And where exactly is this being 'vilified'? All I see is a study that accepts mainstream climate science and offers another data point about climate sensitivity. It's at the lower end of the range accumulated from previous studies but nevertheless consistent with that range. It remains to be seen whether this is more accurate than the 2.5 degrees often assumed as the most likely climate sensitivity value. If it is, then that's a bit of good news but we're not off the hook by any means.

It's clear that you don't really get a lot of this stuff. Despite that, you seem to be in some position where you can review and reject other people's code. Your remarks would be hilarious if I didn't think you were serious. For example:

The whole point about generic algorithms is that you only have to write them once and can then use them with all sorts of containers, including ones that might not have been written yet, as long as the containers satisfy the minimal requirements of the algorithm. So for example, the 'set' in set_difference does not refer to the container type - it is a description of what the algorithm does. The algorithm does not demand a set; you can equally apply it to a sorted vector. Furthermore, the two input sequences to set_difference do not even have to be the same type as long as their elements are compatible, so I can apply it to a set of strings and a sorted vector of strings if I want to. By your argument, I would have to have a set class with a difference method, and a sorted vector class with a difference method. And then if I wanted set's difference method to work with sorted vectors and other compatible sequences, how would that work? I would have to write it as some sort of generic member function anyway.

So what you are saying is that instead of having a sort algorithm implemented once, I need to reimplement that algorithm in every class that I might want to sort. So either I guess that I might want to sort it at the time of writing it or, if I didn't get that right, I have to go back and modify the class. Compare that with the non-intrusive sort algorithm. How is what you are proposing good software engineering practice by any stretch of the the imagination? And I don't understand your point about comparators. In most cases a type you want to sort probably defines a less than operator, which is all you need and you don't need to provide an explicit comparator. It's only when you need to do something special that you need a comparator. How would the sort member function be better?

Here's a hint: go and look up the word 'orthogonal'. It's a key concept in understanding the STL.

Presumably you have studied the scientific evidence of alternative hypotheses in order to arrive at your conclusions so it seems a bit odd that you are asking this question. Shouldn't you be pointing us to them?

I think it is your literacy skills that are deficient. Arrhenius identified the mechanism but fossil fuel usage at that time was a fraction of what it is now. Hence the use of the word 'potentially'.

You are completely missing the point. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and O2 and N2 are not. It is the absolute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that is important - its effect is not diluted by the rest of the atmosphere! Having said that, I can understand why people get confused by this. I believe it results from the conventional use of ppm to express how much CO2 there is.

That 'much better' summary is taken from the Register from an article written by Lewis Page. He is one of their resident 'climate skeptics' and is well known for writing stories in which he misinterprets the latest scientific research. This one does not appear to be bucking the trend.

The Daily Mail? Seriously, The Daily Mail?? You're having a laugh aren't you?

This would be a great book were it not for the fact that it has just about the worst index I have seen in a technical book, let alone a reference book!

I agree with you about Learning Perl vs. Learning Python. The former was a short, to the point, book that covered the basics, got me going with the language. From there I progressed to Programming Perl for the details, and the excellent Perl Cookbook for the how-to recipes. I have found the Python equivalents to be disappointing. I read an earlier edition of Learning Python but found it badly written and going into slightly bizarre amounts of detail at certain points but not explaining other things very well. I also have a newer edition that I picked up cheap but haven't read yet and it looks like it might be better but now seems to have got too big.

It's strange really, as Python is so much cleaner than Perl so one might have expected that to make it easier to write books about it.

As far as I understand it, microevolution is very provable & has been observed; macroevolution (which is what you're probably talking about), on the other hand and IMHO, has not been observed. This is fairly controversial & I'm not up on the latest research, so if somebody's got some proof here, I'd be interested to hear it.

As I understand it, the terms "microevolution" and "macroevolution" are unknown/undefined in science and were invented by creationists to get around the fact that evolution is observable. If you are going to use such terms you need to provide precise definitions of what they mean.