See here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Not always. Especially when the person in question is something of an expert and the rebuttal consists entirely of "he's wrong"

Ken Ham would think that the RFCs on Avian Carriers were groundbreaking science and is not a Google consultant with 20 yrs of IT under his belt.
His followers are mostly led-by-the-nose idiots; Lauren's are largely grizzled geeks & distrustful nerds.

Guess you're okay with them spying in the bathrooms, too.

Lauren Weinstein is no lightweight; there's a good reason he's a Google consultant and have 400,000 followers. It's not for his singing & dancing.

You're looking for a prediction of something that didn't happen?
"Zero warming" is utterly wrong. What could be said is that there was no "statistically significant" increase in surface temperatures where there are adequate measuring stations ie not the poles.

And even that isn't really true - https://tamino.wordpress.com/2...

What are you talking about?

A somewhat benign infection can suppress a more virulent one. But how to know which is which?

I'm backing the ones that are trying to run through our resources more slowly.

About 60% of that rise has been in only the past 30 years.

That history you're referring to had very few temp rises as quick as what we're seeing now although there were some.

One of the most important factors, which is not currently in play and won't be for thousands of years is an orbital forcing or Milankovitch cycle.

Many of the things that could be done and should have been begun decades ago will make life better for pretty much everyone.

Better housing standards - the roots of the Passivhaus dates back to the '70s and there are even older ideas that would have saved a lot of money if they'd been followed.

Solar power / heating - Carter's initiative from 1980, if it had been pursued would have changed the face of America and the breakthroughs we're waiting for may have come a decade or more ago.
But his "gasohol" idea would probably have fallen flat.

If the climate isgoing to change because of our input, we should figure it how much and in what direction. It does appear that we are causing more rapid change than ever before short of a major cataclysm.

"Evolve at this particular point in history"? How wide is that historical point? 1000 years, 20,000 years? More? Less?

Clouds are troublesome because they have both cooling & warming effects, depending on their type, reflectivity ( which varies even though we see them mostly as "white") and altitude.

But the overall effect of clouds is hypothesized to make the Earth slightly warmer - but the margin of error is pretty wide.

Most of the world doesn't have "a century or so" and that includes America. Texas & California will be great spots for solar power but not so much for agriculture without large-scale desalinization.

Depending on what you mean by "gradual worsening", you might be fooling yourself. If you're looking at it by just the average temp rise, you're missing the point that the kind of weather whiplash we've seen over the past few years can be hell for food production.

And that will become quite evident in 10-20 years.

Whether or not "tipping point" arguments instill fear or trigger a backlash is irrelevant to whether or not they are correct.

And the "reasonable action" ship likely sailed 15 years ago. The 2C target which is likely to be exceeded was supposed to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of warming. That doesn't make it benign and some of the impacts seen from the much smaller amount of warming we've experienced are pretty bad already.

Thanks to the inaction to date, all we're left with are difficult choices. Not only do we have to decarbonize everything we do, we may well have to find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere more quickly than natural processes permit.

Reasonable action is only valid if it's effective; if it's too slow to make a difference and you're not willing to make the hard choices, you're wasting your time.

I don't foresee them sticking to that policy when there are hundreds of thousands or millions of battery-swap capable EVs on the road, especially since a battery that's too degraded to be the primary in an EV still has perhaps a decade of usefulness as stationary storage.

If there are enough cars & enough demand for battery swap, they'll offer a subscription plan similar to what Shai Agassi envisioned for Better Place.