It's neither true that everyone is qualified to pass judgement about a scientific field, nor that everyone should just accept what scientists say blindly. The truth is in the middle: It would be great IF everyone could check for themselves, but in practice this just isn't possible, so at some level you do indeed need to trust the consensus of the literature. Of course you put in measures (like peer review and other measures) to make sure the scientists are being honest. Do transgressions happen? Obviously. We are all human. But it's really a stretch to say that all scientists across the world - from wildly differing backgrounds, with different beliefs and supported by different organizations - all came to the same wrong conclusion.

But the issue of global warming is just so simple that you don't even need to go that far. Public temperature records are available. There's all sorts of other public data available. It's really easy to look at the data yourself if you are so inclined.

I'd never seen that list before. It's pretty illuminating. Thanks!

Again, that doesn't really count as being contested. By that logic, it's also a subject of controversy as to whether the dog did indeed eat little Johnny's homework. Also, it's contested whether the sky is indeed blue - a colorblind person sees it as gray.

It doesn't count as contest if the people contesting it are ignorant and/or are doing it for political purposes.

The amount of CO2 we release into the atmosphere is easily measurable, and it matches with the observed increase in CO2 in air, water, and biomass. It's about 40 billion tons per year now: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/GCP/carb...

The amount of CO2 naturally emitted by volcanoes and forest fires and such is a bit harder to calculate but you can get reasonable order-of-magnitude estimates. Volcanoes, for instance, emit about 0.3 billion tons per year. There are lots of sources on the US geological survey page: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/haza...

No matter how you slice it, even the most outlandish estimates for CO2 from natural sources fall 1-2 orders of magnitude short of the amount of CO2 necessary to explain the global increase.

There are natural CO2 absorbing sources but the additional amount they absorb each year is tiny.

It's not 'contested a lot'. The only people who 'contest' it are US republicans.

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

FTA: "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming since 1950, with the level of confidence having increased since the fourth report."

Geoengineering won't solve the problem, it will just replace the problem with another problem. That said, it's possible that the new problem will be easier to deal with than the problem of CO2. In that case I'm all for it, but we need to first figure out more about the effects of climate change before we make any hasty decisions.

Sadly a lot of groups are going to see geoengineering as a way to further their own agendas, so it's possible that that solution too will become corrupted.

Back in the real world, we call people who cherry pick time ranges to get the answer they want liars.

Deal with the science, and quit repeating the lies of others. They are dishonest, you are merely a fucking retard.

And a few paid shills like Frank Spencer. Not that he has ever actually published these apparently devastating critiques of AGW in any peer reviewed journal.

Actually the question isn't to what extent humans are responsible. We know that humans are mostly, if not entirely, responsible. This is not controversial. It's also not controversial that over the next century the planet is going to warm by at least a few degrees, regardless of any actions we take (the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has already 'locked in' a certain amount of warming). In all likelihood, this is going to continue for at least a millenium, again regardless of what we do now. This is unless we figure out a magic way to recapture all the CO2 in the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb it, which is so incredibly hard that you wouldn't be very incorrect in saying that the laws of physics themselves forbid it (removing CO2 from the atmosphere represents a massive decrease in entropy; this needs to be balanced by a proportionately large increase in entropy elsewhere, and this means - ironically - more heat).

The only thing that's controversial right now is what effect global warming will have on ecosystems and human civilization. This is at least a factor we can control, and it's possible it won't be as bad as the alarmists say. Humans are clever and we can overcome the challenges. But we at least need to start doing something and stop pretending that it's a 'controversy'.

Actually, I wish he had limited the statement to the persistence of known bugs in FOSS code bases. ESR said the bugs are easier to find as the number of beta testers and developers increases. This doesn't appear to be true. One thing that is true is that code quality is viewed differently in FOSS than in commercial, proprietary software. All too often, software businesses treat QA, debugging and code maintenance as overhead, so there's a perverse incentive to leave known bugs - even the most egregious ones - lying around indefinitely - or at least until someone publicly raises a stink. FOSS culture values code quality more highly and is less tolerant toward bugs, so generally speaking we see somewhat better code quality, and somewhat shorter known bug life than in similar proprietary projects.

Emphasis on 'generally speaking' in the above. Exceptions abound, but I think the trend is clear.

The question isn't whether writing verifiable code is hard. It's obviously hard. The question is whether the alternative - the risk of a buggy OS bringing down your system and causing potentially huge losses - is worse. In many cases I'd argue that it is. Maybe not if you're writing an iOS game, but definitely for a lot of other stuff.

Well I was attempting to be humorous. It's true - it's NOT a great language.

> And provably correct code is still a pipe dream.

http://sel4.systems/

It's not necessary to write an OS in C. People have written operating systems in high-level languages, sometimes very high level languages. Hell, someone wrote an OS in haskell. The only time you need to use C to write systems code is when it's some weird hardware with a non-standard C implementation, like for microcontrollers. But even that is slowly disappearing as more and more embedded systems go towards ARM-based (and sometimes x86-based) stuff, which has a very healthy language ecosystem.

A myth about C is that it's a "hardcore" language. C isn't really that complicated a language. There's nothing to be proud of about coding in C. There's a reason C is used in a lot of introductory programming courses. Learn haskell then get back to me. Learning to write good code in C is another matter entirely, but why use a language that makes this hard?

Most important thing, though, is that I've never seen "exceptional results that no other tool can match." The only area where this is even remotely close to being true is speed. I'll concede that C code can be made fast. But speed comes at a huge cost. Sometimes the cost is worth it (like say, a numerical simulation engine). Most of the time it's not. And new technologies are closing the gap every day.