and I can't find the word asshole. I can only assume you are all fans.

As usual the media are twisting the report into an end of the world horror story, when in fact it's anything but:

To be sure, there are some paragraphs in which they have medium or high confidence of this or that, for instance more people are killed by natural disasters when they occur in poor countries. Well, smack my ass and call me a monkey, good thing the UN spent millions on a showy conference in Africa to tell us that. It was in Africa of course, because that's where they want the rich countries making all the CO2 to send trillions of dollars. That is the purpose of the UN (if most of the members were honest enough to tell you).

You can see the report for yourself here: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

I don't game, but after reading too many of these posts, apparently the majority reason is to play games. Does that mean, when the gamers get older, MS will go out of business, or are there always more where they came from?

At work and at home I depend on ssh, and I don't understand why anyone would prefer a GUI front end for ssh, rather than just using it the normal way from the command line.

I think you should cut him/her a break. Microsucks is so many more keystrokes.

A couple blasts from a giant frickin' laser canon.

I did not interpret the graph that way and was confused by what you said, but now I have finally RTF summary for the graph and see that they make a caveat that the 2004 temperature is based on only one year, but the rest of the chart has a resolution of 300 years! So, any fluctuations in the past that might have risen above the 2004 value have been lost due to the smoothing.

Too bad. Not very useful for making your claim.

Wikipedia claims "In terms of the global average, temperatures were probably colder than present day" during the Holocene climatic optimum (my emphasis), but admit that the optimum did not occur at the same time in the northern and southern hemispheres.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum

PS. Good catch regarding the speleotherm data, but the graph based on it sure looks a lot like the one you linked to on Wikipedia, and both indicate a general downward trend (with the Medieval Warm Period as a slight deviation), and in fact, looking Wikipedia's 5 million year chart, there is clearly a long term downward trend during this current ice age, as well.

Rightly so. False conclusions are good for science, as long as they're honest. The pursuit for something new will eventually lead to the correct answer.

It's good that the protagonist of the article (Schooler) recognizes and admits the problem.

The people above who are focussing on pharma are missing the point, which is also the failure of the article. The author carefully avoids widening the perview which might then include other sciences which are hot topics these days.

Fuck. Contrary, not contract.

I'm game.

The article is about selective reporting of results, publication bias, and "collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs".

Doesn't that fit the blind acceptance of the CO2 hypothesis despite evidence to the contract, exactly?

The graph which you linked to on Wikipedia contradicts your claim that

and in fact, supports what I said. Did you mean to include a different link, or am I missing something?

Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself. A zip file containing speleotherm data has thoughtfully been provided here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/26/in-which-i-go-spelunking/

When I look at his graph, it sure looks like it's getting colder to me.

In addition, the following paper makes it clear that the warming since 1800 is a "rebound" from the little ice age with a multi-decadal oscillation superposed, and that we have now entered a downward swing in said oscillation, yet the underlying linear "rebound" continues.

(PDF)
http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperDownload.aspx?FileName=NS20101100004_10739704.pdf&paperID=3217

And this paper has an explanation for the power spectra of the temperature oscillations which fit the data better than CO2 based models:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639

I have no argument about what you point out. Mainly, because it doesn't seem relevant in light of the facts. Namely that our current temperature is almost back up to what it was 1000 years ago, but not yet back to what it was 5000 years ago. Apparently we are still below the average temperature for our current interglacial period. There are all kinds of implications here.

• The Earth has been cooling since about the time of Christ. Shouldn't the people who claim CO2 is the boogey man explain that trend first?
• We're starting to warm back up to conditions in which civilization best flourished: The Holocene Thermal Maximum allowed the beginning of civilization and agriculture, the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, and the Mediaeval Warm Period were times of plenty and advancement. Considering how well humanity did in warmer times than this, a finer grained assessment of the risk vs. rewards should be made, as opposed to a Hollywood scare treatment for the ignorant masses. That reeks of an ulterior motive.
• And given the most of the Holocene has been warmer, any life forms which take longer than 10,000 years to evolve obviously have no problem with warmer temperatures than now, so what's with the crap about polar bears becoming extinct?

I wish I had mod points. +1000 to you.

Absolutely right. And when someone who actually knows math and statistics (as opposed to climate "scientists"), and who are knowledgeable enough to consider influences outside the earth's atmosphere (as opposed to climate "scientists"), find that the planetary and lunar orbits fit the temperature cycles better than the climate "scientists'" models do, why does anyone (except media whores) even bother to listen to them any more? http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639