising to find it also in descriptions (equations, theories). Beauty is a Universe-y characteristic.

I imagine if we were in a different universe then our concept of beauty would differ and perhaps, perhaps, conform more to the parameters of theories that described that universe.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is she suggesting us throwing out Occam's Razor? That's pretty radical.

<comment><USER8> I'd use another, less charitable, word. Finding the laws of physics isn't any different than finding a winning play in Go, except the search space is vastly larger. If we aren't going to pay for things like the Superconducting Supercollider, we aren't going to pay for a brute-force search to find the laws of physics. We have to use heuristics to guide the search. "Beauty" has worked in the past (Gell-Mann has a TED talk on this) so there's no reason to abandon it - until it doesn't work. Then we'll try something else. In addition it took, what, 300 years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem? Good grief. For hard problems, 40 years is nothing.

<comment><USER28> Brute force search isn't what solved Go. What was needed was a model with the right information, not all the information or the most elegant or compressive version of the information, but the right information. What "right" means in this context is what we need to figure out!

<comment><USER29> To be clear, Go is not "solved". We just have AI they is strictly "very good" at it (superhuman).

<comment><USER28> fair point, poor language from me there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Humans find symmetry pretty, and fortunately experience has taught us time and again that often the more symmetric solution is the better one.

<comment><USER31> Not sure. Look at any symmetric figure, and compare it with a real flower, or a leaf, or a bee. Which is more beautiful? The former looks dead in comparison. I think the laws of nature are more similar in their "beauty" to the latter.

<comment><USER9> I'm thinking vaguely of how, in a song, a "perfect rhyme" can be as jarring as the lack of a rhyme where expected. I started listening for them and it seems as though "general rhymes" are the rule. There's something about imperfect symmetry in nature.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Every major advance in physics has arrived with a new paradigm of mathematics, usually more than one new paradigm. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but I doubt quantum gravity is going to be solved without the invention of major new mathematics. It's not going to be found by tweaking some kludj no matter how "ugly", nor hidden inside some long-familiar object (e.g., the E8 group...and for the record, Garrett Lisi is NOT a highly respected physicist.)</comment>


In Portal, Violating Physics Proves Weirdly Satisfying - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/10/gamesfrontiers_1008

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the song that plays at the end:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs>

<http://dump.zetopia.com/Portal%20-%20Still%20Alive.mp3>

Lyrics:

<http://www.steamfriends.com/forums/showthread.php?p=5255>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The field of video games might serve as a nice model for web 2.0 in the way that creativity is combined with technical know-how. Read a book on video game design and imagine something similar that could be written for web 2.0.

The only problem though is that most computer games are not novel. But every once in a while, a true gem comes along. Portal is one of those.

</comment><comment><USER2> Have to admit, I beat this game a couple days ago and it was really fun (despite being short). The ending is absolutely hilarious.

The portals throw you for a loop at first, because you can actually see the world you'll exit into in the portal you're about to enter. CRAZY!!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw Portal for the first time just the other day. Been a long time since a game immediately made me want to play it like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Portal is an excellent game, I just wish there was more of it.</comment>


A Sharing Economy Where Teachers Win - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/technology/a-sharing-economy-where-teachers-win.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I am a teacher, and I looked at those lesson plans the last time this was in the news. Most of the lesson plans were crap--I fear for a world in which many teachers pay money for crap like that because they aren't even able to make crap like that on their own.

The main reason I can neither be a customer nor a seller in a marketplace for teachers' lesson plans is that I use rarely used (that is, actually good) curricular materials for teaching mathematics at the "prealgebra" level,[1] and few other teachers use those. Most other teachers who do use the same materials I use are both smart enough to specify using those materials and smart enough to write their own lesson plans individualized for the classes they teach day by day.

[1] [http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/item/prealgebra](http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/store/item/prealgebra)

[http://www.amazon.com/Math-Focus-Singapore-Teachers- Edition/...](http://www.amazon.com/Math-Focus-Singapore-Teachers- Edition/dp/0547561008)

<comment><USER3> My wife is a kindergarten teacher and absolutely loves TeacherPayTeachers. For younger kids, the quality of stuff she finds is much higher than what I guess you find for older kids' math. She uses is not because she can't make materials, but because the ~$1 it costs to purchase material cuts about an hour or two out of her several hours of planning and creating materials a night that she does between 5-10 on weeknights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > A Sharing Economy

It's not a sharing economy. More like a free market breaking a government controlled model.

Schools are monoliths impossible to move.

Teachers are agile.

The beauty is is skips around the government and goes straight to teachers, the trick being prices are low enough teachers are also willing to skip the government and pay for it from their own wages.

<comment><USER5> "Sharing Economy" is a pretty incomplete term, but to the extend it means anything, it means allowing people to turn otherwise idle or under-utilized assets that exists anyway (cars, spare bedrooms, lesson plans) into productive assets by providing a low-friction market place for them.

<comment><USER6> "Sharing Economy" doesn't really apply to lesson plans they are not an object that must be shared it can be duplicated and used concurrently by an infinite number of people.

<comment><USER5> Again, "Sharing Economy" is, at best, an incomplete term, but lesson plans absolutely are assets. The fact that they are easy to duplicate is immaterial to this.

<comment><USER4> I'd guess I see your point in that traditionally lesson plans are used once and thrown away.

But I'd go as far as saying even if this site started this way now it's not. The lessons are designed to sell, with the top sellers possibly longer teachers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a teacher I've looked into TpT in the past, but as an end-user it has rarely saved me any time or effort. At best, documents could provide fresh ideas - but document discoverability + adaptability feel severely inadequate.

What the success of this site does speak to is an underlaying desire by educators to have a shared resource for the rapid creation/adaptation/implementation of curriculum materials.

Teaching still remains a craft-based occupation and experienced educators naturally want to individually create their own curriculum materials; however, I believe this has less to do with the inherent inadequacy of shared documents then it is the cumbersome nature of adapting someone else's documents to your purposes. A strong teacher creates their curriculum documents based on the specific needs/interests of their students (not the ones down the hall, or the ones from last year) so even with the 'best' lesson materials they will need the documents to remain flexible.

Yes - a Word .doc does this to a point, but even fighting the oddities of formatting can be a sufficient enough time-suck to abandon the document and begin from scratch. The document format should instead be a combination of structural curricular patterns (sharable + driving discoverability through the assigned utility of a given pattern [e.g. discussion pattern for groups of four]) + instructor assigned style guide (largely automated in application based on instructors previous style/formatting decisions). I couldn't care less about your font/color choices (which may conflict with customs in my classroom) - but I do care about the underlaying utility of your {activity, introduction, guide, etc.}.

If it doesn't save me time (in doing something I'm already capable of) or empower me to do something (I'm not otherwise able to do), then what's the point?

</comment><comment><USER8> As a teacher, I tried this site out a few years ago[1], and it didn't work out too well for us. Mainly because of timing and the fact that we didn't try to market it at all. I may look into it again, but it almost feels like the old stories of people making millions off of the app store, very few and far between.

I was quite proud of the piece, worked a lot on the layout, and search far and wide for public domain images to use. The friend and I who developed it have used it in our own classes to great success.

If anyone wants a copy of it, my email is in my profile, or leave a comment here and I will send it to you...

[1] [https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Dear-Santa- You-S...](https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Dear-Santa-You- Suck-472067)

</comment><comment><USER9> If the original plans were made within contracted hours, do the teachers own the rights to the work?

I ask this as my wife is an academic and I imagine her institution would not take a favourable view of her selling access to resources that they are likely to consider as owned by them.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if this is the case for upper grades, but my wife is a kindergarten teacher and the idea that she has time to make lessons during her contracted hours is really far from reality. In her contracted hours, she has about 20 minutes to herself where she can sit down and eat and that's about it. I remember in high school the teachers had about an hour during the day to themselves, but I always heard that went straight to grading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a business proposition that is not sustainable. (Simply because of saturation, either through the service itself, or by other means, such as open programs).</comment>


Scheme vs Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-vs-common-lisp

<comment><USER2> On the whole macro debate, whatever one thinks the default behavior should be with respect to variable capture, the syntax-case macro system in scheme works on a representation of program code which is at a higher resolution than what lisp macros works on.

The macro can find out for instance, if an identifier used in its input is a free-variable, or if two identifiers share the same binding. Hence, it is possible to write a relatively short program to define defmacro in terms of define-syntax & syntax-case, but not the other way round. (a pretty short implementation & most of it is error checking - [http://svn.plt- scheme.org/plt/trunk/collects/mzlib/defmacro....](http://svn.plt- scheme.org/plt/trunk/collects/mzlib/defmacro.ss))

This also strikes me as a inconsistency in arc(albeit easily correctable), as it goes against the rule of not imposing restrictions on the user, by default. Even, if the default macro interface is something simple, the user should be able to write macros which work with syntax at a higher resolution if needed.

Also, if you use the most popular distribution, PLT scheme, you have all of reader macros, native hash tables, keyword arguments, a package repository. There is a really nice module system, along with other neat stuff like contracts, lazy modules, frp & of course the continuation based web-server. For OOP, there is Swindle, an analog of CLOS(not having used it, i don't know if it's just as good).

After R6Rs, there is a common module system and standard libraries for hash- tables even in the scheme spec.

The main flaw, it seems, is the relative lack of libraries as compared to other mainstream languages. In particular, what i miss is something like wxPython for scheme.

EDIT : turns out i spoke too soon, defmacro does have an environment object([http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_aad...](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_aad.htm)) as a parameter, so it has some access to lexical info of its input form. To implement define-syntax, one would also need some way to output a syntax object and not just a s-expr. Couldn't find any defmacro implementation of define-syntax on the net.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is oddly over-critical of Scheme.

Macros: All the main Scheme implementations offer Common Lisp style macros, so in Scheme you can use either style. (Good thing, because I like the Common Lisp style.)

The section on numeric types is a long-winded and bizarrely negative-sounding way to say that Scheme wins. "In a good implementation, numerics (capabilities and correctness) are better than most CLs; on average, they are worse." Ok... why would you use a bad implementation?

As for Common Lisp having a well-defined module system consistent across implementations... that was not my experience. I was very irritated by that stuff when going through Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" book, as the book used different terminology than the implementation of CL I had.

I guess it's still true that Common Lisp has better libraries, but Scheme has sure been doing well there lately.

This is not to say that I don't like Common Lisp. In fact there are a lot of things about it that I wish I had in Scheme.

<comment><USER4> >The section on numeric types is a long-winded and bizarrely negative-sounding way to say that Scheme wins. "In a good implementation, numerics (capabilities and correctness) are better than most CLs; on average, they are worse." Ok... why would you use a bad implementation?

Because no Scheme is great at everything. All of them are bad implementations in some sense, and all of them are good implementations in some sense (if you only count ones that have users other than their implementor, not somebody's practice project). If you could somehow take the union of great features in every Scheme, that would be nice, but that's not the case.

In the case of numerics, Gambit is said to be the best Scheme, but it has it's own disadvantages - there's virtually no third-party code available for it, for one thing. Alternatively, you could use Chicken or PLT, which have quite a bit of third-party code and helpful communities, but last time I checked (this may be out of date), numeric performance was not so great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see this updated for R6RS. There are several deficiencies of Scheme (like a module system) addressed in the new standard.

</comment><comment><USER6> This gets posted here every few weeks...</comment>


Antarctic ice cliffs may not contribute to sea-level rise as much as predicted - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/antarctic-ice-cliffs-not-contribute-sea-level-rise-1021 <comment><USER3> Where can I read an unbiased summary of the current state of climate models?

Last night I was called "alt-right" and a climate change denier by a peer for hesitating to agree that we are in a climate crisis, because I said don't have enough information about the situation and I'm suspicious whenever too many people start shouting about something.

The precautionary principle still prevails, though. The more uncertain you are, the more certain the course of action is, which is to avoid burning hydrocarbons.

Edit: I meant to say precautionary principle, not "uncertainty principle".

<comment><USER4> I desire the same type of "unbiased" information myself but I do not believe it is attainable for this topic. The amount of emotion that people have about the effects of pollution on temperature makes it hard to take anything at face value. The best I do is try to read up on different opinions and ignore people telling me not to look or listen to something. Ultimately, though, I have a Ph.D. in physics and not meteorology, so there is a limit to how well I'm going to be able to understand the actual science involved.

On the topic of physics

>The uncertainty principle still prevails, though. The more uncertain you are, the more certain the course of action is, which is to avoid burning hydrocarbons.

This is _not_ the uncertainty principle. At least not the one I'm familiar with. :)

<comment><USER5> Note that climate science is only really controversial in the US, and as I understand it, it wasn't even controversial there 30 years ago. The current political situation has arisen when the oil industry took issue with findings coming out of climate science which was not at that time politicised.

Of course, predicting the climate it tricky business. But the underlying processes (e.g. the greenhouse) are simple physics that a high-school student can understand, and are completely beyond reasonable doubt.

How much more evidence do you need?

<comment><USER6> > Of course, predicting the climate it tricky business. But the underlying > processes (e.g. the greenhouse) are simple physics that a high-school > student can understand, and are completely beyond reasonable doubt.

> How much more evidence do you need?

Understanding how the underlying processes work isn't evidence of the specifics of how it is working in this instance.

As for wanting more evidence, I'd be interested to see some comprehensive documentation on the data sources and adjustments that occur, including a full honest disclosure of areas that are problematic for various reasons. I've read some fairly detailed conspiracies related to this (some email leak, can't recall the name), and as I recall the outcome of the investigation that was promised essentially consisted of "we fully investigated and found no problems, carry on".

As another example, I've also read a fair amount of interesting behind the scenes details on the rise of "grassroots" activist Greta Thunburg that don't get mentioned for some reason in the extensive coverage in the mainstream media.

This and many other similar things do not give me a feeling of trust that everything is on the up and up.

<comment><USER7> > I've read some fairly detailed conspiracies related to this (some email > leak, can't recall the name), and as I recall the outcome of the > investigation that was promised essentially consisted of "we fully > investigated and found no problems, carry on".

You're referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy), where you'll find that eight different major organizations investigated, with pretty detailed findings.

"The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion."

Maybe basing your opinion on climate science on "some email leak [you] can't recall the name [of]" isn't ideal?

<comment><USER6> Let's take the first one just as an example:

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

House of Commons Science and Technology Committee

On 22 January 2010, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee announced it would conduct an inquiry into the affair, examining the implications of the disclosure for the integrity of scientific research, reviewing the scope of the independent Muir Russell review announced by the UEA, and reviewing the independence of international climate data sets.[86] The committee invited written submissions from interested parties, and published 55 submissions that it had received by 10 February. They included submissions from the University of East Anglia, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Met Office, several other professional bodies, prominent scientists, some climate change sceptics, several MEPs and other interested parties.[87] An oral evidence session was held on 1 March 2010.[88]

The Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry reported on 31 March 2010 that it had found that "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact". The emails and claims raised in the controversy did not challenge the scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity". The MPs had seen no evidence to support claims that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.[89]

The committee criticised a "culture of non-disclosure at CRU" and a general lack of transparency in climate science where scientific papers had usually not included all the data and code used in reconstructions. It said that "even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified." The report added that "scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics." The committee criticised the university for the way that freedom of information requests were handled, and for failing to give adequate support to the scientists to deal with such requests.[90]

The committee chairman Phil Willis said that the "standard practice" in climate science generally of not routinely releasing all raw data and computer codes "needs to change and it needs to change quickly". Jones had admitted sending "awful emails"; Willis commented that "[Jones] probably wishes that emails were never invented," but "apart from that we do believe that Prof. Jones has in many ways been scapegoated as a result of what really was a frustration on his part that people were asking for information purely to undermine his research."[33] In Willis' view this did not excuse any failure to deal properly with FOI Act requests, but the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he could.[33] It stated: "There is no reason why Professor Jones should not resume his post. He was certainly not co- operative with those seeking to get data, but that was true of all the climate scientists".[91]

The committee was careful to point out that its report had been written after a single day of oral testimony and would not be as in-depth as other inquiries.[89]

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Is there a convincing evidence-based part in there that I'm missing?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Science Assessment Panel

The report of the independent Science Assessment Panel was published on 14 April 2010 and concluded that the panel had seen "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit." It found that the CRU's work had been "carried out with integrity" and had used "fair and satisfactory" methods. The CRU was found to be "objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda." Instead, "their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible."[61]

The panel commented that it was "very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians." It found that although the CRU had not made inappropriate use of statistical methods, some of the methods used may not have been the best for the purpose, though it said that "it is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results." It suggested that the CRU could have done more to document and archive its work, data and algorithms and stated that the scientists were "ill prepared" for the amount of public attention generated by their work, commenting that "as with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal." The media and other scientific organisations were criticised for having "sometimes neglected" to reflect the uncertainties, doubts and assumptions of the work done by the CRU. The UK Government's policy of charging for access to scientific data was described as "inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere." The panel was also stated that "Although we deplore the tone of much of the criticism that has been directed at CRU, we believe that this questioning of the methods and data used in dendroclimatology will ultimately have a beneficial effect and improve working practices." It found that some of the criticism had been "selective and uncharitable" and critics had displayed "a lack of awareness" of the difficulties of research in this area.[61]

Speaking at a press conference to announce the report, the panel's chair, Lord Oxburgh, stated that his team had found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever" and that "whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly." He said that many of the criticisms and allegations of scientific misconduct had been made by people "who do not like the implications of some of the conclusions" reached by the CRU's scientists. He said that the repeated FOI requests made by climate change sceptic Steve McIntyre and others could have amounted to a campaign of harassment, and the issue of how FOI laws should be applied in an academic context remained unresolved.[92] Another panel member, Professor David Hand, commended the CRU for being explicit about the inherent uncertainties in its research data, commenting that "there is no evidence of anything underhand – the opposite, if anything, they have brought out into the open the uncertainties with what they are dealing with."[93]

At the press conference, Hand also commented on the well publicised 1998 paper produced in the United States by scientists led by Michael E. Mann, saying that the hockey stick graph it showed was a genuine effect, but he had an "uneasy feeling" about the use of "inappropriate statistical tools" and said that the 1998 study had exaggerated the effect. He commended McIntyre for pointing out this issue. Mann subsequently told The Guardian that the study had been examined and approved in the US National Academies of Science North Report, and described Hand's comment as a "rogue opinion" not meriting "much attention or credence".[92]

The UEA's vice-chancellor, Edward Acton, welcomed the panel's findings. Describing its report as "hugely positive", he stated that "it is especially important that, despite a deluge of allegations and smears against the CRU, this independent group of utterly reputable scientists have concluded that there was no evidence of any scientific malpractice."[94] He criticised the way that the emails had been misrepresented, saying that "UEA has already put on record its deep regret and anger that the theft of emails from the University, and the blatant misrepresentation of their contents as revealed both in this report and the previous one by the Science and Technology Select Committee, damaged the reputation of UK climate science."[95] The UEA issued a statement in which it accepted that "things might have been done better." It said that improvements had already been undertaken by the CRU and others in the climate science community and that the University would "continue to ensure that these imperatives are maintained."[96]

It later emerged that the Science Assessment Panel was not assessing the quality but instead the integrity of the CRU's science. Phil Willis described this a "sleight of hand" and was not what the Parliamentary Committee he had chaired had been led to believe. There were also questions about the selection of publications examined by the panel.[97] Lord Oxburgh said that Acton had been wrong to tell the Science and Technology Select Committee in March that his inquiry would look into the science itself. "I think that was inaccurate," Oxburgh said. "This had to be done rapidly. This was their concern. They really wanted something within a month. There was no way our panel could evaluate the science."[98]

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Rather than reducing my mistrust, this one has increased it.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

> Maybe basing your opinion on climate science on "some email leak [you] can't > recall the name [of]" isn't ideal?

It certainly isn't, lucky I'm not doing that: "This and many other similar things _do not give me a feeling of trust that everything is on the up and up._ "

Maybe completely misinterpreting the words and intentions of anyone who dares disagree with the orthodoxy isn't an ideal approach. How's the consensus building going in your opinion?

<comment><USER7> Rather than raw copy/pasting a good portion of the entire Wikipedia entry, would you care to highlight _specifics_ you're interested in discussing?

<comment><USER6> It sounds like standard head patting assurances to me, I'd there anything in there beyond claims that all is well, which was the same story prior to the email leak?

Is all of the data and calculations now open sourced so the matter is permanently put to rest?

<comment><USER7> > Is all of the data and calculations now open sourced so the matter is > permanently put to rest?

Yes (with the exception of 19 Polish stations, for reasons the Poles didn't disclose). [https://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-14315747](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-14315747)

<comment><USER6> That article contains no references to code that performs the calculations.

These sorts of discussions don't do much for increasing my confidence level that statements in the media or forums should be taken at face value.

<comment><USER8> After reading this thread, the problem you have is YOU.

I'm not trying to be critical or a dick. Your argument is "I don't have the information, and random sources I didn't dig into cast aspersions and make me think things are not as straightforward, I want to see the data etc..."

The solution is TO GO LOOK AT THE DATA!. There are hundreds if not thousands of studies with methods laid out in detail, data provided for you with information on collection, manipulation etc... Everything you're asking for to be "more informed" exists, but your not actually out there reading it obviously, you're here claiming you want the data that is available and accessible simply by starting on google and working your way through it to educate yourself.

Ignore the media, ignore those 'email leaks' and other BS you're seeing. Read the actual studies look at the actual information.

Or alternatively you can go to the experts that do all of that and look at their point of view, which is overwhelmingly that while the models might not be as accurate as we'd like all the time, the trend and future direction and many of the eventual outcomes of those changes are predictable.

Furthermore, climate change scientists have been beating this drum for 3 decades. As they predicted and we ignored, We're in the middle of an extinction event where we're seeing massive die-offs in multiple areas of the ecosystem, sea level rise and temperature rise is already happening and visible/quantifiable, increased storms, flooding and fire is already part of our lives.

To still deny the scientists who have been largely right for 30 years+, to ignore the actual evidence published while demanding "more evidence" and to deny the climate changes and the causes (significantly: us) as we've well established is at best ignorant, at worst malicious.

Do the research, do the reading. Inform yourself instead of demanding others inform you while casting aspersions on scientists based on media and rumors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dawg- Interesting. It's unfortunate that this will be used as ammunition for climate skeptics.

It seems that ice cliffs are very different than ice sheets - the things currently melting. Ice cliffs were previously supposed to account for up to 6 feet of sea level rise, instead of the much more toned-down projections we have seen in the last few years.

The subtle distinction between ice cliffs and ice sheets will be lost in the media re-telling of this. Sometimes I wonder if science can ever truly be put to work for mass society? It seems not.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I can already see all the articles saying that the meltdown of the ice sheets is "not that bad after all", even though the melting is on record levels in the last few years.

This is why even in the age of the Internet, it's going to take decades until the measures that actually need to be taken to combat climate change to be put in place.

By then we will be well above the 1.5 degrees rise in temperature, and population north of 10 billion.

<comment><USER10> We don't control the climate. The climate is a non-linear dynamic system. There are dozens of natural cycles that control the climate (AMO, PDO, ENSO, solar cycles, to name a few). And all predictions of catastrophic, runaway warming have failed to materialize in the 21st century despite over 30 years of doomsday predictions. We've seen maybe a 0.13C per decade increase in temps. Well within cyclical norms. Our understanding of the climate has to be driven by facts on the ground and not computer models and hype.

We still do not have good models for understanding or predicting global low cloud cover. Clouds are hugely important to our climate system. There is no way to accurately predict the temperature in the future, especially 100 years into the future, without modeling fundamental and extremely complex systems. Our current models do not match reality or even closely approximate it.

<comment><USER11> Honestly where do you get this stuff? It's like time-cube level of nuttery.

<comment><USER12> Which claim is nuttery?

1\. Getting clouds right is extremely important for the climate models. 2\. We still do not know how to get clouds right.

<comment><USER13> Well for one there's contradicting comments. First saying that there has been warming every decade, but then saying that's somehow cyclical (warming and cooling cycle) when it's really a trend (continuous warming). Then saying we need facts and not computer models, but then going on to saying we need computer models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A lot of people are going to read only the headline and shout "MIT says global warming isn't true" into their science denial bubbles!

From my reading of this, the study does not say that sea-level rise won't happen, it's just saying one theoretical mechanism for RAPID sea-level rise might not be correct, so it'll be slower than some models predict.

The study relates to ice cliffs on land and the theory that if the ice shelves in the sea break apart, then the ice cliffs on land will break apart rapidly, contributing to rapid sea-level rise. Ice already in the sea doesn't raise sea-levels but ice currently on land would. The study uses modelling to demonstrate that runaway event is unlikely, so the sea-level rise from that even should be removed from estimates.

There's another paper about this from February_:[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0901-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0901-4)

Some quotes from the papers:

\- "We're saying that scenario, based on cliff failure, is probably not going to play out. That's something of a silver lining. That said, we have to be careful about breathing a sigh of relief. There are plenty of other ways to get rapid sea-level rise."

\- Ice cliff collapse... "is not required to reproduce sea-level changes due to Antarctic ice loss ... without it we find that the projections agree with previous studies (all 95th percentiles are less than 43 centimetres)."

A couple more things:

\- Both papers still agree that sea-level rise will happen, but maybe not so fast and not so much. (Whether your house is under one foot of water or two doesn't make much difference to if you can live there.)

\- If your discussion point against climate change is based on the models being wrong/inaccurate/too varied, then you have to discount this evidence, as it too is based on modelling.

\- MIT's press department need to write better headlines.

<comment><USER12>
       > A lot of people are going to read only the headline and
       > shout "MIT says global warming isn't true" into their
       > science denial bubbles!

This is an example of the extremely informed and scientific claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let's build an interactive display of different models. Like Coinbase.com/charts but for climate models.

You can check and uncheck various factors (ice sheets, greenland, methane tundra).

Interesting?

<comment><USER16> Does one already exist? I know there are some for C02 emissions and other useful stats. I am certainly interested in seeing a tool like this.

<comment><USER15> I haven't seen anything useful

For example, this looks like it was designed on the Apple II

[https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-bathtub- sim...](https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-bathtub-simulation/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ITT: A lot of people with no education in climate science proportioning to understand the climate better than the vast majority of climate scientists.

<comment><USER18> Of course the many people calling themselves climate scientists only know about programming computer models.

<comment><USER19> You'd wish, have you seen the code of scientific models?

Coding is one of the things you just pick up on the way, while physics etc is taught formally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What % of overall sea level rise predictions did this effect contribute? Do we still have to worry about New York and other coastal cities being inundated in the next few decades, or not?

<comment><USER21> You still have to worry. This is one study, not a final word on the topic, there's considerable uncertainty in this area. Notably recent numbers indicate that Greenland melting is worse than predicted.

<comment><USER22> No, I don't have to worry. That would make me unhappy.

Worry is bad for your health. Don't worry about far-off uncertain things that are out of your control. It'd just get you down, paranoid and freaking out, when you could instead focus on the things that matter in life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I get suspicous when people start shouting and screaming that the only way to do anything about climate change is X - where X might or might not reduce greenhouse gases but definately aligns with there politial prirors.

I also don't like the fact that these same people seem to have no respect at all for economic growth. I firmly believe that any realy solution will be an encouragement to growth not a discouragement.

<comment><USER24> Economic growth? How does the imaginary game of wealth-points intersect with preserving the planet's ecosystem?

I can imagine many scenarios for saving the planet, that are detrimental to human interests. Nuke all major population centers, for instance. Ban burning oil entirely. Begin sequestering all crops in the bottom of the ocean as CO2 sinks.

To confuse human trivia with planetary disaster is one of the first refuges of naive deniers - "Well, we sure can't go without our cars, don't be ridiculous!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Scientists have assumed that ice cliffs taller than 90 meters (about the > height of the Statue of Liberty) would rapidly collapse under their own > weight, contributing to more than 6 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the > century — enough to completely flood Boston and other coastal cities.

If I understand correctly, these are icebergs. I don't understand how melting icebergs should impact the sea level in the first place. If I melt an ice cube in a cup the water lever remains unchanged. Don't the icebergs already displace as much water as they would contribute? Is there something about icebergs that mean they displace less water, or am I somehow misunderstanding what is going on?

<comment><USER11> This is describing cliffs of ice on land, like the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The worry this paper is investigating is whether those could rapidly collapse ones the sea ice that protects it calves off.

<comment><USER26> And in addition to the ice moving from land to water, the land will be less compressed by the weight of ice above it and will rise, displacing even more water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I may be completely missing something, but I was under the impression that floating ice has zero impact on sea levels - a unique characteristic of water. Ice floating in water in a cup already at the top won't overflow when it melts. It seems like only land-supported ice sheets would have any impact at all anyway. Where were they getting the 6 foot rise in the first place? The violent water displacement when the cliff falls?

<comment><USER11> The article is about land ice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For hundreds of years there have been people predicting some kind of nightmare scenario 'in about 30 years'. In the 1960's and 1970's they were predicting a new ice age, that oil would completely run out, etc etc.

More recently they have been predicting extremely rapid climate change, global warming, 'cities underwater', etc.

Look at the graph of anticipated sea level rise: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise)

Notice anything suspicious? It goes along pretty flat (the historical data looks as linear as it could possibly be), then as soon as you get to right now it jumps up and to the right with exponential growth. If a startup pitched that growth trajectory everyone would know exactly what was going on - <USER2> hopes and lies. Except that well meaning idiots have been pitching this for the last 30 years, exponential up and to the right growth of temperature and sea level, and it never materializes. Every few years they just update the graphs to show the small increase that actually occurred and move the exponential explosion so it's always in the near future.

Edit: I have noticed people down-voting this comment, that's fine of course, but I wonder whether it's because you think the oceans are going to start rising exponentially - starting right now - or if you think it's dangerous to question climate change dogma because it empowers climate change deniers or something? Or are you just down-voting it because it seems like something you don't like?

<comment><USER18> Well, I'm with you on sea level rise. I live in The Netherlands. Big part of our country is below sea level, millions of people actually. Recently Deltares, the body that advises the government on the height of our dikes released a 187-page report on sea level rise. Using the newest methods, they found that sea level has been rising at a constant rate (1.8mm/yr) for > 125 years now, and the sea level rise is NOT accelerating. I trust these people, since they are responsible for millions of lives.

Of course IPCC climate models are projecting acceleration, but those are just models. And past sea level rise acceleration projections have obviously been wrong so far.

I clearly remember over the course of my life reading about climate catastrophes, scientists being in consensus about it, it never came true, and I don't believe it now.

<comment><USER29> You need to read the report more closely. First, it describes only the Dutch sea level rise, not the global sea level. Second, the most important _reason_ that the sea level rise is that "the Netherlands is located in one of the least affected areas [of sea level rise] in the world. 9cm/century [of sea level rise] has not influenced the Netherlands, but has been observed around the equator" [1, from the summary]

[1] The report is here (in Dutch) [https://www.deltares.nl/app/uploads/2019/03/faq- zeespiegelmo...](https://www.deltares.nl/app/uploads/2019/03/faq- zeespiegelmonitor-2018-.pdf)

<comment><USER18> Yes, I've had that comment more often. My standard answer is that if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be accelerating everywhere. The sea level rise itself may differ per location, but logic dictates that an acceleration should be visible everywhere.

Note that sea level rise differs across the globe for many reasons, land sinking being one of them. For example, sea levels are dropping in Sweden, because the land is rising.

<comment><USER29> > if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be > accelerating everywhere.

If you mean "accelerating upwards" then it is completely wrong. Sea level gets lower near large icebergs (e.g. the arctic). As the ice from the pole melts, the gravitational pull of the ice mass decreases and water is displaced to areas further from the pole.

As for your Sweden comment, I don't see how it is relevant. Please explain

<comment><USER18> I said 'sea level rise', not 'sea level'.

Sweden was just an example of a place where sea level is dropping.

<comment><USER29> Maybe I'm confused with what you're saying, please correct me where I misinterpret what you mean.

On a global scale, the sea-level is rising [1] and the sea-level increase is itself increasing (i.e. accelerating). This can also be seen in [1]. That does NOT mean that the change is uniform over the globe. You can check your locale here [2] (and confirm that Sweden's sea level is getting lower, the Netherlands slightly rising).

Globally, sea level rise IS accelerating [3].

Coming back to your claim that "if sea level rise is accelerating somewhere on the planet, it should be accelerating everywhere". Please explain why there could not be some (the Netherlands? hypothetical?) place where the the sea level rise does not increase even if more water is added to the system? This IS possible but the water must go somewhere else, i.e. the acceleration will be stronger in other regions (for example, Manilla).

[1] [https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea- level/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/)

[2] [https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html](https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html)

[3] [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds- se...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-sea-level- rise-accelerating)

<comment><USER18> You are confusing 'sea level rise increasing' with 'sea level rise increase acceleration'. Of course when a lot of water enters the ocean sea level rises everywhere. The amount to which it rises may not be the same everywhere, for example due to gravity differences. But as far as the 'acceleration of sea level rise' is concerned, that _has_ to be visible everywhere.

An example. Suppose due to melting ice sea level rises 1 mm at the Dutch coast. Let's entertain the possibility that in Australia this results in 1,1 mm. Let's say this happens every year. Eventually this correlation will break, but for the sake of argument let's assume it doesn't. Now, when ice starts melting faster and faster, the sea level rise at the Dutch coast grows to 1.5 mm each year. This is sea level rise accelerating. Now, it is _very_ unlikely that the rise in Australia stays at 1.1 mm each year and will not accelerate. That is why I say that if sea level rise is accelerating, it should show up every where. Hence if the rise isn't accelerating on the Dutch coast, it isn't accelerating anywhere.

Sea level rise isn't the same everywhere, but _acceleration_ of that yearly rise should show up everywhere in some form.

<comment><USER29> Thank you for expanding on your thoughts. I now understand what you mean, however, I do believe you are wrong. Look at source [3] above. Sea level rise is accelerating globally. The effects are different locally.

<comment><USER18> A later study by (former IPCC) Dr Judith Curry has gone more into this [1]. And the report I referenced was even later. The comments on that page BTW make abundantly clear that scientists do not agree at all that the sea level rise is accelerating, and even if it is, if it's more than a minute amount. Most of the rise graphs focus around satellite measurement starting from 1993 which seem to show 3mm/year rise, and attaching these number to the graphs of sea level tide gauges is heavily disputed as scientific heresy. Additionally to get to that 3mm the satellite measurements had to be corrected, an action which was explicitly rejected by the recent Deltares report I referenced. So, whatever people may think, acceleration is not a fact, and even the scientists that believe it, think it's very small. It's the alarmist media that blow it up to huge proportions.

As a side note: I have been following climate news closely since a year now, and I have to say, I'm noticing strange patterns, in for example picking starting dates for graphs. Read for a recent example this article[2]. And I have noticed many occurrences of this, including from Goddard (part of NASA), NOAA, but also other institutions. This makes me suspicious.

In my own country the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute, was accused of erroneously changing past temperature data - supposedly to correct for changed sensor setups, to make heatwaves in the first half of the 20th century disappear. I read that report, and it was very careful, and very thorough. But the Meteorological Institute _refused_ to discuss it. It's these things that make me very suspicious. There are more examples, but I won't make this overly long.

So I would recommend looking really critically at _any_ climate news, since in my experience most scientists do not agree on a lot of issues, despite claims to the contrary, and the subject is very heavily politicized.

[1] [https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/27/special-report-on-sea- lev...](https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/27/special-report-on-sea-level-rise/) [2] [http://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/10/illustrating- the-c...](http://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/10/illustrating-the- corruption-in-climate-science.html)

<comment><USER29> The climate news needs to be looked at with extreme caution, I agree. Newspapers tend to spin scientific reports in a specific direction (both "alarmist" and "denyist"). However, in general the scientific literature is very cautious, and presents models, measurements and conclusions along with their uncertainties and assumptions. The interpretation of these uncertainties and assumptions is often lost in translation when presented to the general public, which is a shame and should _not_ be endorsed. From a PR perspective, it may be nice if the Meteorological institute(s) would give some public interview or explanation when doubts are cast on their work. The discussions get political really quickly, which leads to a blurring of the lines between what the facts are and what (politicians) suggest the solutions should be to curb carbon emissions. This needs to end. Unfortunately, we are still in the situation where people outright deny the human role in climate change and politicians on the "denier" side of the spectrum abuse this to continuously cast doubt on whether any action is required at all.

That being said, you claim: "the satellite measurements had to be corrected, an action which was explicitly rejected by the recent Deltares report I referenced" but I couldn't find it in the report. The report (section 6.9) says [rough translation]: "The trend between satellite measurements and tide gauges [in the Netherlands] shows some agreement, along with their standard errors." and later "[..] satellite data are a less suitable source of deriving sea level rise". Note that this last quote should be interpreted in the Dutch sea level context, not the global context.

> It's the alarmist media that blow it up to huge proportions.

Agreed. That needs to stop.

> I'm noticing strange patterns, in for example picking starting dates for > graphs

This, if true, is bad and needs to stop. It is the same behavior as the "deniers" have used for years (for example, the "no warming since 1998" meme).

<comment><USER18> I just noticed that you linked the summary of the report, the actual report is here: [https://www.deltares.nl/app/uploads/2019/03/Zeespiegelmonito...](https://www.deltares.nl/app/uploads/2019/03/Zeespiegelmonitor-2018-final.pdf)

The researchers state (page 68 - my translation): "We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018), within the 1993-2017 record. A correction for the eruption of the Pinatubo and El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was needed to find that acceleration. These corrections we do not apply in the sea level monitor."

I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global warming. I've read enough to confidently say that the consensus claimed by the media is not there, so I'm not done reading yet.

<comment><USER29> It was my mistake to link to the summary, I was actually referring to the full report in the comments before.

As for your quote, it needs to be read in the context of the full paragraph. Its written sloppily, but a better phrasing would be: "We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018) _in the Netherlands ' coast area_, within the 1993-2017 record". I.e. they are saying the global trend is not the same as the local (Dutch) trend. Perfectly reasonable.

> I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global > warming.

Well, I could imagine your doubts about sea level rise because they are difficult and uncertain. But there is absolutely no scientific doubt about the role of CO2 in global warming. In fact, CO2 as a control knob of the climate is the only way to explain climatic variations observed in (at least) the past _500 million years_. What is uncertain is the predictions because they are influenced by action taken to curb emissions etc.

There is a great video series on YouTube by "potholer54" that shows the scientific evidence for it better than I can. The first video is only 10 minutes and addresses the general points rather well. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&list=PL82yk73N8e...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52KLGqDSAjo&list=PL82yk73N8eoX- Xobr_TfHsWPfAIyI7VAP&index=2&t=0s)

<comment><USER18> > CO2 as a control knob of the climate is the only way to explain climatic > variations observed in (at least) the past 500 million years

I think you may now be stretching it: [https://miro.medium.com/max/1320/0*3Vm0copgT8K-pcRm.gif](https://miro.medium.com/max/1320/0*3Vm0copgT8K-pcRm.gif) No relation between temperature and CO2 levels.

Also, it's rather unlikely that for a system as complex as the climate there would be only one control knob.

I've seen all of potholer54's videos.

<comment><USER29> 1) Your meme-image does not show there is no relation. In fact, the source of one of the lines in the image is by Berner [1] which states (p. 201): "This means that over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the atmospheric greenhouse effect." The source of your image directly contradicts your claim.

2) RE "unlikely that [...] there would be only one control knob": I never said there was only one. I said it was _a control knob_. And it is in fact the most important one (but not the only one) [2].

3) RE "I've seen all of potholer54's videos.": I think you need to watch them again.

[1] "Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time ", [http://www.ajsonline.org/content/301/2/182](http://www.ajsonline.org/content/301/2/182)

[2] "Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth's Temperature", [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356)

[3] As a side note: your image has no x- and y-axis scales. If you want to spread misleading images, at least use a better version (for instance, [https://abruptearthchanges.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/no- lo...](https://abruptearthchanges.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/no-long-term- correlation-between-co2-and-temperature.jpg?w=829))

<comment><USER18> The only thing you can say about the correlation in Geocarb II (my graph) and Geocarb III (your graph) is that 500 million years ago CO2 was 6000ppm and temperature 25ºC. Today CO2 is 410ppm, and temp 16ºC. That's it. So you _could_ say there's a long term trend. But both graphs show wildly diverging lines between those points, in fact it was only during a few percent of the total time that the temperature rose when CO2 levels rose. This does not look like CO2 is mainly controlling the climate at all. So there is my problem.

There are more problems, like the multiple periods of warming and cooling in the last 1000 years, that were just as bad or worse as what we're in now, but without human CO2. Like the fact that in the past CO2 _followed_ temperature instead of preceding it (and the Milankovitch 'explanation' is not convincing at all), and like the fact that in recent years records are being shattered for _cold_ weather all over the globe. And the media doesn't report about that.

This thing about the climate is that everybody tells me to educate myself, and when I did, it only raised more questions.

<comment><USER29> I am glad you're willing to educate yourself. I hope to give you at least a starting point and will try to address the points you made.

1) Regarding the correlations: The reason why you don't "see" the correlation (i.e. the lines don't perfectly overlap) if you plot CO2 and average global temperature is because there are other effects that obscure the correlation. For example, on the scales of 500 million years, the power coming from the sun (solar luminosity) has increased [1]. Milankovitch cycles are also important over longer timescales. Albedo changes of Earth's surface, etc. I have already cited the principle control knob paper. If you don't agree with the results, we can discuss that but, if so, please give some arguments instead of "I don't believe it".

2) "CO2 lags temperature": this is true in some cases. Vostok ice core is often cited and indeed the authors point to a ~1000 year difference between CO2 and temperature [2]. A more recent analysis [3] goes into more detail on a global sample. They find that on average, CO2 leads temperature but in the southern hemisphere, temperature leads CO2. This lag can be explained by ocean circulation changes.

3) "multiple periods of warming and cooling in the last 1000 years, that were just as bad or worse as what we're in now": A landmark paper was released this year reconstructing the global temperatures in the last 2000 years [4] and they concluded the current warming is global and warmer than ever. Other warm periods in the last 2000 years were simply a) not as warm AND/OR b) not global. One image says it all [5].

4) Record cold not reported? I get a lot of search results from mainstream outlets when searching [6]. Of course, one cold/warm year does not disprove/prove global warming, but you know that. Also, weather and climate are different but you also know that. Popsci did an article explaining how this cold can be interpreted [7].

[1] For a short explanation, see Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_luminosity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_luminosity)

[2] "CO2‐climate relationship as deduced from the Vostok ice core: a re‐examination based on new measurements and on a re‐evaluation of the air dating", [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1034/j.1600-0889....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1034/j.1600-0889.1991.t01-1-00002.x)

[3] "Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation", [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10915](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10915)

[4] "No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era", [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2"](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1401-2")

[5] Image from [4] [https://media.springernature.com/full/springer- static/image/...](https://media.springernature.com/full/springer- static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-019-1401-2/MediaObjects/41586_2019_1401_Fig3_HTML.png?as=webp)

[6] [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=record+cold+2019](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=record+cold+2019)

[7] [https://www.popsci.com/cold-weather-climate- change/](https://www.popsci.com/cold-weather-climate-change/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's the academic paper the article references: [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL084183)

Not showing up on Scihub tho. Anyone found it?

</comment><comment><USER30> Articles like this should discuss how the impact it does have contributes to the whole, climate change is a feedback loop.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback)

</comment><comment><USER31> regional hegemons enforce embargoes on nations which refuse to behave according to new standards. a carbon non-proliferation treaty backed with coordinated blockades and cyber-attacks of critical infrastructure, initiating limited civil wars. the top level view is mutual cooperation to avoid global catastrophe.

this would require america and russia to stop selling their terrestrial missile technology and fossil fuels to the rest of world. once the current generation of inventory and raw energy is cleared it, orbital space based weapons can be deployed, obsolescing land and sea nuclear delivery and defense. this might explain china and india's rush to space, in order to have a bargaining chip in the future discussion about their territorial and energy sovereignty it is necessary for them to have a significant presence in low earth orbit.

things typically don't escalate dramatically during international disputes, and it's likely that the russians and americans will just use blackmail diplomacy to freeze, then develop the rest of the world with new energy they control. in order to avoid public scrutiny it's important to paint this as a critical emergency rather than a strategic sharing of influence between continental superpowers.

i suspect this will play out slowly over the next century, all the while regular people will be cowed by the ever looming threat of total extinction. not a very original sequel, a real throwback your parents might enjoy, cold war 2: fight the heat. the science on anything hardly matters, since scientific truth is subservient to pragmatism and political realities. given the massive investment in government information collection, it is clear that any large popular movement would quickly be steered towards desired policy goals, which should reinforce some version of the above story i laid out.

</comment><comment><USER32> the hubris of man is that we have enough data to understand the earth at any given moment.

[https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0](https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0)

<comment><USER33> Excellent find. Key quote:

"The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth's temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown."

Dated June 30, 1989

Global temperature anomaly 2018: +0.83 Celsius

[https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4626](https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4626)

<comment><USER34> The low estimate seems to have been on the money.

<comment><USER35> Didn't even break onto the chart for the lowest number in the lowest estimates. I wouldn't call that "on the money."

<comment><USER36> Was Brown predicting a rise in Celsius or Fahrenheit? The article doesn't say. (And we are up by ~1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Recently declassified NSA Historical Documents - <AUTHOR> http://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/NSA-SelHistDocs_1931-1985.pdf

<comment><USER2> really not wanting to click on any pdf these days.</comment>