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Here’s some heartbreaking news for people pinning their hopes on online matchmaking sites: It’s virtually impossible to forecast a love connection.

Maybe that’s not so shocking to survivors of the dating wars. But now science is weighing in. Extensive background data on two individuals — comparable to that collected by digital dating services — can’t predict whether that pair will romantically click during a four-minute, face-to-face speed date, say psychologist Samantha Joel of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues.

People know when an in-person meeting on a speed date has gone smoothly or felt right — and that bodes well for mutual attraction, the investigators report online August 30 in Psychological Science. But on paper, no blend of personal qualities and partner preferences thought to influence mate choices pegged which opposite-sex duos would hit it off, Joel’s group concludes.

Joel expected that, say, a person who reported being attracted to extroverted people would generate the most chemistry with speed daters who reported being extroverted. Or, two people who reported being good-looking and having particularly warm personalities would feel especially attracted to one another after brief dates. But that’s not what Joel and coauthors Paul Eastwick of the University of California, Davis and Eli Finkel of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., found.
The researchers studied 350 heterosexual college students — almost evenly split between males and females — who participated in one of 15 speed-dating events in 2005 or 2007. Participants filled out either 182-item or 112-item questionnaires about their personality traits and preferences in romantic partners. The students then completed about 12 speed dates. Afterward, participants rated their interest in and sexual attraction to each person they met.

Some qualities romance seekers said they wanted — such as extroversion and warmth — predicted individual speed daters’ greater attractiveness to others in general. But a statistical analysis of participants’ responses found that no traits or preferences, or combinations of traits and preferences, predicted how much one person especially desired another person after a speed date.

Joel’s team has not analyzed evidence from online matchmaking services to see if their questionnaires frequently pair people who generate romantic heat. “But our findings suggest that it’s quite difficult to predict initial romantic attraction using self-report measures before two people have met,” Joel says.

Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, a senior researcher at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, agrees. “You’ve got to meet someone in person to trigger the brain circuitry for romantic love,” Fisher says.

That comes as no surprise to operators of online dating sites, she adds. These sites typically don’t promise customers romantic connections, says Fisher, who is a consultant for online dating site Match.com and founded its affiliated website, Chemistry.com. The aim is to provide an array of potential dates with background and personality traits requested by a customer. The rest is up to those who decide to go on dates.

It is “extremely likely” that humans are driving warming on Earth since the 1950s. That statement — which indicates a 95 to 100 percent confidence in the finding — came in a report released November 3 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This interagency effort was established in 1989 by presidential initiative to help inform national science policy.

The 2017 Climate Science Special Report, which lays out the current state of scientific knowledge on climate change, will be rolled into the fourth National Climate Assessment, set to be released in late 2018.
The last national climate assessment, released in 2014, also concluded that recent warming was mostly due to humans, but didn’t give a confidence level (SN Online: 5/6/14). Things haven’t gotten better. Ice sheet melting has accelerated, the 2017 report finds. As a result, projections of possible average global sea level rise by 2100 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (in which emissions rise unabated throughout the 21st century) have increased from 2 meters to as much as 2.6 meters.

In addition, the report notes that three of the warmest years on record — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — occurred since the last report was released; those years also had record-low sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean in the summer.

The report also notes some still-unresolved questions that have become increasingly active areas of research. One big one: How will climate change alter atmospheric circulation in the mid-latitude areas? Scientists are wrangling with whether and how these changes will affect storm patterns and contribute to extreme weather events, including blizzards and drought.