An indicative map of potential consequences of global warming, by the NYT. The provincially patriotic among us should pay attention to that yellow spot in the Mediterranean that will be affected from droughts. Surprise: it’s the south of Greece. And then in frame 3, it’s all about Cyprus.

Moreover:

From Cosmic Variance:

You can find scientists that believe the Universe is not expanding. They are wrong. You can find scientists that believe there is no evidence for evolution. They are wrong. And you can find scientists that believe there is no evidence for anthropogenic global warming. They are wrong.

and then

Since this issue has profound consequences for centuries to come, I would claim it is the responsibility of every citizen of the world to educate themselves on the topic. It seems to me that each of us has three straightforward choices:
1. go back to school, get a PhD in climate sciences, and form one’s own informed opinions about what’s going on.
2. trust the experts.
3. trust the fringe.

Note that the fringe consists almost entirely of non-experts. And believing the fringe requires you to be convinced there’s a vast scientific conspiracy, with the willing collusion of thousands of experts around the world. With no obvious motive or agenda.

From Andrew Jaffe’s leaves on the line

The basic science behind climate change is well-understood:

1. The mean temperature is increasing, with significant variation superposed from place to place and year to year.
2. This is caused largely by the anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due to the very well-understood and uncontroversial physics of the carbon-dioxide molecule.
3. Significant further increase would be societally bad for many people.
4. Lowering our greenhouse-gas emissions can slow or halt the increasing temperatures.

At this coarse level, both the data and the theory underlying these conclusions are almost incontrovertible and ought to be uncontroversial, although each of these has been questioned by the politically-motivated or ignorant deniers sceptics.

Μια δημοσίευση με ιδιαίτερα αφηγηματικό ύφος στο abstract έκανε την εμφάνισή της χθες:

On 23rd November 2009, during the early commissioning of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), two counter-rotating proton bunches were circulated for the first time concurrently in the machine, at the LHC injection energy of 450 GeV per beam. Although the proton intensity was very low, with only one pilot bunch per beam, and no systematic attempt was made to optimize the collision optics, all LHC experiments reported a number of collision candidates. In the ALICE experiment, the collision region was centred very well in both the longitudinal and transverse directions and 284 events were recorded in coincidence with the two passing proton bunches. The events were immediately reconstructed and analyzed both online and offline. We have used these events to measure the pseudorapidity density of charged primary particles in the central region. In the range |eta| < 0.5, we obtain dNch/deta = 3.10 +- 0.13 (stat.) +- 0.22 (syst.) for all inelastic interactions, and dNch/deta = 3.51 +- 0.15 (stat.) +- 0.25 (syst.) for non-single diffractive interactions. These results are consistent with previous measurements in proton--antiproton interactions at the same centre-of-mass energy at the CERN SppS collider. They also illustrate the excellent functioning and rapid progress of the LHC accelerator, and of both the hardware and software of the ALICE experiment, in this early start-up phase.

Κανείς δε γνωρίζει ακόμα αν πρόκειται για το πραγματικό, ιστορικό ξεκίνημα του πειράματος. Κανείς δεν γνωρίζει καν αν και κατά πόσο το LHC θα πετύχει τους στόχους του. Πάντως αυτή τη φορά το πείραμα φαίνεται να προχωράει χωρίς τυμπανοκρουσίες, με μικρά σταθερά βήματα που ενισχύουν την αυτοπεποίθηση των επιστημονικών ομάδων στο CERN, και παρά τις ελαφρώς δυσοίωνες εκτιμήσεις γύρω από την τελική ενέργεια των δεσμών πρωτονίων που είναι ρεαλιστικό να επιτευχθούν, ο άνεμος δείχνει προς το παρόν γενικά ούριος.