Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

the younger kids (college age) feel the need to rebel. that's universal.

however, they are extremely uninformed and are siding with the WRONG side.

islam has no ceasefires. they only have 'temporary reloading' periods. this is in their holy books, look it up. if you dare to find the truth about islam.

islam is not compatible with the west. the longer we keep putting off the big fight, the worse its going to be.

I have zero patience for so-called 'smart googlers' who cant even see that the islamic way of life is 100% counter to everything they VALUE in the west.

in short, they are idiots. how they got into google - that just means google has no clue about actual people's views and only cares about 'how fast can you code nested procedures?'.

again, I have very little respect for googlers. they are the most spoiled brats I've ever seen in my life.

let them lose their jobs. that would be some justice.

when they get 20 or 40 years older, they'll change their views. we all do. but for supposedly smart geniuses, they sure act like little clueless children.

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.

Sure, the planet does not care, but we're not asking what the *planet* should do, are we?

Of course this isn't science, it's just wishful thinking and hand waving about things you don't actually know much about. It's probably worth noting that actual reef scientists aren't so cheerful about the prospects for coral reefs as you are.

It's not even that what you *think* you know is necessarily wrong. You're talking about about something reef scientists aren't particulary worried about: the extinction of coral *species*. In other words it's a straw man. What scientists are worried about is something quite different: a massive reduction in the 348,000 square kilometers of coral reef habitat that currently exist.

That's something that will take millions of years to recover from, and which will cause countless extinctions It will result in multiple species extinctions; sure that's survival of the fittest, but "fittest" doesn't mean "better"; it means more fitted to specific set of new circumstances, in this case circumstances we *chose to create*. And sure, in a few million years it won't matter. But that's not the test we use to decide whether anything other issue needs addressing. If someone broke into your house and took a dump on your kitchen table, it wouldn't matter in a million years, but you'd sure report it to the cops and expect something to get done about it.

No, it's not evolution *at work*. It's human intervention in the environment at work. Sure, evolution will *respond* to this intervention; if you want to see *that* at work, go into suspended animation for a hundred thousand years.

You could argue that *humans* are part of nature and therefore anything we do is natural. That's just quibbling. By that argument it would be just as natural for us to choose not to shit in our own beds.