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.

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.

This is a really old and mostly wrong story. There was a person who wanted to be paid for his invention, which happened to be a wrong-headed attempt to square the circle. He wanted government money for having done that work. That is what the bill was for. To give him money. He didn't get the money.

The scientific method is for experiments. If you wanted to use it to see if global warming was real, you would make a forecast like "The world will get hotter than it's ever been.", and see if it comes true or not. It did come true. Last year was hotter than it has ever been, globally. Scientists were telling us that would happen for years.

It's time to stop denying. It's time to stop saying "they should use the scientific method" when you know full well they have. You know, that is, unless your head is in the ground or your preferred news network is putting it there.

A journalist ALWAYS needs to write something that is SOMEHOW different from what the reader believes. (If he's just reinforcing what the reader believes, why should a reader bother reading his output?)"

Actually, studies have shown that people tend to read authors and publications that tell them they are right. Echo-chambers existed long before the internet. So, while you ask why a reader would read that which reinforces his beliefs, the reality is he does.

Echo-chamber yes. But needs some difference, also yes. Even an echo-chamber medium is about giving the reader some new aspect to consider, new argument to use, etc. It may be primarily reinforcing, but it also adds or tweaks aspects to deepen the conviction and/or warp it into slightly better conformity with the common ideology of the journalist's in-group.

So I don't think there's really any conflict between our claims.

Which photo?

I have not been at HP for a long time, of course.

HP has a very long history of buying companies only to unload them for cents on the dollar a few years later. Remember Palm and WebOS? Take a look at the HP Acquisition List on Wikipedia. Not many of those companies were good buys.

This was another of many issues that contributed to staff depression while I was there and continues to this day. We could see it was wrong, but could do nothing about it.

They used to be the company engineers wanted to work for. When I got to Pixar in '81, the engineers that had been at HP were still proud of having worked there. It's really sad what's happened.

The trick to the Betteridge law is that when a journalist writes a headline as a question, the question is suggesting what most people find improbable; and the improbable rarely happens.

There's some of that. But that's more about choice of subject matter. A journalist ALWAYS needs to write something that is SOMEHOW different from what the reader believes. (If he's just reinforcing what the reader believes, why should a reader bother reading his output?)

The real trick that leads to qusetion-headlines (that are almost always implying something that's wrong) is different.

When a journalist writes a juicy headline as a question, it's because he couldn't find evidence to support the conjecture, but wants to run it anyway.

Usually this is because he guessed wrong. The deadline is approaching, he's got to publish SOMETHING to stay employed, and he just wasted a bunch of time researching something that didn't pan out. Oops! So he runs his orignnal conjecture and the workup he did on it before finding out that it was either wrong (usual) or maybe right but couldn't be supported in the time available (rarely). He just phrases the headline as a speculation rather than an assertion.

That way his credibility isn't wrecked for the future, he gets to publish something, it's interesting and plausible (even though probably totally bogus), and in those rare cases where it WAS right he's scooped his competitors. However it comes out it's a win for the journalist - though it's a bunch of noise for the readers.

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

Sounds to me like a quantum monkey-at-a-typewriter.

Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)