If they can pull more people out of poverty, what the U.S. does won't matter to China and India because their domestic markets will be larger than the United States. Currently they have even worse social inequity than we do, and the poor performance of their own markets forces their own people to look elsewhere for work.

Yes, I'm also a solid Democrat. But this has been a long time coming and IMO it's even in line with Obama's recent agenda on the Middle Class! The problem with the guest worker programs is that they devalue the local workers by diluting the market for them. The effect is to create a sort of "disposable worker" from our own citizens.

Now, of course jobs can be sent overseas too, but if the alternatives are to have foreign workers work at home, or in the U.S., neither choice is a win for our own citizens.

It continues to seem silly to have such a thrust on STEM education in the U.S. when the job market for STEM workers consistently goes to overseas hires, whether they are here or in their home nations. We need to work on the job-export issue as well.

The company I work for has fairly good diversity. The company is a chip company with a number of software teams for things like compilers, SDKs, drivers, the Linux kernel, bootloaders, etc. While it isn't 50:50 there are a lot of women developers and while the majority are indian there are a fair number of caucasian and other minorities as well. We hire what we can get. We have positions that have been open for months and the majority of those that we interview are of indian descent. We have a hard time finding good engineers, the key word being good. I have interviewed a lot of engineers of all nationalities who I do not consider competent. The competent ones usually have multiple offers.

The problem with the H1Bs are that they are abused by companies like Infosys and for less skilled engineers and IT people. Some companies also seem to have an inordinate number of H1Bs like Cisco. I'm of the firm belief that we need more good engineers and that we need a lot more people graduating from college with degrees in science and engineering.

Nothing in that article disputes the confidence that the past decade was hottest. It simply disputes which year in that decade was the worst. Nor does it dispute that the trend is increasing temperature per year.

Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.

Decreasing doesn't mean reversing. And we have physical observation of ice melting, and releases of previously-sequestered gases on sea bottoms, underground, etc. These things all take a heat input. What happens when those buffers are spent and there is nothing to sink the heat input?

Had we depended solely on experiment for everything, we would know much less about the world today. When direct experiment is not possible we still have observation and modeling, and certainly that is science. And of course most of our models do scale, simply because of long observation at all scales. Were this not the case, we would still be arguing about the heliocentric theory, because we can not move planets and suns in order to prove it from first principles, and the orbits of planets would not necessarily scale to suns, etc.

Sure, the earth has large processes that regulate each other, but there is nothing purposeful in their existence and positive feedback is as likely as negative. The Earth is as likely to be naturally fragile as naturally robust. So you can not place faith in unseen processes that will tend to mediate insults to the environment.

If there is some unknown non-anthropocentric cause for climate change, we are still in the position of having to resolve the issue through some modification in society's behavior, rather than consign the victims.

It's not surprising that fitting a model to something so complicated takes more work. But it's irrelevant when the thing actually modeled gets progressively hotter.

Where does this bullshit originate? I guess the same place as the "global warming is a fraud" bullshit.
While DDT was banned for agricultural use, it was never banned for malaria control. One of the problems with DDT and most pesticides including antibiotics is that overuse gives the pests a chance to develop pesticide resistance, this is what finally killed DDT usage, it was so overused that mosquitoes became resistant. Currently it is being used by at least 12 countries (India and some S African countries as of 2008) for malaria control and the WHO is encouraging the use of it, though not overuse. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Where ever you are getting your propaganda from you should stop using as they are spreading outright lies and if they can lie about something as easy to check as the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Pesticides how are they lying about harder to check things such as climate change?

Yes, I know. but it's more polite than telling them where their head really is. :-)

Um. That dozen years was the hottest dozen in history. Much more clearly than any individual year was the hottest. You might wave away one year as inaccuracy. But not 10 or more. See the NOAA data here.

The NOAA data says there has been no hiatus and the 10 hottest individual years have all been since 1998.

Our control Earth is history. We can see that this Earth killed most macroscopic surface life a few times in history, and we have evidence for why that happened. We can see that it once would not have supported our sort of life. We can see how its atmosphere developed and how ecological networks have formed. We also have a pretty good understanding of gases and their behavior, and we can measure the gases in the atmosphere and the gases emitted from our civilization.

We can readily disprove theories of lucky socks and umbrellas causing rain. We can't, however, explain how any atmosphere would be able to tolerate inputs of the sort our civilization produces without some change.

Oh, right. A vast international liberal cabal is adjusting historical temperatures. I guess they've replaced all of the almanacs in libraries with cleverly rewritten versions. And so on. In every country, regardless of the languages they speak and write.

And the last several years have just happened to be increasingly hot.

Take a look at any of the photos of the Earth from space. The planet is big. But the atmosphere is really thin! You can easily tell the difference in pressure if you only go up 8000 feet or so. It is that piece that we're unbalancing.

Neither is as good as the Classic Shell start menu, which works on both.