Why does it matter to end users?

The Linux community has spent almost 3 decades now still ignoring desktop users wants and needs. There has been this blind belief that if only parity with the Windows experience(Apps, HW support, ease of use, etc.) could be reached then, finally the world would embrace Linux. Users though do NOT care about their operating system. The user community is not out there wishing against hope for the day they can run Linux on their desktops. Until the Linux community actually decides to look at what they can offer users that Windows can't, and that users actually care about, there will be zero progress towards getting Linux on desktops. Even Apple, with all it's resources and it's user oriented design of OSX had an uphill battle selling itself and had to distinguish itself to users with things like 1 way fo doing things, simplified UI and HW choices, and an overall support model of it works or it need to get replaced. Apple provided users with a simplified experience. What's Linux even attempting to offer?

Here's a fundamental thing that's getting missed. If you could magically have ALL games 100% Linux compatible tomorrow you still would not have given people a reason to switch to Linux. You only removed 1 reason for people to refuse to use it. It is not enough to fix the very many show stopper issues keeping people off Linux, you need to give users something they care about and can't get on their Windows box. Name me something users care about that is better on Linux. Failing that, even provide a GOAL for the Linux community to work towards that would provide users something they care about and can't get elsewhere.

I have no idea why you're downloading and double-clicking .deb files. We've had package managers for a long time now. Your issue isn't that linux doesn't work well, it's that it doesn't work like you think it does. That speaks nothing to how well it works, and everything to difficult it is to teach people that microsoft's way isn't the best way to do things.

Maybe this needs to be said more bluntly, you can get all your facts right, but in the end nobody cares! Suzy in purchasing has and never will think about how best to do things with a computer. She wants to complete a task, the computer is a tool and the less time it spends in her way the happier she is.

Pretty much any average user can download and install linux, and do most of what they currently do in Windows out of the box.

You've never worked with any average users then. Average users are sketchy with downloading and installing browser extensions. You are NOT looking at the 95% of the user base here. Users don't give 1 second of thought to the process of I need an OS, and then a browser and my office productivity package before I can do what I want. When they walk up to a computer they will ask does it have internet, or can I use Word/Excel/Powerpoint on it. Many users will want Quickbooks or QuickTax. Even if they can get a techy friend to download and install linux for them as you describe, they aren't going to be able to do any of those out of the box except use internet(unless they get unlucky and even that needs some tweaking too). MS Office and the Quicken toolsets aren't available under Linux period. I know you may reply with OpenOffice, but users will reject that and demand the computer just be put back the way it was when it was working. Try moving users from MS Office 2010 to MS Office 2016 and listen to how many have problems adjusting and missing things they used to be able to find. You have NO idea what users need or are interested in trying to do for themselves.

  It's sometimes rather baffling how disconnected from what users actually use their computers for the average slashdotter is.
Indeed. Users can just download Linux, install it, and use it out of the box. Yep, the disconnect is baffling.

If $700 a month stops us from having to pay almost four times that amount to lock that person up in jail, we're recognizing cost savings there as well.

US population is ~325million, so UBI of $700/month costs the country $227.5 billion per month, or an annual budget of $2.7 trillion. The entire federal budget via wikipedia for 2017 was $3.3 trillion. So, if you can find a way to run the military, police and the rest of the federal government for the remaining $0.6 trillion the US could afford it. Realistically though, it means cutting a LOT more than just current social program funding...

Convenient to leave out Mann's biggest trick. His original hockey stick graph displayed to disparate datasets. His proxy reconstruction of old temperatures, and superimposed on that was the instrumental record. This created the shocking effect of the graph abruptly surging away after 1900. Everyone then made a big deal about that coinciding with CO2 emissions, but much less attention was directed to that also coinciding with the change in datasets...

You are correct that more recent studies have more or less recreated Mann's results. Many have improved on his work in a very important way by including graphs showing uncertainties more clearly. In those the noise dwarfs the signal, so again without the instrumental record, there is no sudden and abrupt 'hockey stick' shape within the proxy reconstruction. For that, you still need the subtle trick of adding instrumental data onto the end.

The newest review of the literature I can find right now(I'm being lazy) is in Reviews of GeoPhysics on AGUpub, "Challenges and perspectives for large-scale temperature
reconstructions of the past two millennia".

Here's some of their notes and conclusions making more or less the same observations as my summary:
"Regardless of the many seemingly contradicting results regarding, e.g., regularization methods, and regardless of other technical issues, underestimation of low-frequency variability is a serious concern and that reconstruction methods in particular have problems reconstructing temperatures that are outside the range of the calibration interval. The main reason seems to be a feature of direct regression and CPS methods which under general assumptions can be shown to be biased toward zero."

"We saw that the different reconstructions agree on the general form of the low-frequency variability but that they disagree on the amplitude; the centennial-scale amplitude (i.e., the temperature difference between the warm eleventh century and the cold seventeenth century),in particular, varies from 0.14 to 1.3C

Around page 25 they have this to say in comparing reconstructions to instrumental records:
"It is obvious that the noise is considerable and that the signal TTis not easily seen in P. In particular, for
c=0.40 and c=0.25 the trend in the twentieth century is practically lost in the noise. It is clearly not a simple
task to extract the signal from the noisy series—almost like making eggs from scrambled eggs—although
temporal or spatial averaging may reduce the noise."

In other tree ring reconstruction reviews(I can't find it right now but I've not spend much time either) the authors note that bad sensitivity to high temperatures (like the current period), is a known issue particular to tree rings and handling of that problem is a big and current research area.

So the overall summary being, there are a lot of unknowns, the hockey stick only 'works' if you are a bit dishonest on your graph, and when we say the current warming is unprecedented over the last millenia plus it is with a host of caveats and uncertainties that you need to read the full papers to see, and the uncertainties aren't nothing.

Thats a lot of postulating, but you’ve entirely neglected to acknowledge the data. Specifically, over the last 100 years, global crop yield per acre has steadily risen, while global tmeperature has steadily shifted from historic norms. You can explain as long as you like how that shouldn’t happen, but that doesn’t alter the facts.

Sounds like a testable hypothesis. In the last century global temp has risen around 1C after having remained comparatively stable prior to that. One could take global crop yields, and compare the annual trends against the change in global temperature.

The trouble is, that your hypothesis of increased crop failure, and presumably decreased global yields(else if yields don't drop who cares), presupposes that all other things remain equal...

Of course, global crop production has been trending persistently upwards as temperatures have also trended up. Numerous advances in crop technologies and techniques being a portion, and additionally regions impacted by climate change where conditions become too warm/cold/dry/wet for one crop are rotated for others. Farmers don't stubbornly plant the same crop for decades when conditions change, even if that would make projecting trends easier...

Spend a little more time reading what I said rather than trying to identify what team I appear to be on...

The GP was pointing out disillusionment from the continual headlines stating new discoveries showing AGW is going to be much worse than previously thought. Those discoveries, like the linked article here, are what I am referencing as 'seemingly' over-turning the previously 'settled scientific consensus'. The rest of my post referencing the IPCC and the linked article being mis-characterized for a sensational headline make that clear.

The point being made/defended was simple. If alarmists(not scientists) want to decry opponents of their political solutions as deniers of 'settled science', they can only sensationalize so many headlines like 'OH NO, it's going to be even worse than anticipated" before they are the ones that have repeatedly insisted that their 'settled' science was entirely out to lunch.

Again, my original post finished by observing that the actual journal article in this case does make reference to the IPCC, does NOT claim to have overturned the IPCC predictions, and merely notes that their additional evidence will be compiled into the overall collective analysis the IPCC uses for it's next report. That is to say, the sensational headlines from the journalists are the BS, are the scientists meanwhile are not the ones declaring everyone panic, the previous IPCC finding have been overturned...

Poor effort, you clearly didn't read a word I wrote.

You realize that when a group like the IPCC says they have High Confidence that changes due to climate change will be in range x,y,z that dissenting opinions are not only those with less severe predictions, but equally those like that linked here citing more severe changes?

I think folks like the parent are asking to be engaged honestly, rather than trying to be tricked and frightened into doing what they are 'supposed' to do.

He's just pointing out a very real problem that the alarmist crowd is creating.

Go back to the first IPCC report and Al Gore's movie and shared Nobel prize. Assume the parent poster paid attention, looked at the evidence and agreed it looks sound and made a decision to make certain changes and support some actions to improve things. Now, during all the backlash, parent was onside with the movement to improve things, and had seen the scientific consensus from the IPCC and could agree to summarizing things as 'settled'. Thus, calling out the opponents and hold outs as denying the science seemed rational.

Fast forward a year or two though, and multiple head lines have come out from the alarmists that oh no, these couple scientists had demonstrated it's much worse than we though, we must act even more. Maybe parent even accepted this, science does refine itself, so ok.

A few years later, and even more reports stating things are going to be even worse than last years worse pile onto each other. There comes a point when the parent says stop, somebody somewhere in all this is either lying about just how settled the original science actually was, or just how much worse these new studies actually are showing things to be, and maybe all those folks being called deniers were being called wrong for political and not scientific reasons.

I largely share the parent's conclusions, and am pretty convinced it's the most rational response too.

If we walk back to Gore's noble prize for an inconvenient truth and the IPCC's work, at that time those calling for action and change all cited the scientific consensus, that the science was settled. Anyone with a dissenting opinion on the impacts or the best course of action was called a denier.

The thing is, the crowd trying to push an agenda of carbon taxes, industry cutbacks, etc has repeatedly dragged out scientific studies like the above out to declare that we must act now because, oh no, it's even worse than we feared.

The rational crowd though is starting to question how come the scientific consensus that was so settled, is now being overturned on a seemingly annual basis, and maybe those pushing for change and dragging this reports into the spotlight are just playing chicken little to get their agenda through.

An easy example, the most recent IPCC 5AR(2013, so 7 extra years of research since Gore's Nobel prize), says the following on sea level rise to 2100:
For the period 2081–2100, compared to 1986–2005, global mean sea level rise is likely (medium confidence) to be in the 5 to 95% range of projections from process-based models, which give 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6, 0.32 to 0.63 m for RCP4.5, 0.33 to 0.63 m for RCP6.0, and 0.45 to 0.82 m for RCP8.5. For RCP8.5, the rise by 2100 is 0.52 to 0.98 m with a rate during 2081–2100 of 8 to 16 mm yr–1.
We have considered the evidence for higher projections and have concluded that there is currently insufficient evidence to evaluate the probability of specific levels above the assessed likely range. Based on current understanding, only
the collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet, if initiated, could cause global mean sea level to rise substantially above the likely range during the 21st century. This potential additional contribution cannot be precisely quantified but there is medium confidence that it would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century.

Scenario 8.5 is to show the worst case, if emissions are still accelerating in 2100, and has it's range of 0.52m to .98m sea level rise by 2100. That's what the "settled" science says, but then along comes a headline claiming things are happening much faster, even "increasing exponentially as a result of manmade global warming".

The good news for the scientific crowd though, is if you read closer, the Nature article linked does acknowledge the IPCC work and makes far more modest claims, merely that this may alter future IPCC corrections. This is in contract to the chicken littles writing the headlines.

Ignoring all of the oh-no it's even worse and now it's even more important to act crowd is a good idea, they are generally trying to use deception to manipulate people.

Surprisingly, Aliens or climate change aren't the only possible explanations. I know, hard to believe but hear me out.

It's beginning to be widely accepted that fighting forest fires has contributed to making the big ones worse. When we stop small forest fires, that means dead fall and dried planet matter continue to accumulate. It turns out, larger trees used to survive small forest fires, and the smaller fires cleared out the dead fall and dried material. With us stopping those fires though, enough tinder is accumulating that when a fire does hit, it's bigger, stronger and worse than ever before.

I know, citation please, so here's a fire forest researcher from UBC from a region of Canada where we fight multiple forest fires every year saying the same thing.

Before you get too sad though, there is a silver lining. The faculty member mentions that changing forest fire management might be opposed by standard logging industry practices, so we can still hate on corporate/industrial causes for the problem, hurray!

The systems really aren't a whole other discussion though, right? Take away all those systems, take away society and give yourself a flourishing tropical island paradise all to yourself. Even with those kind of ideal conditions, you are still stuck as an employee, this time an employee for yourself and/or mother nature. If you want clothes still, your going to have to collect and process the raw materials and make them into the clothing you want. That's a lot of work. Food, shelter and any tools to make that easier are all going to require work.

You can't just say you want more out of life than being an employee, without acknowledging the fact that at fundamental level, the basic necessities of life take work to produce. In fact, they take an incredible amount of work to produce. The owning of stupidly comfortable clothing, weather proof homes with hot/cold running water, food(let alone imported food) is an historically ludicrous level of wealth. It's hardly fundamentally obvious that the work we have to put in to acquire and maintain such a lifestyle is unreasonably tailored against us.