Soot in general has non-negligible impact, yes. Food from poor people's cooking stoves, on the other hand, has not. First, it's a small amount, compared to industrial and other sources. And secondly, since it comes from small fires without much updraft and without high chimneys, it mostly settles locally. Not too many poor people live close to large glaciers.

You make that sound as if that is a good thing. It is not. The very point of communication is to be exposed to new and possibly uncomfortable ideas. Strong filtering bias is a very real danger - 1000 digital TV channels means I can always find a rerun of Firefly, and I never have to encounter even a news flash. Customised news aggregators allow me to filter out all comments from lefty windbags and/or Austrian economists. I can comfortably live in my bubble of self-imposed ignorance. Don't get me wrong - on a personal level, I of course like the choice. But as a society, we need moderately informed citizens able to have an intelligent dialogue on important issues. How we achieve both is a non-trivial question.

This is really surprising and depressing to me. I don't even see the crime. Since when is it generally illegal to lie, or to lie well? What's next - imprison people who teach martial arts? Or shooting? Or driving (think getaway cars)? Or better, people who teach writing (which can be used for teaching nearly anything)! Down with knowledge! Bring back trial by fire!

You have never seen the price of nuclear power. From massive subsidies to develop nuclear technology (both civilian and military) to subsidised insurance to low-balling decommissioning costs, nuclear energy has been so heavily subsidised, it's not even funny. And that's not even talking about nuclear waste storage, which still is an open problem wherever there are working nuclear installations.

Actually, even if this one piece of evidence was not in direct contradiction, the original post would still be crap, a sequence of unsupported allegation connected via non-sequiturs. See "Lack of pirates is causing global warming".

If you take that look, be sure to look closely. The plan is to utilize Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River, which connects it to the Caribbean. That leaves only 10 km of completely new canal (from Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific), although the San Juan River also needs upgrades to make it navigable for larger ships. This is not a new idea, nor an implausible one - see the Wikipedia article.

Not that the US is to blame for all evils, but as a short historical reminder...

• Augusto Pinochet
• The Somoza clan
• Ngô ình Dim (and most of his successors)
• Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
• Really too many juntas to count
• ...

During the height of the cold war a vague claim of anti-communism apparently was enough to excuse all kinds of torture and murder.

I smell a Kickstarter here...

You mean the guy who got a M.Sc. from Helsinki University or the guy who got a Ph.D. in math from Caltech? Using hashes to manage file in git needs math. Finding a good scheduling algorithm needs math. You don't need all the math all the time - in fact, you probably don't need most of mathematical knowledge at all. But the skills of thinking abstractly and analytically, and a basic understanding of what math can do, are enormously helpful. You can't google something you can't even imagine.

Since the 70s? The Iranian revolution was in 1979, with the new constitution coming into force in December. And in 1980 Iraq (under our then-ally Saddam Hussein) invaded Iran, leading to 8 years of war with somewhere between 500000 and 1 million Iranian victims (that's around 250 9/11s if you need a comparison). That looks more like a reactive and defensive stand to me...

Actually, if funding is completely evenly spread among all scientists, and 97% arrive at any one position, hey, presto, they get 97% of the funding.

There is a reason why most countries have a tenure system of one kind or another. It means that tenured professors can say whatever they like without risk to, at least, their personal livelihood. In many cases, even reasonable research funding is guaranteed via their position, no matter how popular or unpopular the position. This enables them to go wherever the evidence leads.

This is a legitimate observation. But what is not legitimate is to deny the science because you don't like the political implications. Our understanding of the climate system is not perfect, but it is plenty good enough to understand that we are increasing atmospheric CO2, that that increase leads to a significant warming of the ocean/atmosphere system, and that this warming will have, on average, significant negative effects on established eco-systems and, in the medium term, coastlines. If you don't like to handle this via "taxes", find some other way. Or convince people to live with it as the price of progress. But denying it is not a valid choice.

I am the brain, your thinking organ. Thou shalt not read the DailyMail except purely for entertainment value. Read Hansen's original text, which is much more nuanced, and speaks of a remote possibility under the assumption that we burn all fossil fuels.

How is that the scientists' problem, or casting the science in any doubt? Facts don't vanish because they have unpleasant political effects, wether necessarily or not. If a largish asteroid were heading towards earth, that would most likely also cause giant government programs to spring up. But would that be a reason for scientist to ignore the rock? Or, historically, entering WW-II caused a giant government intervention in the US. So would it have been ok to keep Pearl Harbour under wraps? Some scientific or historical facts don't jibe well with some political views. But that does not mean that science or history have to bend. It means that the people holding the view need to accomodate the facts, or live with the mental discrepancy. You know, "your own opinion, but not your own facts".

The part you are looking for is "the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses". You test a hypothesis by comparing the predictions it makes with actual observations. If the observations match the predictions, the hypothesis is confirmed. If not, it's refuted and either rejected or, more often, modified to fit the new observation. Rinse, lather, repeat. After a few hundred years you can compute where a shell will land, or which treatment will enhance survival of cholera infections, or how to design a 3GHz microprocessor, or even how the climate will develop under certain external forcings.