It doesn't get you out of the logic trap, however, when religion actually starts making claims about science, nature, or "natural law".

Unlike evangelicals, the Catholic church realized a while ago that creationism was untenable. So, they did what they always do: they changed their tunes. Catholicism basically just slowly retreats on everything where it is proven wrong and redefines God to fit the data. Yet, at the same time, they proclaim that they had it right all along and present a consistent and unchanging universal truth. It's bullshit, of course. Catholicism employs the same propaganda techniques all totalitarian institutions employ.

But when people disagree on facts and logic, we have debates and arguments in order to resolve those disagreements. Afterwards, people should change their views accordingly.

The Catholic church claims that their world view is rational and that its theology and morality follows logically and rationally from observable fact. If one disagrees with them (as the majority of humans on this planet do), then one can have a debate with them about it in order to test their statements.

Despite the sugar coating by Catholic representatives, fundamentally, Catholic dogma requires that the entire world should submit to the rule of the Catholic church or suffer eternal damnation, and that it is the obligation of its followers to recruit and convert by any means allowed within its own rules.

And although the Catholic church is nowhere near as powerful as it used to be, it is still an important political force, and as such we need to deal with it just like any other political force: debate it and expose the flaws in its views.

It is "bad" in the sense that you need a reality check, both in your knee-jerk condemnation of corporations, and your understanding of the function and purpose of the UN.

No, we haven't done that yet: that's what the security council and veto power are for.

I suspect both the research itself and the education of the researchers involved were paid for by grants and fellowships. The patent will likely go to MIT, with some pay-off to the researchers. (I have no opinion on whether that's good or bad.)

I think most Americans and most US politicians couldn't care less at this point. If UN organizations don't want American tax dollars in support of their causes, they are welcome not to take them.

If you want to improve the UN the best way to do it would be to revoke the special veto powers given to the winners of WW2,

Great idea! Let's hand over control of the UN to a collection of communists, monarchies, corrupt governments, and Islamic theocracies, which together make up the majority of UN members. What could possibly go wrong!

the blind support of Israel by the west and Syria by the East would be much harder to maintain.

Israel is a small desert state of no particular significance. The only reason it is an issue at all in the UN is because Arab nations like to use it to distract their citizens from the miserable state of their own economies and their own corruption.

Having said that, I think the US should get out of the Middle East. The Europeans created that mess, let them fix it or live with the consequences.

UNESCO is one of the most highly regarded and wide-spread agencies for cultural preservation in the World.

Highly regarded by who? Have a look at UNESCO's activities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unesco

Most people in the world will never have heard of many of those organizations. So, maybe it's time to question that.

The US pays for 22% of UNESCO's budget. What is the US tax payer getting for that? Are the activities of those organizations aligned with US interests?

There is simply no evidence for this statement, yet a tremendous amount of evidence that it is false.

I'm not making a simplistic argument that more CO2 is good for plants. I'm saying the following. We are currently in an interglacial warm period. Usually, those last only a few thousand years, then temperatures rapidly drop by several C, and long term by about 8C and sea levels fall by 120m. Sometimes, interglacial warm periods also have sudden temperature rises of 4C before dropping precipitously. That's the normal climate pattern.

Arguments that our current interglacial period is any more stable or long lasting than the last ones are weak at best, because nobody understands how these cycles work. If emitting large amounts of CO2 has the potential to alter this pattern, then that's a good thing, because the normal pattern would be devastating.

Also, there is little evidence that the soils in high latitude environments could be improved ... Also there is little reason to believe that most crops would grow at higher latitudes simply because of more carbon dioxide ...

I'm not making that argument. But since you bring it up, there is plenty of evidence, because for many millions of years, those environments were lush and teeming with life. The fact that they are frozen wastelands right now is the exception in earth's history, not the rule.

Also, there is little evidence that the soils in high latitude environments could be ... As for sea level rises not being a sufficient argument "to do anything", what you are saying is ...

What I am saying is that rapid climate change has been an unavoidable fact of life on this planet for the past several million years. If it is not the normal climate cycles, then volcanoes, deforestation, desertification, meteorites, sun cycles, ocean currents, clathrate releases, and all sorts of other things can cause temperatures to swing and even sea levels to change in a short period of time.

To suggest otherwise is only to reveal that your position regarding the effects of climate change have moved from merely living in denial to living in delusion.

The "delusion" is that we can somehow maintain a stable climate; that is far beyond our capabilities. We may be lucky and have a choice between glaciation and global warming, and between those two, global warming is far preferable. The changes predicted even by the worst case IPCC scenarios are something humanity can easily cope with. Glaciation is not.

Every Android tablet and laptop is also a Linux laptop. You can drop down into the shell. If you like, you can get root on it and install tons of packages.

The difference between Android and Ubuntu has traditionally been that Ubuntu runs a standard X11-based Linux desktop. But I don't see much of an advantage of a Wayland/Unity-based Ubuntu device over an Android device.

The fact is that Wayland creates a new, incompatible set of APIs in addition to X11. X11 apps won't have all the same functionality and desktop integration available to them as Wayland apps. That's exactly the situation on OS X and it sucks.

So, realistically, all the engineering and scientific apps need to be rewritten to use native Wayland APIs and desktop integration. But the problem with that is that the Wayland developers have their sights set on the consumer and tablet market, so Wayland isn't going to address professional needs very well (and if you have any doubt that they don't give a damn, just look at Unity).

So, Ubuntu is doing the same thing Apple and Microsoft have been doing: targeting the consumer market, with the professional market as an afterthought. The difference is that Apple and Microsoft have consumer market share, while Ubuntu has next to none.

The only thing left to argue about is how much do we contribute... 80%? 50%?

Personally, I think humans contribute nearly 100% to the current warming trend. I also think that doesn't matter.

However, I've not once seen a denialist argue "The mainstream claims that we contribute 80% but I think it's only 50% because of this evidence..."

Well, and I have not once seen a sound argument for (1) why we should prevent global warming, and (2) how we are going to achieve that.

The fact that, all things being equal, continued CO2 emissions will cause global warming and sea level rise is not a sufficient argument to do anything. The climate is so variable that anthropogenic warming is as likely to be beneficial as it may be harmful.

This isn't a two-sided issue where you can divide people into "mainstream scientists" and "climate skeptics".

The original statistical analysis of warming temperatures was deeply flawed. Saying that doesn't mean people necessarily denied that warming was happening, simply that the data didn't show it. Muller reevaluated the data and found that the warming trend was real. Given that the data had been looked at many times, that doesn't surprise anybody.

That means very little, however. Most people labeled as "climate skeptics" don't really care about that data to begin with. There are still fundamental questions about whether the warming it shows is relevant to global warming and whether it is related to CO2 emissions. More importantly, many people think the warming trend it shows doesn't matter, or that it is not preventable anyway, or that it is even beneficial. Those objections are not addressed at all by this data or reevaluation.

Personally, I agree with almost all the scientific findings in the IPCC report, and I still say we should take no action on global warming because there is no effective action we can take to prevent it. Temperatures are going to rise due to continued CO2 emissions, sea levels are going to rise, and we should just deal with the consequences.

Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations. Unfortunately, with 11.10 and the upcoming move away from X11, Ubuntu is hell-bent on leaving that market: Unity is already nearly useless for power users (it doesn't work well at all on large or multi-screen setups), tools like Synaptic are becoming non-standard, etc.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS. Ubuntu has virtually no mobile developers. And if it manages against all odds to even get a small market share, Ubuntu will face the kind of patent feeding frenzy that Android is being subjected to.

Too bad Shuttleworth couldn't leave good enough alone. He's going to kill Ubuntu and seriously hurt Linux as a whole.