If everyone had the same environment then all variation would be genetic. I would argue the psychological effects of growing up in a dangerous neighborhood with barely enough food, moving from relative to relative, and being viewed as a failure by the rest of society would have a rather large negative effect.

Congratulations! You just discovered that the sphere is a PITA to smooth over with data in Lat-Long format.

Science will never deliver answers on the meaning of life, how man should live morally, what justice is, etc. But it will tell you how to make machines that can destroy tumors with beams of radiation, reach the moon, determine the composition of the core of the Earth, destroy diseases with literally nothing more then the root cause slightly modified. Mold society? Only because they see a threat which, if left unchecked, could launch a tide of refugees numbering in the millions, destroy the remaining coral reefs. It doesn't matter if deindustrialization, carbon taxes, or cap and trade prevent this from happening. Scientists are indifferent to the details, but want only to see this threat addressed.

That's not been true for at least 70 years. Read Lakatos to see that math is an experimental science where the theories are always tautological!

The longer you wait, the steeper the maximum decline that is required. Have you filled a bathtub lately?

Wouldn't a carbon tax be the preferred capitalist alternative as it takes advantage of market forces? I thought conservatives were against subsidies of specific industries.

What is not specific about the IPCC projections?

So what if they just imposed a market based carbon tax?

Start recording temperatures in 1850, and in 1950 look at the trend. Do the same from 1950 onwards. Notice that CO2 increases IR absorption and is increasing in the atmosphere. Create a GCM and run it with and without the anthropogenic forcing. Notice which one fits the data. Download the program and the data from http://edgcm.columbia.edu/ and run it at home if you want to check. Oh, don't believe that data? Use this, or this new one. Want to check the GCM? run against paloclimate proxies, or write from first principles and do it on paper like Arrhenius did.

Yes there is. The Skeptic clearly understands the evidence for the theory and has opposing evidence that is genuine. The Uniformed Judge makes false claims to support his point, or doesn't understand the empirical support for the theory. Suppose I am arguing that Einstein's Special Relativity is correct. I use atomic clocks to determine that Einstein's theory predicts time dilation correctly, or muon decay. The Skeptic at this point shuts up. His evidence isn't precise enough, so he now changes his mind. The Uniformed Judge then launches all kinds of irrelevant attacks.

The laws were known to be invalid since the development of Maxwell's equations. Einstein was continuing the work of Fitzgerald and Lorenz in the area. All 4 of the papers in the Annus Mirabilis (1905) were very much in line what was expected. General Relativity (1915) was part of a research programme begun to connect Newtonian gravity to special relativity. There were many theories proposed, Einstein just had the luck and intuition to find the right one.

Who? Can you show me the studies? Can you show me the absence of papers saying those papers are full of crap?

Who decides what those national security interests are? Did the United States have a security interest in bombing Vietnam that was so important it transcended the rights of the people to express their opinion on it through the political system? What about murdering El Salvadorian peasants, bombing the harbors of Nicaragua, assassinating exiles on the streets of DC? Was that so important that the people of the United States should not have been allowed to decide if this was how their country would behave? Politics is the only alternative to violence. We should not lightly silence it.

But you can't avoid the attack. Do you seriously think that terrorists will use any communications medium that can be intercepted now that they know wiretaps exist? Do you seriously think they would need to have the fact that they themselves are being wiretapped known to avoid the wiretap? And if they are this dumb why do you think we should be afraid? The only people who can destroy the US Constitution are the Americans. And they are doing one good job of it.

But will they defend the right to tinker against large corporations with interests in curtailing it? I think not. They are anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, and have a regressive view of liberty. They do not understand the Enlightenment philosophy from which the US Constitution springs. They are not interested in further realizing emancipatory possibilities. A vote for them will be a victory for the forces of evil that seek to make this country into something like Ireland.