When someone says something like "e.g replace global warming with, say, climate change", I can never tell if they're making a lame attempt at humor or are just tremendously ignorant. Global warming and climate change came into use at about the same time (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html) and they're respective meanings have never changed: global warming remains a subset of climate change. Given how widely this is known, you must remain willfully ignorant to not be aware of that. I always take comments like yours to mean "I don't care about the damn facts, they must be wrong". But I'm sure yours was just a lame attempt at humor, right? ;)

Umm, yeah. Burning fossil fuels adds 1% and the extra CO2 in the atmosphere adds 100 times that much. You do see that the additional energy coming from burning fossil fuels is only noise compared to the energy added by the extra CO2 in the atmosphere, right? Thinking otherwise would be like dropping 100 lbs on someone and then dropping 1 lb on them and then saying that is was the 1 lb weight that killed them.

But how much? The extra energy due to the burning of fossil fuels is about 1% of the extra energy staying in the climate system due to the addition of CO2 in the atmosphere. Is it naive to believe that something that is known to be 100 times larger than the output from burning fossil fuel is playing a much greater role in the current climate change/global warming? I don't think so.

And, yet, I don't recall anyone on the pro-science side saying to cease all carbon emissions. Ok, there are probably some radical people doing so, but there are also radical people saying that climate change/global warming doesn't exist - there are always fringe people spouting off nonsense.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that we don't know why many of those earlier events occurred or that we don't know why the current climate change/global warming is occurring. The causes of climate change aren't that varied. The big players are the sun, the earth's orbit around the sun, and the ability of the earth to radiate away the energy it gets from the sun. We know the sun isn't causing the current climate change/global warming because, if anything, the long term output from the sun has decreased slightly. We know the orbit isn't causing the change because it should actually be cooling the earth slightly. We can measure the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and know that is primarily caused by man. We can also measure the reduction in outgoing IR radiation due to that increase in CO2. Sure, it's possible that climate science is missing something (that's always possible in every field of science), but when the science explains so much of what's currently going on and what went on in the past, and when the current science is able to make very good projections about what will happen, at some point you have to say, "Yeah, that's probably right." Since there are no current alternate hypotheses (or, rather, no good ones) and since the data clearly supports the basic theories that make up climate science, there's no good reason to be doubting the science.

While I agree with most of your points, I thought I'd point out that this is a common misconception. In fact, both terms came into usage at about the same time (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html ). Climate change refers to all effects of the changing climate (ocean acidification, droughts, floods, changes in short term weather events, long term temperature changes, etc.). Global warming only refers to the general trend in surface temperature. So global warming is, and always has been, just a subset of climate change.

I agree somewhat with this statement. But remember that there's very good evidence that the loss of summer Arctic ice cover has a large effect on the winter Arctic Oscillation. And the loss of summer Arctic ice cover is caused by the current climate change/global warming. So there is some effect there. I don't know if it's very predictable though so what effect climate change/global warming had on the past winter, I don't know. And you're correct about the La Nina - for all I know that's the bigger cause of the past winter's weather.

I'm not sure if you're quite aware, but the pro-science side has data much longer than 100 years (actually, both sides have access to all that data, but one side tends to ignore it). Besides, when the physics does a very good job of explaining the current climate change/global warming (and many of the past climate changes), you don't need even 100 years of data. If you turn the oven on and it warms up, do you really need 100 years of data to understand what's happening?

And you can make more outside of the San Francisco area (or, at least, I could - YMMV). Don't get me wrong. I loved living in the Bay area, but when I got the offer for more money (and a more interesting job) in a place where I could buy a house twice as big as my Fremont house (and for less money with a much shorter commute), I couldn't pass it up. I always thought that I'd gotten premium pay for working in the Bay area, and putting up with the high prices and long commutes, but it turned out not to be true.

All success in schooling (public, private, or home schooled) depends primarily on the parents involvement. I think there was a chapter in the Freakonomics book concerning this.

I found interest all over the country. There was Amazon in Seattle (not a job I really would have cared for, but it would be an interesting place to live), as well as lots of embedded opportunities in Arizona, Wisconsin (which seemed surprising), and Virginia (but kind of far from DC). I finally ended up in Albuquerque, making more money in an area with a much lower cost of living. I must confess, part of the problem I had in finding a new position was of my own creation - I'm really, really, really, really bad at interviewing. For some reason, I do much better when traveling for an interview. And considering they they have to drop $1000 or so just to get me out there, it generally means they had more interest in me once I got there.

The only time I really had problems with a company was one in Ohio. The opening they advertised was a perfect fit for me - it seemed like they had taken my resume and used it to make a job opening - and it didn't seem like a common combination of education and experience. After a brief phone screen, the opening went away and I figured I'd screwed up the phone screen somehow. But the opening appeared again a couple weeks later, but this time with the requirements adjusted in unimportant ways as to disqualify me. Other information indicated they were trying to hire a non-US citizen and needed to show that no US citizens were qualified for the job in order to obtain the needed visa. So the first job posting was just to see what qualified applicants were out there so that the second job posting could be created to eliminate them. The other person might have been a better person, but the deceptive nature of the first job opening kind of bugs me.

Look outside of the bay area. I was in your exact position last year and couldn't find anything. I finally gave up and started looking outside of the bay area (and California). Suddenly, I was in high demand and within a month found a dream job that pays more than I was making in the bay area. It also didn't hurt that the real estate market in the bay area was still pretty strong and the one here was weak. The bay area is a great place to live, but it's not the only place to live.

Yes, this is exactly the case. We have similar situations in aeronautical engineering: If I'm an engineer working for an aircraft company and I make a mistake and put a flaw into the design of an aircraft, and if that flaw ends of causing a crash and killing people, I am not liable. The company I work for is because I don't sign my name to the design and, generally, I have no control over testing that might have been able to uncover the flaw. That is, unless I'm a licensed Professional Engineer. In that case I do sign my name to the design and I do become liable. I had a professor in college who would always go over this point in one of his classes.

There has occasionally been talk about licensing software engineers and I've always tried to raise this issue when it comes up. As software engineers, we're often slave to the schedules and product requirements coming from management. I've been on any number of projects that started out with great intentions, planning to do code reviews and testing of every line of code. But as schedules slip, guess what's the first things to be thrown out of the development process?

... and a big natural gas pipeline that Bush wanted (and couldn't get after the negotiations with the Taliban failed).

Um, yeah, but the story says the same thing. Ie: "It looks like having some Toxoplasma gondii in the collective brains of your home country makes your team a little bit better at soccer, so long as you're already among the top teams in the sport." But as anyone who's ever been involved in any kind of human competition will tell you, being a little bit better doesn't mean that you will win every time. Again, I'm not saying their reasoning is any better, but you can't take one particular event (this year's World Cup) and use it to disprove their claim. So your reasoning is still deficient. So there! :)