Heat lags CO2.

Er, no it doesn't. CO2 lags temperature by 800 years; http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/

GNOME 3 requires that you change how you interact with your computer......

Your entire reply rests on the premise "this new way is a lot better than the old way, so eventually you'll have to deal with it".

I'm still to be convinced that a touchscreen interface is suitable for a desktop meme. And I don't think it will ever be, unless your desktop monitors are touch sensitive (and how practical would that be? You'd soon have aching arms reaching over to your screens).

He seems hell-bent on foisting Unity down everyone's throat, no matter what device they're using, by having it configured by default on a fresh installation of Ubuntu, and I think the backlash against Unity is because of that.

Unity does not work well on the traditional desktop meme. My desktop is NOT a tablet or a cellphone, and I do not want my desktop to look or act like a touchscreen device tablet or cellphone, nor are my monitors touchscreen devices.

I want my desktop to be a traditional, get-out-of-my-way place, safe from interference from anything like Unity - and Mark should know better than to have not given a choice at installation time whether one wants the "touchscreen interface" or the "traditional desktop interface". Sure, after installation and with 10-15 minutes of work you can end up with Xfce4 or other desktop manager of choice, but not offering the choice at install is bad - just that one choice would probably have made all the difference between people saying "the latest incarnation of Ubuntu is not bad" or "fuck Ubuntu and fuck Unity".

Agreed. And in fact my house in Koriyama's particular location (very eastern outskirts of the city) basically escaped the plume as it was blown north north-west from the nuclear plant, over Iitate town, reached Fukushima city, then got blown south south-west down towards Koriyama city. The plume mostly missed my location by a kilometer or three, and radiation levels around my house are around 0.25 uSv/hr , which I believe is about 0.02 uSv/hr below the world average background radiation dose rate.

I've measured levels at a friend's house in central Koriyama which were about 5 uSv/hr at ground level on his lawn.

Regards.

Bingo! You nailed it :)

Perhaps I should change my url link in my /. profile ;)

Regards

Nit-picking, much? :)

I'm from Scotland and hence I'm used to miles. The Japanese use the metric system and hence use km for distance. I'm kind of used to thinking my house is 33 miles away from Fukushima Daiichi genpatsu rather than 54km.

I too live in Japan. I'm 33 miles due west of Fukushima Daiichi, on the far eastern fringes of Koriyama city. My family and I also have access to my wife's parent's second house which is located on a mountain and is about 1km from Miyakoji village in Tamura city, and where we lived for over a year before moving to Koriyama. That mountain house is roughly 21.5km due west of Fukushima Daiichi, the centre of the village is about 20.5km, and parts of Tamura city area further east are within the 20km "Stay out" zone.

After the March 11th quake, most if not all the villagers around there evacuated the area at first. It is my understanding some returned a couple of months after the event. A friend of ours decided to stay at her house nearby and has done so ever since.

Myself and my wife and son stayed at our house after the March 11th quake (apart from the night of that incident because a sizeable fissure had appeared on the ground at the rear of my house and we didn't know if it was safe to stay there after consultation with a local fireman, so we stayed overnight at the local community centre).

Since then, I have visited Miyakoji town and the mountain house, with my Geiger counter, and have taken measurements there, and at those locations the levels are around 0.5 uSv/hr - some spots much higher (1.2 uSv/hr), some much lower, depending on what the wind was doing the days after the nuclear plant accident.

People do want to move back to their homes there, I know that much. The various Municipal governments are making or are currently already implementing decontamination plans - at first removing top-soil from schools and government buildings and then presumably from other areas after that. Water supplies in Miyakoji are most often supplied via deep water wells (the water has always been extremely high quality there), and from what I've read, because of this, water supplies should be safe from contamination because any radioactive material will have been filtered out by tens of meters of soil layers above the water extraction point, and by the time any caesium etc. reaches that level, the radioactivity will have gone down to background or safe levels anyway.

I have a map of radiation levels on my personal website, which clearly shows that the radiation plume was mostly blown away from that area towards the north north-west and which agrees with the measurements I personally have taken around where I live and around Tamura.

Lastly, I want people to remember that there has been more widespread devastation, disruption, and death from the magnitude 9 quake and subsequent tsunamis, than there has been even from the nuclear disaster (and I just know someone's going to play the "but what about future deaths from radiation exposure which haven't and can't be counted yet" card - my answer to them is there still will have been more widespread devastation, disruption, and death from the magnitude 9 quake and subsequent tsunamis, than there has been even from the nuclear disaster").

The origins of the term doesn't matter, and my post above still stands regardless. :)

I see your weasel words "global climate change" - do not try to obfuscate that with "human caused global warming" - it doesn't work and we can see right through your tactic.

Does the global climate change? Sure it does - it's been doing it for millions if not billions of years - it did it before you and I were born and it'll still be doing it when you and I no longer exist.

is it the human race who are largely responsible for the current climate changing? Perhaps at the micro-scale or local level, where we build big concrete jungles which absorb heat from the sun and stall wind movement within the cities, and air conditioners extract more heat from inside buildings and blow it outside the already warmer city streets.

But on a global scale? There are far vaster forces at work than mere humans can have influence on.

Lastly, here's a nice headline for you "Scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming" , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2053842/Scientists-sign-petition-denying-man-made-global-warming.html

Are all those scientists shills paid for by big oil?

Waiting for the "But they not CLIMATE SCIENTISTS" strawman.

It's extremely funny to me when the watermelons play the christian fundy card, because I'm an atheist and I also do not get taken in by that other religion called Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Where am I equating unreliable with automatically wrong?

Also, this isn't a fucking court we're talking about here.

"The mere fact that you don't understand this diminishes your credibility." - christ you're an idiot, aren't you.

IICV (652597) I had a look at that graph you linked to on Wikipedia. Couldn't help but notice this about it : "This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. Modifications: Generated as svg. The original can be viewed here: Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png. Modifications made by Autopilot." So i had a look at the original graph at : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png , which has a downturn at the end of its 5-year average line in red, whereas the retouched SVG version now being used has an upturn. Curious. Just sayin' is all.

I'd like to counter that with a different name.

Richard Dawkins.

Like me, he is an athiest. Like me, he does not believe in the existence of some Divine Creator, Zeus, or whatever other Sky Pixie you care to mention.

Unfortunately, though, he is a full-on AGW Believer. He's completely deaf to anyone who's skeptical of the theory that humans are responsible for a whole planet warming up.

Does that mean that I should consider anything he says about Evolution/Religion to be complete and utter nonsense?

If we go by your logical fallacies? Answer : Yes, and I should be prostrating myself in front of my deity of choice right this instant.

Luckily, though, I am quite capable of ignoring Dawkins' /faith/ in what other warmist-alarmist doomsayers are saying - even though this apparent cognitive dissonance makes me wince.

"As for TFA, the author of the paper, Roy Spencer, is a creationist quack who has expanded his quackery into AGW, his claims on anything scientific should be taken with a truckload of salt."

I'll just put this here;

--
Description of Ad Hominem

Translated from Latin to English, "Ad Hominem" means "against the man" or "against the person."

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of "argument" has the following form:

Person A makes claim X.
Person B makes an attack on person A.
Therefore A's claim is false.
--
In your comment, Person A= Roy Spencer , and Person B = TapeCutter (624760)

Yep you're pretty much an idiot for saying that.

It's a big deal because, despite it being "roughly 100 times less energetic", it was also closer to the land than the 11th March quake.

In addition, the intensity of the quake was just as severe as the 11th March quake, i.e. in some areas the intensity was measured to be Shindo 6 on the Japanese intensity Scale. Go google for "Shindo" and find out what that means.

Also, it's a big deal because in numerous areas around Japan, buildings that are still standing have already become weakened by the 11th march quake. Also take into account damage introduced to the ground itself after the March 11th quake.

I live in Koriyama city, Fukushima prefecture, and my house is 54km due West from the nuclear plants. I stayed up until 2am watching the news like a hawk, just in case the power plants sustained more damage from that so-called "100 times less energetic" quake. My house itself, being only about 3 years old, is in good condition considering the quake on March 11th, but it IS a bit more "rattly", and during last night's quake I honestly thought the house was going to be shaken apart.

Yes, last night's quake was a big deal, in Japan at least.