You're lying in bed at night in a cool room with one blanket on. The blanket is warmer on the bottom next to you and cooler on the top. The top of the blanket is still warmer than the air in the room and it loses heat. Put on a second blanket. You get warmer underneath the two blankets, the top of the blanket layer is cooler than before, and less heat escapes into the room. The troposphere without additional CO2 already has about a dozen blankets on, because we're 33K or so warmer at the surface than our effective radiative temperature into space, and the recent excess CO2 is just adding another blanket to add a few more K to the surface warming. But the main point for this is that the stratosphere is mostly outside the blankets and is getting less heat.

After the fall of communism, the Russians learned that "everything Lenin said about communism was false and everything he said about capitalism was true." Paraphrase and partial quote from William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.

What I find amusing is how completely Pascal has disappeared from both historical memory and current usage. Some of you may remember the 80s for Basic on a C64, but I remember a huge bandwagon for Pascal both as a teaching language and as a working language. (I am not advocating Pascal, just reminiscing.)

And, I think the judge's almost glib comment near the end that this plaintiff has pursued over 100 previous suits to trial of this sort and can handle another one could indicate that she recognizes Righthaven's business model is Troll, which I take to be a (possibly unwarranted) good sign.

Sigh. The full, legal, proper name of my country is "United States of America," it is the only country with "America" in its name, and we refer to its people as "Americans" by the same construction that we (in English) refer to people from the Federal Republic of Germany as Germans or the Peoples Republic of China as Chinese. This might be one of the oldest stupid arguments on the internet -- it certainly was common on Usenet > 20 years ago.

Well stated. A complicated feedback diagram in climatology from 25 years could have served as a model for the Afghan diagram (Robock, 1985, Bull. A.M.S.) and its complexity is the message -- you can't understand this system without understanding all these connections. Gen. McChrystal should not have been laughed at for recognizing the problem. PowerPoint has nothing to do with this aspect. If anything the point should be that PowerPoint discourages diagrams and thoughts of this level of complexity, and thus encourages oversimplified thinking (which was also Tufte's point, mentioned by someone else). We probably need more diagrams like this.

That is so bogus. There are many fields of scientific study where all we can do is observe what happens now, try to reconstruct, often from proxy data, what has happened in the past before the era of human observation, and use extrapolations from physical principles (i.e., numerical models) to try to better understand processes. Climatology, geology, ecology, paleontology, much of astronomy, much of what we think we know about evolution, and a lot of oceanography -- in other words most things having to do with the large scale, have the same observational, not lab-experimental, basis. Climatology is at least physically based enough that we can try to project the future (arguing about accuracy of those predictions is fair, and that argument is a robust part of current climate research).

The canard about what we know in the 1970s is getting really stale. In the early 1970s, climate modeling was in its infancy and we were trying to nail down what, among many possible climate problems, was most likely. If your library has a copy of S.H.Schneider's The Genesis Strategy, look it up for a view of the uncertainty we had back then. News magazines picked up on the ice age side of things more back then, not because there was any scientific consensus at all, but because it sold magazines. By the early 1980s, the scientific consensus was that CO2-greenhouse gases were the imminent concern. Nobody has been seriously pushing the encroaching ice age as a problem for 30 years. This is how science works: hypotheses lead to research which leads to corrections and improvements.

It would help if you recognized the difference between talking to American humans and talking to fast-food life-forms working from a script where "you just want the sandwich" is equivalent to "you don't want the 'meal' (drink and fries) with that?" Because the sort of people who work there (which no doubt includes the past lives of a huge number of slashdotters -- no insult intended here because it's an entry level high-school job) need a simple, one-size-fits-all script, and sandwich is considered all-encompassing. As the comments have come in, you have shifted your position from "the burger only refers to the patty" which is seriously wrong to "it's not a sandwich, regardless of filling, if it comes on a bun." That is more regionally variable. If you travel the world, expect that sandwich is something added to some kind of bread. In parts of Europe, the bread could be an open-face half of a baguette. In America, you'll often get a choice of various flavors of sliced breads or a sandwich bun (aka Kaiser roll in my usual lunch counter). None of that redeems your original comment that a burger is just the patty in America. You are still dead wrong there and are just trying to change the argument.

Speaking as a life-long American, no, we don't. America has dialect regions and I've only lived in three, but I've never thought of things this way.