Or an orange grove -- they use oil-sulfur sprays on those, the whole thing has a faint whiff of SO2. Grew up in the middle of one, and years later someone opened up a bag of gardening sulfur near me, and "HOME!" hit me in the nose.

Avoid tobacco water, unless you like Tobacco Mosaic Virus in your plants.

It would be hysteria if the bees were not a big factor in keeping yields up, the bee population appears to be in trouble, and we don't understand why they're in trouble. You also propose a false choice -- there are other options between no-limits Frankenfood and mules we might allow GMOs for growing on poor soil, but not to carry pesticide genes, just for example. We might allow pesticides, but only those with an environmental half-life of one week

Your reasoning ignores externalized costs. Neonic insecticides may improve the quality of life of Bayer and the particular farmers that they sell to, but if pesticide use causes a greater harm to beekeepers and to other farmers whose crops bees pollinate, that's a net loss. Yet Bayer and their customers have no incentive to stop.

Plant nectar varies; I don't know exactly how it relates to HFCS, but it's not straight glucose, and has a fair amount of fructose, so it's probably not "completely different". You can see this in the way different honeys crystallize, or not -- tupelo's usually liquid, palmetto is usually crystallized. I think this means that tupelo has a lot of fructose in it, and palmetto does not.

Here near Boston at Alewife they have "Pedal-and-Park". It's a great big cage full of double-decker bike racks, with cameras on it, and a door that is locked and controlled by a (very easily obtained) access card. In the one instance of theft that I've heard of, they caught the thieves. See first and last photos: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/if-you-build-it-they-just-might-come/
And also, look at the induced demand -- for *bicycle parking* -- if you ever doubted that induced demand was possible.

Shift to another method of transportation. Motorcycle, carpool, bike, e-bike, transit, transit+folding bike, move, change jobs. The whole point is to attach the price to the thing that "costs" and let the market work it out.

There's not a direct connection between the price of the upgrade and the cost to use the road -- instead of funding through congestion charges on that particular road at rush hour, it's funded from taxpayer dollars. We do that because it's approximately a public good, but the accounting is really crappy (does it includes the external costs, from noise, crashes, pollution, oil spills, as well as impediment to travel perpendicular to the freeway?). If the goal is to reduce congestion, you can do that in a number of ways, and simply building more road is not necessarily the cheapest or most effective use of dollars. Standard microeconomic theory says, with much handwaving, that if you can tie the charge directly to the costs (i.e., to pay a fee to drive when demand is high and congestion is likely to result) then you will get the most efficient solution, as long as the transactions charges are not too high. Toll booths have transaction costs that are too high so we have traditionally not used congestion charging that much, but nowadays we can read license plates on the fly for cheap.

Bikes are an option. Either folding bikes that you take with you, or bikes at either end. Car-free friend of mine plays that game between Cambridge and Providence -- bike to Boston-Back-Bay on "good bike", take commuter rail to Providence, hop on "beater bike" at that end to get to work. "Beater bike" has survived over a year locked up in Providence. Full-sized bike on a train is more of a problem -- takes up space, and slows boarding.

But either way, use of a bike multiplies your tolerable-distance-from-station by a factor of 3 to 5.

That's an insanely stupid and costly idea. Even adding a normal-sized bicycle reduces the capacity of a train car by 2-3x (source: Caltrain bike cars, 40 bikes take the same space as 40 up-to-2-person seats). The effect of adding that bicycle to a boarding is a concern for getting the trains in and out of stations quickly enough.

Never mind that some of us have seen it in our own lifetimes? When you add freeway capacity, you create the (temporary) ability to live a little further from where you work, either to find a better job without moving, or to live in a somewhat cheaper house. In the case of a place like NYC or Boston where many people already take mass transit, making the freeway more attractive will pull people off of mass transit and onto the roads.

Similarly, when the roads get screwed up you see a reduction in auto traffic and a surge in mass transit use (for example, by an earthquake, as happened in the SF area after the Loma Prieta quake -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake#Effects_on_transportation ) .

Perhaps "induced demand" would make a bit more sense if you looked that it the other way around. Do congestion and traffic jams make people more likely to drive, or less? I assume you would say "less" -- stuck in traffic sucks, and dinking around on surface streets (which jam up pretty quickly as soon as "everyone does it") is no fun, either. So why wouldn't adding capacity cause people to decide to drive more often?

Except that if we "accounted" honestly for congestion and accident costs, we would be far more willing to contemplate congestion charges. What if it turned out that the cheapest and most effective solution was simply to charge people to use the freeway, and use that money to subsidize bus transit to give people an alternative to the roads?

Note that there is no evidence in the fossil record of the Archangel Gabriel descending, and there is also no evidence of an ice age ever occurring with CO2 at current levels, never mind the levels we are projected to achieve later this century. It's much easier to assert the impossibility of those events.

There *IS* fossil evidence of rapid sea level rise, and we don't have a solid explanation for exactly how that happened -- meltwater, for example, requires an extraordinary amount of in-place melting (takes a tremendous amount of heat), and we have the additional fun of punching up CO2 at an unprecedented rate, so we cannot take past events as an upper bound on what we might observe.

There is the additional risk-unpleasantness of the arctic icecap melt completely outrunning theoretical predictions, and the obvious linkage between Greenland and the arctic ice cap. I'd be much more comfortable rejecting Hansen's claims as lacking a proper theoretical explanation if the proper theoretical explanation had not already been proven far too conservative in that region of the world. That's a huge problem.

And again, I'm not saying that Hansen is right -- I am saying that we don't have a comfortable level of certainty that he's wrong. I'm not normally a fan of exponential curve fits either. Unfortunately, he's a climate scientist, and I'm not (and as far as I know, you aren't either).

Not sure this is right for you, but it was once upon a time designed to match some of your buzzwords.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/reddwarf/

Perhaps you're comfortable with a higher level of risk, but I notice that you don't say that rapid rise was *certainly* due to a meltwater pulse, merely *likely*. Even if that event was certainly due to a meltwater pulse, that is not in itself proof that a similarly rapid glacial slide cannot occur now, given the unprecedented forcing. I do agree that it has to be a glacial slide -- melting in place would require a truly awesome amount of heat -- it takes far more heat to melt in place than is available merely from global warming (but there is plenty of heat for melting ice once it is in the ocean).

An exponential fit is aggressive, I agree, but do you have a proof of impossibility that does not rely on bluster?