The obvious answer is that Apple was farsighted enough to diversify its product line, and came up with some innovative music players and phones.

My monoculture comment was more aimed at the iPhone line specifically. It's been very successful but lost market share anyway, because many people want something different. Apple itself will likely continue to do well, as long as it can create entirely new product lines as the old ones fail (as the iPod is doing now).

Monocultures can be very successful. They do have associated risks though. Diversity usually wins in the end.

Apple of course are in no immediate danger, they're doing just fine. Though I do wonder why Apple fans point to their huge profits as a good thing.. Good for Apple, certainly; not quite so much for their customers.

I accidentally RTFA'd and realised the fatwa is actually against high-speed internet that isn't government controlled and censored:

Thus I conclude that internet porn is just fine, so long as it's consumed slowly, scanline by scanline. He clearly wants you to enjoy the anticipation.

I think you're missing my point too. The models are only inaccurate temporarily. They're still quite valid for predicting longer-term trends.

The reason for this is because of the cyclic nature of the ocean warming. ENSO, AMO, PDO etc are all natural cycles that shift heat between the ocean and surface. While heat is being transferred to the ocean (as currently), the models will over-predict surface temperatures. When the cycle reverses, heat is transferred from the ocean back to the surface - and the models will under-predict surface temperatures.

Because heat isn't created or destroyed, only moved around, the net effect of these cycles is zero, and does not affect the longer-term warming trend that the models show. If you take a longer-term running average of surface temperatures, they still come very close to the models' predictions.

Climate scientists already know that the models won't match the short-term noise created by these currently-unpredictable cycles - but that's OK, because they're not intended to. It's only uninformed laymen that insist that any short-term mismatch is a "failure" of the models, rather than simply using them for longer-term predictions only, as designed.

Luckily, the detailed impact of natural ocean cycles like this one (and ENSO, PDO, AMO etc) is not required to be known.

Because they are cyclical, any contributions they make to surface temperatures are by their nature temporary; at the other end of the cycle, the process and temperature contributions are reversed, and the net impact is zero. For the purposes of long-term forecasting, short-term natural cycles are irrelevant.

This is only assumed to be true, and only if fossil fuels are your sole source of energy. Investment in other sources of energy creates economic development in itself, as well decoupling this assumption.

Luckily we have many thousands of informed individuals in dozens of countries who have studied the matter in depth, and they're telling us very clearly that there is more than enough certainty to warrant reforming our energy sector.

If you don't feel there's enough to go on, perhaps the problem is that you don't have all the information?

We really don't care much what the temperature was 300M years ago - we care what it is now, while we're here to experience it. And particularly, we care when it changes suddenly and drastically.

That would be news, yes. While it's quite true that surface temperatures haven't increased much recently, ocean temperatures are still warming at least as fast as ever. Which is exactly what TFA describes - the extra surface heat is being moved into the oceans. All other examples of this effect have been cyclical - in the near future, the process will reverse, moving heat from the oceans to the surface. When that happens, surface temperatures will jump - as they have in the past.

The only observation that would seriously challenge our understanding of anthropogenic global warming would be to see a sustained cooling phase, both surface and ocean, which would indicate that the previous rises were merely part of a larger natural cycle. However, no such cooling has been seen - the opposite is expected, given our calculations of the greenhouse effect.

That seems highly excessive, even allowing for fuel and Canadian winter heating costs. I find it hard to believe that energy costs outweigh food and/or housing.

By comparison, in 2012:

The novel part is they present data to confirm it, and their analysis is peer-reviewed - that's the difference between a real study and something that "everyone can see".

What I was actually referring to was the models being incomplete, which isn't news to anyone. Fyfe et al 2013 just demonstrate this, and suggest some of the likely missing factors. TFA goes further, and gives data on a new factor (the deep-ocean current).

No model, in any branch of science or engineering, is complete and perfect; that doesn't mean they're useless.

I'm curious to see which fundamental assumptions made by current models you believe to be contradicted by this paper. To me it looks like they're simply pointing out a deep-ocean cycle that could soak up heat from the surface - not unlike the well-known ENSO, PDO and AMO cycles, which most models don't attempt to predict. Unless you think that "incomplete" means "fundamentally assumes that no other factors can exist"?

Your linked study really just shows what everyone could already see - the climate models are missing something. This of course isn't a surprise; they're missing lots of things, many of which are called out in the study (ENSO, AMO, volcanic activity, unexpected stratospheric aerosol variation or solar variation, etc). There's a lot of details we can't predict, but climate models are still useful even when we know they're incomplete, just like every other kind of model.

Still, I appreciate the link, even if (as you say) it doesn't invalidate any "sketchy science".

Do enlighten us - please link to an example of "sketchy science" that has been proved wrong by more solid, peer-reviewed science.

Strangely, all the examples I can find just support the consensus view.

Only if you're in a nuclear family.

It's worth noting that Roger Shawyer (the original inventor) maintains that this effect does not violate Conservation of Momentum.