So which party is it that wants the government to assume the risks and pay for the damages created by a de-regulated industry? I seem to remember going through this recently...

Quite wrong. Gradual climate change has been extinguishing civilizations since the Dilmun were driven out of Bahrain. That's the point.

As long we're taking the long term perspective, sure climate change happens all the time. So population displacements, economic crises, civilization collapses -- we should all regard them as a natural feature of human society. That doesn't mean you want to be around when that happens.

Forest fires are natural. That doesn't mean you should play with matches when you're camping in Yosemite during a drought.

No, the alarm is triggered by events on the ground. The models are just responding to those.

Gee, and who was the GGP who brought up sea ice in the first place? He sure seems confused.

If you're really interested, consider reading The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. He makes the point that traditional conservatism in the US has been largely displaced by authoritarianism -- something that can happen on the right or left but in this case on the right. These aren't grandpa's thrifty, public-spirited Burkean conservatives we're talking about here.

We're not talking about Antarctic sea ice. We're talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is a totally different thing.

Do try to keep up.

Why not give diseases numbers, and refer to emerging infections people who don't know by name using the number? You could have a system where each number prefix tells you more or less the family of diseases you're dealing with.

I know it sounds bizarre, but people seemed to be OK with H1N1 for "Swine Flu", so why not extend that to any kind of infectious (flu, malaria) or environmental (Minamata disease) etc.?

Clearly we are living in a post-irony world.

I was reading an essay the other day by a woman who was against Mother's Day. She raised her kids not to observe Mother's Day because she didn't want to be one of those Moms dragging screaming toddlers into restaurants to have dinner with Grandma. My reaction to her was the same as my reaction to you, which is get a grip, for chrissakes.

Let me give you some genuine old-fart perspective. Everyone thinks they're more special than they really are, especially when they're young. This extends to having troubles. Everyone thinks they got a raw break; that their generation got a raw break. Hell, my generation thought so; I went to college in an era after The Pill and when there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with penicillin; the minimal standard of "do-ability" was at a historic low. And still people were miserable. And the funny thing was our parents had to pull themselves out of the Great Depression then go over the Europe to kick Hitler's ass and they thought of themselves as lucky.

Not getting goodies handed you you gratis does not make you special. Life costs you, just like it has costed every generation of humans since Olduvai Gorge.

Sure, but you realize that just comparing the present cost of the intercity air link to the future cost of an intercity rail link is simplistic, right? If we can move up to high school math for a moment, you need project the future costs of *both* modes of transit *plus* the links on either end (parking at the home terminal, car rental or public transit at the destination terminal). And for university level credit you have to account for the impact of the growth you plan to accommodate on what you'll be asking the passengers to pay.

Let's imagine you want to quadruple intercity travel from LA to SF in 20 years. If you attempted to quadruple the number of air trips and made the passengers pay for that, would airfare still be $70? Supposing you could even do that, what would happen if aviation fuel doubled in price?

You need to build a better grid.

Then again If you want to replace nukes with renewables, you need to build a better grid.

Plus the brass ring in science is proving what everyone else believes is wrong, or even better, not even wrong.

The public understanding of scientists is misguided in nearly every point, but one thing the tropes get right: that note of maniacal glee when the mad scientist holds a test tube aloft and crows, "AND THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE!" Any scientist would jump at a chance to be able to disprove something most of his colleagues believed implicitly.

Of course it would be very bad form to act that way in public, but scientists have their own way of showboating, which is writing a paper in unusually straightforward language. That's why landmark papers are often so readable. It's a scholar's smug way of saying "Bring it, 'cause this is da shit."

In 1903 mathematician Frank Nelson Cole made a presentation to the American Mathematical Society in which he walked to the blackboard and wrote, "193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287" and then proceeded work out the product as "147,573,952,589,676,412,927". Then without saying a word he sat down to thunderous applause and mathematical immortality: he'd just proved by demonstration that the sixty-seventh Mersenne number is not prime.

That's the dream, to show your colleagues you know something they don't. How much do you think you'd have to pay Cole not to reveal that? Or the people in that lecture to not be there? And it was already known on theoretical grounds that M67 was composite; what if that weren't the case? Denialist conspiracy theorists are so unimaginative and dull that they actually believe that you could hush the whole thing up by spreading a little grant money around.

That's laughable if you know anything about scientists. You could no more hush up disproof of the scientific consensus with grant money than you could stop cocaine use by handing addicts wads of cash.

This is a bit like Marx writing in 1848 that Communism is a specter haunting Europe. Sure, in seventy years time but in 1848 that was just posturing for shock value.

The idea that somehow that 3D printed guns are going to be a wedge issue to use against the left is fantasy. Domestically we're awash in cheap guns that are way better than anything that could be printed and would take generations to get off the street, even if we had the political will to do so which we don't. Internationally, I have two letters and two numbers which together puncture any pretense of significance for 3D guns: A-K and 4-7. There are over 100 million AK-47s and derivatives in the world -- that's one for every seventy human beings on Earth. And if you wanted to bring that number closer to parity, building more AK-47s would be far more effective.

Sure, in twenty years 3D printed firearms may become a potent transformative political force. But at present it's political theater.

My doctor told me to drink a cup of tea after a hot bath...

Well, you could ask, "Am I being detained or arrested?" and if the answer is "no", then "I do not wish to talk with you. Please carry on while I film, officer."

I understand. But you asked whether it mattered, and my point is that's a very different question than "is it likely to have made a difference."

You can't say, "this would almost certainly have made no difference, so there was in practical terms no harm done," because the whole point of football is to see improbable plays shift the tide of fortune back and forth. It may be highly improbable that Colts fans were robbed of a victory, but it's quite possible that they were robbed of a memorable play. If the standard is "no foul if it produces the expected result" is the standard, you might as well watch WWE instead of NFL.