temperature instrumentation

In your expert opinion. Relax. Anthropogenic climate change is real and won 't go away because you don't know enough about historical temperature measu rement techniques to be confident about some of the basic data. The Murdoch media denies this, but presumably get some kind of back-hander to keep the m on side.

Why uncorrected? The problem that Spencer and Christry took so long to fix was the correction of the satellite data for orbital delay. If you don't do that kind of correction your results aren't all that useful, conflict with everybody elses - which they didn't after Spencr and Christy were finally pressured into cleaning up their act.

It will be appreciably warmer in a few decades.

No, it's actually very easy. You look at things like this:

and photos from space and other sources that both visibly show and prove that 95% of the worlds glaciers are retreating at a rate which will see the majority of them, despite being eons old, *will* disappear within a

"F*ck, how could we have been so stupid!"

either that or you say,

"Wow, look at that! Something fundamental has changes in the nature of matter that changed the melting point of ice and no scientist or instrument has been able to detect it"

and thereby prove you are a fool beyond reasoning.

Before anyone argues they had better come up with a reason that 30 years of world wide satellite photography shows the rapid retreat of the glaciers WORLD WIDE - otherwise it is QED.

I nearly responded to the troll but figured it was better to wait for others who are much more informed to do so.

And they did. Cheers Bill & David.

That's what the wooly mammoths said.

Yosemite, Exit Glacier (AK), the Laurentide ice sheet, and the La Brea Tar Pits suggest the world has been warming for quite a while.

Glaciers have been retreating generally.

We blame George W. Bush.

Cheers, James Arthur

Don't worry. That'll all chage after Jeb gets elected.

Well, his election campaign was heavily funded by the fossil-carbon extraction industry, and he did what they wanted after he got elected, but CO2 levels have been going up since the industrial revolution, and his contribution was fairly minor.

After what Jeb did to the Florida electoral rolls, only the dumbest Tea Party supporters would vote for him, and they'd probably prefer something even further out in the lunatic fringe.

If he did get elected, he could do something as stupid as invading Irak, but opportunities to make that kind of pratfall don't come up all that often.

Who would bother to spread them all over mountain tops, but omit the surrounding plains? I'm pretty sure they're wild.

Jeroen Belleman

I mean that they'll probably have cross-pollinated with the cultivated varieties. Maybe not all of them, yet.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The birds and the bees.

Where I go in the mountains - I never see crocuses. I see hundreds (easy) of species of wildflowers, and nearly without exception these are not found in "civilization". Often they have a variety of specializations that prevent them from being successful in other microclimes.

There are some places (generally near trail-heads or within a mile or so of same) where there will be the occasional super-invasive immigrant - dandelions, for example

- but not the kinds of commercially-grown flowers. Most of the variations found in commercially-raised flowers optimize for flower size or quantity or duration; these are most often less able to survive in more stressful environments (temperature/dryness/ herbivores/disease) without various protections.

The kinds of genetic and physical barriers to crossbreeding between these alpine and subalpine flowers seem insuperable. Unless, of course, there has been a secret plot by those nefarious environmental extremists who have worked for decades to distribute earlier-blooming flowers for the purposes of a false data point.

I'm currently designing two temperature simulation boxes; one simulates thermocouples and one simulates RTDs. Both are difficult and interesting designs, and that got me thinking about temperature measurement, and I happened upon the new network of standaridized, well sited, RTD-based, calibrated surface measurement stations.

Talking about temperature measurement isn't trolling in an electronic design group, unless maybe you think that introducing any topic is trolling.

I just tested some tiny surface-mount relays, to see how coil power dissipation affects generated thermoelectrics. That took a full day.

The old records are likely to be from people's gardens, though.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Using the existence of a new network of temperature measuring stations to recycle Tony Watts denialist twaddle is trolling, and even you should be able to realise this.

And your false comparison measuring temperatures around a lab with measuring a single voltage source with different measuring instruments was pretty dumb, even for you.

It's hard to believe that anyone can be this dumb, and that the press goes along.

How could overcrowding result in extinction? Will the entire population drop dead simultaneously?

This is incredible:

"He said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization (a period now known to scientists unofficially as the Anthropocene) rivals any effects of ice ages or comet impacts."

At least, if we're doomed, there's nothing we need to do.

It's from 2010, he's probably already dead.

How can a physics site put up that population graph.. it begs for a log scale.

George H.

Even better:

They start his history at 1981, but conveniently ignore The Population Bomb:

"After explaining the domestic policies the US should pursue, he discusses foreign policy. He advocates a system of "triage," such as that suggested by William and Paul Paddock in Famine 1975!. Under this system countries would be divided into categories based on their abilities to feed themselves going forward. Countries with sufficient programmes in place to limit population growth, and the ability to become self-sufficient in the future would continue to receive food aid. Countries, for example India, which were "so far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self-sufficiency" would have their food aid eliminated."

That's genocide. This guy is crazier than the Pope.

We are really in a new age of anti-science, with phys.org up there in the lead. I blame the Internet.

Uh... the referenced article refers to mass extinction of plants and critters on down to miscellaneous microorganisms. It ain't anti-science in any form.

Dixy Lee Ray once said "I know a siphunculid from a siphoniphid, and I can spell 'em both". Most political movers, though, have to be told about biological diversity with reminders like this, from observers of nature. Species are vanishing. It could mean big trouble ahead.

In this democracy, we are all political movers. I applaud phys.org for the publication, in easily digestible form, of a summary of this situation.

On big problem with getting your scientific info from a "politically conservative[2][3] news and opinion website" is that they bias the data they report and do a lousy job of analyzing it. Oh, but that's the same thing you do, so I get it now.

He's not dumb. The press loves bad news.

At sufficiently high population densities, infectious diseases become very bad news - everybody gets infected before the disease has had chance to kil l anybody, so that everybody dies in fairly short order.

Seems unlikely. But a large majority of the population dropping dead in a s hort time could work just as well.

We are only doomed if he's right that the changes we've made so far are lar ge enough to eventually kill us all off (which strikes me as unlikely). We' ve probably still got time to hold global warming down to no more than 2 de grees Celcius. If we can't manage that, we are probably looking at an event ual population crash back to pre-agricultural numbers - our agriculture is finely tuned to current temperatures and rainfall patterns, and won't be qu ite as spectacularly productive if they change much.

We survived fine without agriculture for some 50 to 100 thousand years - mo dern humans seem to date back about a 100,000 years, and we've only had agr iculture for about 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age.

Of course there were only a few million of us back then, and we still felt enough population pressure to colonise pretty much everywhere on earth.