Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

For something like Jekyll, this also applies to the input. I use it for a couple of sites and, in both cases, the sources are Markdown files (easy to edit with your favourite text editor) stored in a git repo. When I'm working on updates, I run 'jekyll serve' locally and get a copy of the site on the loopback. When I want to push them, I can do jekyll build and then rsync the results to the web server (or do something more clever if I'm less lazy and want atomic updates). The entire change history of the site is stored in revision control and the revision control system contains everything necessary to recreate the site at any point in its history.

I've yet to see a CMS that allows trivial rollback to earlier versions of the site or which makes it easy to store the content in such a way that a compromised web server can't damage it.

I'm not sure I agree with your first premise. There are fairly trivial combinators that you can write in lambda calculus that are conditional flow control (i.e. reduce to either the left or right lambda expression based on a value). The implementation of ifTrue in Smalltalk (loosely) follows this model.

Only if the unconditional branch is a computed branch. Otherwise how would you implement a program that either terminates or does not terminate based on user input? The example that comes to mind is the x86 MOV instruction which, with a single unconditional backwards branch is Turing complete, but this relies on several other aspects of the surroundings that allow you to implement a conditional branch (or, at least, a select, which is morally equivalent).

The simplest Turing-complete instruction set is a subtract-and-branch-if-not-negative instruction, but this is a conditional branch.

I agree that conditional flow control is slightly too broad a requirement, as it depends on an imperative model. Conditional execution depending on input data might be a better way of phrasing it.

No number is larger than any other number. Quantities are larger than other quantities. Numbers are symbolic entities that can represent a quantity, or not.

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.

Oh, do I have to qualify that for you, like the hottest outside of a period of Milankovitch Forcing? Gee, maybe the Earth's orbit changed, like back then, and we just didn't notice.

Let's take a look at one of the references you cited:

A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.

It sounds like we have reason to be alarmed.

Well, I am trying to get through to you. You wrote that the hiatus was widely acknowledged by scientists! It's like talking with someone who believes in god - they have no facts, and no facts will convince them, and they create their own "science" which is nothing of the sort to bolster their viewpoint. So, I tried another another argument. But let's go back to the first. Nobody credible believes in a hiatus.

Calling names isn't going to advance your argument.

Orbital models only have two variables when there are two bodies. In reality we are always dealing with an n-body problem. Regarding atmospheric models, we have weather, which is too chaotic to forecast, and climate, which should not be.

We could sit back 100 years and see what is happening then, so that we have lots of good data points, but potentially at the cost of widespread famine, death, etc.

We have excellent reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon even if we ignore global warming.