I completely disagree with this. It's like the old adage "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Same thing with learning --- unless you think the only place that learning takes place is in school.

Sorry for the messed up formatting. That should have read:

This is an important point. Standardized tests assume everyone is like a cog coming off an assembly line. Good education should be tailored to needs of the student, not the needs of an industrial education system.

We know there were Polynesians on Easter Island which is closer to South America than it is to Australia. Maybe some of them made it to South America long ago.

That's close to but not exactly true. Biological processes such as photosynthesis tend to prefer the lighter C12 isotope over the heavier C13 and C14 isotopes so the ratio of C12 to C13 & C14 is higher in plants than it is in the atmosphere.

Breathing is not the way humans (and other animals) take up carbon. It comes from the food we eat. So burning coal to heat your home doesn't have any direct effect on your personal C14 level.

I only care about people who disagree with science when they interfere with us facing the reality that science tells us about.

Anthropogenic climate change probably won't wipe out Homo Sapiens. We're a very adaptable and resourceful species. But it may well wipe out the complex global civilization we've built or at least reduce it to a paltry impoverished echo of what we have now.

Yeah, we had a crappy winter on the West Coast too. But it was the opposite of what happened on the East Coast. Very warm and very little snow in the mountains where we depend on it for late summer stream flows.

I live on the same continent you do and I've lived here since the 1950's. It's easily the warmest year I can remember and the weather statistics support that assertion.

Unless you're taking a global view of the situation you're missing to much to have an informed opinion.

You just don't know how adjusted the satellite data is. Far more adjustment goes into satellite data than the surface temperature records.

Satellites don't measure temperature directly but rather the microwave emissions of O2 molecules. The data has to be adjusted for orbital variations, sensor degradation, the effects of clouds and water vapor, the effects of high elevations and the differences of replacement satellites that are launched every 10 years or so. Compared to that surface temperature adjustments are a piece of cake.

You mean "hockey stick graphs". There have been over a dozen studies since the original and they all show similar shapes. Here's a graph with 10 of them from 2005.

Anyone with some statistical chops can handle the raw data. The reason you don't see raw data graphs of global temperatures from climate contrarians is because they don't help their case that much. Instead they'll cherry pick some individual records like that station in Paraguay and try to imply that shows the global records are rigged.

I know there were some cold records set east of the Rockies on North America this past winter although not all that many. That doesn't negate the fact that there were also record high temperatures west of the Rockies and when you look at it globally it was a pretty warm winter.

The Koch brothers tried that with Berkeley Earth and that didn't turn out so well (for them). The researchers at BE were pretty much unconnected with the climate science community and use their own methods of adjustment yet their results came out about the same as everyone else.

You wouldn't know what to do with the raw data if you got it. It is available to anyone who cares to seek it out but it may take some work to get it.

There wasn't near enough snow along the US East Coast and in New England to make up for all of the snow we didn't get on the West Coast this past winter.