A national ID is a Single Point of Failure. I have had several cops / security folks tell me that a collection of documentation greatly increases the difficulty of forgery, because they have to be mutually consistent over space and time. A variety of documents provides a multitude of entry points and traversals for even a cursory on the spot casual interrogation. For example, some of the digits of the SSN associate with certain states at certain times, so even if the SSN Card isn't produced as ID, a question to tell the SSN orally, Followed by a remark like "Do you parents still live in State X" can trip someone up. Also, some states have had difficulties with corruption and counterfeiting in DL bureaus, but perhaps not all states at all times. Relative wear, like marks and de-lamination, also are giveaways, along with other seemingly innocuous contents of a wallet. Collections of anything will exhibit patterns of differences and similarities from individual to individual, and will be characteristic of a given 'locale', and these will alert an experienced observer. A national ID would tend to be adopted by any and all agencies as proof o person, if just as a cost and complexity saving measure. But it's that same complexity which trips the impostors.

Not NASA trolling, They learned their lesson about conversions after the Metric Mix-up with the Mars Climate Orbiter ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Encounter_with_Mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter ). I suspect the residents HD 38801b, HD 5319 b, WASP-18b, or even HD 45364 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_45364 in Canis Major. Probably running some sort of Devil's Tower subliminal suggestion trick like they used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and much less expensive than Monoliths. I, for one, welcome our new Canine Overlords!

Scanning through some of the releases on http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/stardust/ "NASA's Stardust-NExT mission took this image of comet Tempel 1 at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) on Feb 14, 2011, from a distance of approximately 946.05 trillion kilometers (587.85 trillion miles). The comet was first visited by NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005." 587.85 trillion miles? ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion for both defintions ) This would put it 6,314,828 A.U., or about 23 times the 4.365 Light years ( 276,041 A.U.) distance to Alpha Centauri. ... or maybe it is just damn fine imaging! :-)

The first day I'd assign reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" ( http://www.nealstephenson.com/command/ and http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html online ). I've used it in situations with even non-technical people to explain "Why Linux", and it's highly entertaining even if one is an expert. As another poster said, there is some "History and Philosophy". I also use it as an ESL text for engineering graduate students :-)

No particular individual dataset of observations definitively 'proves' the correlation of human caused climate change. But the cross correlations between an incredibly diverse set of observations does provide a basis for a pretty well based assumption. These include ice cap bores from Greenland, species in seabed sediments, coral growth, tree rings (even petrified trees :-), even historical accounts from a very wide variety of scientific disciplines, which use different methodologies and models, each subject to peer review within their own disciple.

What hobbles this in every case is the sample space, what is needed a fine resolution chronographic continuous globally distributed climate record. I.e. the ice caps are only located in certain areas and so it has only been in the last few years we have had satellite platforms to global measure sea temperatures. Global weather monitoring on a regular basis only started during World War Two, mostly driven by military aviation.

If Climatology is a tough nut, Paleoclimatology is even tougher. Ironically, the world wide exploration for oil combined with temperature as an indicator for petroleum formation has provided one possible set of observations. See " Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions Using Terrestrial Borehole Data" (and others) at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003/mann2003.html This area of current relies on ancillary data, but could be extended to deeper wells and better distributed locations to increase the time horizons.

The diverse and broad studies around climate change complement and supplement one another to reach the conclusion and correlation. Sunspots and lemming migrations can be argued endlessly, but it is the meta analysis of all these efforts that matters. If the media has a hard time with translating and portraying the problem and controversy inside a particular specialized scientific study, it is absolutely incapable of informing the public about the meta analysis. So drowning cute polar bears isn't scientifically precise, if the imagery causes behavior change, all the better.

The other aspect of the debate is the time dynamics and values of the risk situation: What is the cost of doing business as usual in the event the warming hypothesis is wrong? If we mitigate the carbon impacts and it's wrong, so what? We have a vastly more efficient and clean economy. If it's right, the downside is potentially death and disruption for billions. Also, how long do we have to figure it out?