In a similar way to how casino's can accurately predict the takings they will have from a roulette table but not where the ball will end up on any one particular spin of the wheel.

there are two fans of probability that need to be accounted for. The first is the sensitivity of climate to change in CO2 - I think the direct physics calculations come to somewhere around 1 degree to double the level of CO2 from preindustrial rates. Then you have to take positive and negative feedbacks into account. The second fan of probability is predicting what we globally as a species do, whether we increase production or reduce it. How willing we are to modify our behaviour.

Essentially you are seeing those two factors multiplied.

While this is true - given the IPCC past estimates 90% likely. I feel this is the wrong way of looking at it. It will very likely be much more expensive in the long run to do nothing than it would be for us to try to get the situation under control. This is risk management.

A) This is settled, the degree to which it is isn't. I think the current estimates are around 20% slightly positive to slightly negative but easily dealable, 10% likely to be catastrophic, end of civilisation as we know it. The most likely outcome is something between those two extremes. More in importantly there is very high probability that will cost us more to do nothing in the long term.

B) What is settled is that reducing the amount of CO2 we burn will effect the distribution of probabilities of the outcome. Ideally we should phase out coal power as soon as it is practical to do so and we should invest resources into trying to make it practical earlier.

C) What is settled is that the ice is retreating. The preponderance of evidence points towards global warming being the culprit. Nobody knows enough to give you a year. When you hear these statements they typically are prefixed with "If the ice melts at the present rate".

D) This is settled. How much by we don't have a good handle on. What we can say is that all other things being equal warmer oceans will produce more extreme versions of some types of weather event.

E) What is settled is that there are multiple tipping points. What we don't know is how much warming will trigger them. The tipping points that we know about involve the melting of large sheets of ice and the destruction of certain ecosystems and extinction of plants and animals in those ecosystems. Sensitivity is still being debated so we don't know overall how much the effect will be - refer back to A) for a distribution of probabilities.

F) refer back to A)

G) not settled - but refer back to A)

H) This is pretty much settled, it's also the wrong question. Global Warming not only predicts that the planet will warm but predicts it will do so with a very distinct pattern. Different sources of heat will have different patterns of warming. These "fingerprints" include, troposphere warming but stratosphere cooling, significantly more warming towards the poles, more warming at night than in the day, centres of continents warming more than the edges. It is possible but extremely unlikely that a different heat source would produce the same fingerprints.

We have a pretty good handle on the changes that cause the shifts in climate on a geological time scale and we are measuring most of the other possible candidates directly (output from sun, the earths orbit, position of continents).

We are reading a commentary on the report - not the report itself. Make allowances for that.

You have a few options including fbx. Which is probably the same route as you would take migrating between different Autodesk products.

How is DirectX not a single Vendor technology? sure you can run more than one companies hardware.

Human Resources

Most major middle ware engines now support Linux as a target platform. I think the only exception I can think of is maybe the latest iteration of the Unreal engine.

there are some smaller players that support authoring on linux - of particular note are
Unigine and in a couple of weeks Leadwerks.

The science on whether a) The planet is warming b) the cause is greenhouse gasses c) of which the primary culprit is CO2 d) which is caused by Human Activity is pretty much settled.

The parts that aren't settled are exactly how sensitive temperatures are to increases in CO2, exactly what increases in temperature will do to weather patterns how much this will play into the worsening of extreme weather events etc.

For instance we know that when the world was between 1 and 2 degrees hotter (125,000 years ago) that the sea level was 4-6 meters higher than it is today. What we aren't sure about is how long it will take for the ice to melt.

Honestly who modded this insightful. Of course the models take into account water vapour into account, and of the effect of water vapour is difficult to model which is a big part of the reason that the error bars given say in the IPCC are quite large.

As for the Antarctic sea ice. The very first article I looked at explains that although the ice extent is a record, the volume of ice is shrinking. It's almost like the somebody read just the headline and made assumptions. I am not sure what finding ice under greenland would prove at all.

honestly Libertarians do a pretty good job of demonizing themselves.

Currently your best bet is Unigine. Currently it has better engine but worse tooling than Unity and a 12 month license is in the same ballpark as a Unity Pro License. You probably want at least one programmer in your team if you go this route though. I will say that Linux is absolutely a first class citizen as an Authoring platform for games. I have about 5 years experience Authoring using Unigine on Linux.

If you don't have a coder or the cash and you can hang in there for about a month LeadWorks is in the process of porting. As far as I can tell they are aiming for something similar to Unity. I put money into the kickstarter and am waiting for my copy before I can say more about it.

solid body, good keyboard and touchpad.
low latency audio capable.
toolless access to battery, 2 ram slots, (single screw for two hdd slots, wireless card).
graphics card, processor and other 2 ram slots can be upgraded with some effort.
optical drive can be replaced with 3rd hdd.
will connect to second battery if you are going to be away from mains for a while. This also angles the keyboard and keeps your lap from burning.
certified to run SuSE linux if linux is your thing.

It's quite a bit heavier than the macbook pro - the w series are portable workstations. The 14 and 15 inch versions are smaller and lighter.

Seriously?
I would be quite happy to challenge Cool Edit Pro on Windows XP vs Ardour 3 on KXStudio.

1) what limits?
2) I can pipe the output of almost any Linux Audio app into the input of almost any other Linux Audio app. Feed a drum machine into a Guitar FX rack - no problem. I can use a fairly wide selection of Virtual Instruments include Windows ones. Same for audio FX. What other types of extension do you want?
3) Most of the applications Have pretty straight forward configuration options - I don't know what to tell you here - not significantly different to any Windows application I have used.
4) I don't even know which interface you are responding to.
5) Good point - not all hardware is supported. If you plan to do Linux audio then you will need to find one that is before you start.