1) People skeptical of the solidity of the science in AGW are not 9/11 conspiracy theorists. You're comparing one to the other because it makes your argument simpler. It's a meaningless and dishonest comparison. The questions don't go away simply because you call the questioner a Nazi.

2) It's not just the emails, though they are somewhat damning. People are looking at the code, and they're looking at the provenance of the information as well. It's not encouraging. It's certainly not "settled science". It looks more like "settled results".

3) Any rebuttal that begins with "you have to have a Ph.D. to understand why this number should be a 3 instead of a 4" smells funny. I don't have to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics to understand the basics of absorption line spectrums, because the explanation is straightforward and well understood. Hiding behind credentials is not a substitute for understanding thoroughly enough that you can explain the hows and whys and defend them.

I'm actually of the opinion that carbon emissions are not good, and we should do something about them. Carbon emissions make a fairly good metric for efficiency, and encouraging efficiency is a good thing. I object to grand, sweeping changes negotiated in the political sphere because once you introduce politics you can't disentangle it. Especially inside the global political sphere. Carbon emissions become a club to wield against political enemies and defend political interests, and it becomes decoupled from the environmental good.

So I'm in favor of continuing study of climatology, and to continue to work on the climate models. This is good science that we need to know. I'm in favor of establishing some kind of baseline to measure carbon emissions so we can make something like informed decisions. I object to climatologists needing to come up with doomsday scenarios to justify their funding, and I object to emissions legislation whose primary purpose seems to be redistribution of wealth. I don' think this makes me a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, nor a birther. Yet I think the current state of climatology is full of holes concealed by a lot of hand-waving.

Do they put something in the water cooler at Facebook HQ?

BTW, the "News Feed/Live Feed" thing is a piece of shit and whoever came up with it should be wrapped in barbed wire and shot into the sun.

Facebook used to be pretty nifty. Now it's made of AIDS. Fuck it.

All they need is a dozen "flashlight" applications, some Tetris clones and a Winnie-the-Pooh theme and you've essentially duplicated the Blackberry App World.

Not to mention that getting carcasses off the road benefits everybody. Who cares if it was tenderized by a Dodge?

Using 'man' is fine, except it's a pain to use. How do you search? How do you scroll up a full screen? Down a full screen? Of course, I know how to move around inside the man-page, but I've been doing it since installing Linux meant downloading 18 Slackware floppy disk images. But it's slow. HTML with links is faster, and easier to read. Often more convenient, too, since you're likely to have a browser open in modern distros, but maybe not a terminal.

(Then of course there are the iconoclasts who insist on using 'info' instead of 'man'.)

All of this made sense when Unix was largely command-line only, but times have changed. The needs of the users have changed. The programs have changed, too. For the better, IMO. They're a lot more helpful than they were, when terse was an over-valued virtue.

If you're going to stick with 'man', emulate OpenBSD. Their manpages were among the best of the open-source world.

Study on the matter and come to a conclusion yourself.

Unless you actually have a degree in this stuff, you aren't going to be a great judge of arguments.

This is nonsense, because we do this all the time. And those with degrees do not always judge correctly either.

It's a thinking person's responsibility to look into all of these important issues and come to their own conclusions. You're perfectly welcome to punt and let somebody else make the decision for you, but you shouldn't feel good about it.

From the original post:

Therefore, it seems clear that we should believe the majority

That is not "believing" in science.

I'm arguing that one believes in religion, but one practices science. Using the language of one in the demesne of the other is often a mistake and should be avoided.

Well, it's run by scientists who know more than any of us, which is why it is useful to link to them. There are also scientists who know more than any of us that oppose global warming, but there are much fewer of them. Therefore, it seems clear that we should believe the majority, since we ourselves are not experts. Linking to some of those experts is the correct thing to do here.

While that's not the worst idea I've ever heard--I once heard a guy suggest that we should douse ourselves in paint thinner and leap into a volcano--it ranks pretty high.

If that was rewritten with "priests" instead of "scientists" you'd probably shit your pants, but it would parse extremely well.

Now I'm happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism.

Good, legitimate criticism is difficult when you find out that one side has been manipulating data, deleting data, strong-arming publications and otherwise engaging in questionable behavior in order to sabotage the opposing side.

The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn't even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of 'disproval' of global warming (which wouldn't have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they're simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate.

Interesting, because the climate scientists who have been caught out in this scandal seem to be the ones working hard to avoid a real debate. In addition, the email quotes were the low-hanging fruit, publicized without hours of the leak/hack. There hasn't been time to properly parse the data. Will more dirt be found? Maybe, maybe not.

While I get where you're coming from, viz. expertise, climate science isn't that esoteric. It's hard, uncertain science, but the results are not complicated. That's why they put up those graphs. Temperature? Going up! Except now we find out by peeking into the sausage factory that it's not that simple, because of a lot of statistical dodges, data massaging and other manipulations. Are they valid? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to tell, since climate scientists don't want to reveal their models because that might impair their ability to get funding. Especially if their models aren't as robust as they want people to believe. While that's not a simple problem, it's got little to do with science and a lot to do with politics. Expertise is not required to smell a rat.

It's probably not fair to say they were ripping customers off. Wal*Mart's economies of scale allow it to do things a mom-and-pop simply can't do.

However, when my tire went flat on a Fourth of July weekend, it wasn't the mom-and-pop tire stores that were open. It was Wal*Mart.

Thank God we have Google to defend the end-users' interests.

Seriously, is there anything that Google can't provide? Maybe they should run everything!

I'd suggest disabling javascript and calling it a day.

FWIW, this is Slashdot. You can be pretty confident that a Slashdot user is aware of disabling Javascript, and of NoScript, and all the other obvious non-solutions. You can also be confident that if they haven't done so, there's a pretty good reason. In my case, the trouble it fixes is not as bad as the trouble it causes. Not a few Web sites do not work, or work poorly without Javascript. Sometimes it's even useful.

This has been a problem going all the way back to 1995 with a million nested tables and IMG tags with no width or height attributes. It's simply bad design and the bad habit of blindly following trends. People do that because good design is hard and expensive, and following trends is easier and cheaper than developing an individual marketing campaign.

With NoScript on and off, the web is a totally different place

Yes. Quite often completely non-functional, because the site requires Javascript to do anything.

Usually this is followed by an assertion that the site's developer is a clueless knob--which may be true, but doesn't help at all. This is the Web we deserve, I suppose: 6 megabit cable connections and dual-core 2.5 gigahertz processors that can't render a forum page for Pokemon addicts in under 8 seconds.