You mean like the careful evaluation we did before dumping CFCs into the atmosphere, and the one we did before digging up fossil fuels and burning them like there is no tomorrow? Or the one we do before we all send all our cattle onto the common grazing ground?

Science is not perfect, but it has very good self-correcting measures. I'm impressed if you are able to independently understand the CFC/Ozone relationship, as well as the complexities of climate change. But if you do, why do you point to crappy political sites which have no scientific value at all?

But science does not rely on the word of a single researcher or a single research institution. Science is a collaborative effort, with many different actors cross-checking, verifying, and, where possible, refuting their respective results. It is not perfect, but it is, to a high degree, self-correcting.

"The government" actually is many different governments, which, in many areas compete. Moreover, we have had governments in all advanced societies for the last 5000 years or so - basically, since we had advanced societies. It hardly needs to "justify its ongoing existence".

Does your reason tell you that to substantially engage in any single field of science, you typically need a long, expensive, and arduous education? How do you know that your "reason" is sound? Or at least sounder than that of hundreds of talented people who often spend years or lifetimes trying to discover the nature of reality?

If your best source is Wikipedia, you should re-evaluate where your get your information. Try Google Scholar for a start. Libertarians may have a good take on liberty, but, sadly, many libertarian-leaning organisations have shown a disdain for science that does not jibe with their politics. I would like to be free of gravity, sometimes, or of the relationship between calories in and body weight. But no matter how much I like freedom, we ignore physical reality at our (or, in some cases, our children's) peril.

EFF might help. But this is more in line with the Software Freedom Law Center. Defending FOSS developers against unjustified patent claims is part of their mission.

The fact that CO2 has a logarithmic relation to radiative forcing has been well understood since Svante Arrhenius in the late 19th century, and is also reported in the IPCC WG1 report. The base of the logarithm is irrelevant (as long as its >1), as that only translates into a constant scaling factor.

I don't think that it's too expensive to do anything. Significant expense is coming down anyways - in the form of direct effects of climate change, of increasing fossil fuel prices, and of social unrest. We can opt to handle the expense in a controlled, gradual manner, or we can wait until the midwestern corn belt turns into a dust bowl again, New Orleans vanishes behind a massive sea wall, and refugees from Bangladesh destabilise India. A simple way of changing to a less carbon-intensive economy is to introduce a gradually and reliably increasing tax on carbon emission - e.g. collected internally for fossil fuel at the point of production or importation, and at the border for products coming from states that do not have a similar policy. This can be done in a revenue-neutral way, by lowering existing taxes, or by distributing the income to the population similar to e.g. Alberta's so-called Prosperity Bonus. Even if you follow the Stern Review, the suggested tax rate of US$ 30 per ton of carbon amounts to less than 10 cent per gallon - noticeable, but hardly debilitating.

Actually, the progression is "there is no warming", "there is some warming, but it's natural", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, but it's good", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, it's bad, but there is nothing we can do", "there is some warming, its anthropogenic, it's bad, but it's to expensive to do something", and then back to "there was some warming, but it has stopped". Different deniers are not always in sync - some cling to "there is no warming" when others have already reached the "its to expensive" stage.

While old bombs are still found daily in Germany, very few of them explode, even fewer explode under uncontrolled conditions, and there is about one incident per decade where humans are hurt - mostly members of the bomb disposal squad.

Obviously, with the power requirement to blow up Alderaan, you need a power density where any one catastrophic reactor failure will blow up the whole thing - or at least reach far enough to cause a chain reaction. So you'd rather put all your risk into a single, well-defended place. Well, in theory. Then the contractors come in.

Actually, http://xkcd.com/164/.

Having driven both in Germany and in the US for quite extended distances, there often is a significant difference. Germany has a much higher population density, and that translates to a much higher traffic density. Moreover, the fact that there are different speed limits for different classes of vehicles (80km/h for trucks and most trailers, 100km/h for many buses and some trailers, unlimited or 120km/h for normal cars) leads to frequent lane changes and other manoeuvring. On the US50, I can just put a brick on the accelerometer, tie the wheel, and go to sleep (or email) for half an hour. Driving on the German Autobahn is often (though not always) more like driving in, say, inner-city Boston. If you are not reasonably alert, there is a high chance of an accident.

We don't have crime in Germany. It went out of style 35 years ago as old-fashioned.

While I would phrase this a bit more conservatively, I agree with the core reasoning. I bought my MacBook Pro because it has among the best hardware combo one can get in a notebook (and that includes keyboard, screen, touchpad, and form factor), and because, under all the glitter, it's a UNIX box. If they ever stop being a good UNIX box, I'll be back to Linux in a heartbeat. I run it on desktop and serves, anyways.

And I'm fairly sure I'm not alone with this sentiment. At the conferences I go to, people started buying Macs when MacOS-X came out. Now there are about 80% Macs, 18% Linux (on everything from ThinkPads to cheap netbooks), and 2% Windows (and those only buy the people who work for Microsoft Research). Admittedly, this is not a large field, but academics are an influential group in general.

Actually, CERN has insane bandwidth requirements that required significant new research into distributed computer systems to realise. For the LHC, they created the LHC Grid, with the 11 tier 1 institutions being connected to CERN via dedicated 10 GBit/s links (and they receive only part of the data each).

The EuroStar takes 2:16 from (central) London to (central) Paris. It's unlikely that you can beat that on any aircraft, if you take times to and from the airport, check-in and check-out times, and waiting time into account. The Eurostar is not only international, but also leaves the Schengen area, which complicates travel a bit. But for national trains, I just go to the station with 5 minutes to spare and walk onto a train with an open ticket (although some discount options require the use of fixed connections).