You aren't quite right that the satellite gravity scientists are just using climate as a "hook" to display their techniques. A major reason for the launch of these very precise gravity satellites is to use gravity to monitor the movement of water (not just ice) in and around the Earth. Hence the name of the GRACE satellite -- Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. The NASA GRACE fact sheet is at -- http://earthobservatory.nasa.g... with more details.

"is it possible that the ice has actually thickened and displaced more of the denser sea water?" -- not in this case. The geographic precision of these satellite gravity surveys and complementary ground and airborne surveys in the area constrain the loss of mass to ice over the land. In addition it is possible to estimate the change in ice mass on the land by other techniques and they are in agreement with the gravity. There is a good (but long) discussion of the recent observational techniques and results for the ice sheet mass balances in Greenland and Antarctica here: http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/so...

I haven't had any trouble finding incandescent light bulbs for sale lately, but I haven't been looking very hard. The local Home Depot has a whole pallet of the super cheapo 60 watters for the hoarders to buy. The high quality halogen incandescents are available and nice choices for those last niches where you have to have incandescents before LEDs completely obsolete them for general lighting.

I did the math on our porch light (it's pretty easy easy math) and it saves me money to put in a CFL and just leave it on 24/7 over buying incandescents and turning them off during the day. And the bulbs last forever -- a couple of years each -- what is that about 16,000 hours? My security floodlights outside are CFL floods on a photocell switch ($10 from Home Depot, marked suitable for CFLs). Those bulbs also are lasting a couple of years each. But this is all water under the bridge because the LEDs are obsoleting the CFLs.

Just put up some of the latest pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is still up there snapping away at 1 meter resolution. The following is from http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/mro/bo...
"The track left by an oblong boulder as it tumbled down a slope on Mars runs from upper left to right center of this image. The boulder came to rest in an upright attitude at the downhill end of the track. The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded this view on July 3, 2014."

Everyone is getting all excited about India/ISRO and ESA making it to Mars on their first attempt -- great, good job, those are achievements, no question. Here is the Wikipedia description of the USA's first attempt at Mars in 1964:, "Mariner 3 was launched on November 5, 1964 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 13, but the shroud encasing the spacecraft atop its rocket failed to open properly, and Mariner 3 did not get to Mars. Unable to collect the Sun's energy for power from its solar panels, the probe soon died when its batteries ran out and is now derelict in a solar orbit. THREE WEEKS LATER (emphasis mine), on November 28, 1964, the identical Mariner 4 was launched successfully on a 7½-month voyage to the red planet." So the second spacecraft of a two spacecraft attempt was successful, in 1964.
By the way, the first US attempt at Venus, the Mariner 1 mission, failed on launch, but, ONE MONTH LATER, the identical Mariner 2 spacecraft was launched and had a successful mission to Venus, in 1962. So, yes, these were not successful on the "first attempt" but about as close as you can get without technically achieving it, and done in a hurry, only 4 and 6 years after the US first put a satellite into orbit.

Congrats to ISRO and India as you say, and I don't know how to put this without it sounding like I am try to downplay their achievement, which I'm not, but it's worth reminding everyone who never knew or forgot: the USA only got its first satellite launch capability in 1958, and by 1964, only SIX YEARS LATER with 1960's tech, NASA flew Mariner 4 on a successful flyby mission to Mars on their second attempt. In 1962, only four years after the first USA satellite launch, NASA flew Mariner 2 on a successful flyby of Venus.
And as someone else pointed out, I have to disagree with your statement, " and it has been a couple of decades now, hardly anyone is doing anything worthwhile as far as space exploration is concerned". Right now we have (functioning), an orbiter around Saturn, an orbiter around the asteroid Vesta (or it may be on the way to Ceres now), two rovers on Mars, an orbiter around Mercury which just finished its mission, a flyby mission on the way to Pluto, a new orbiter on the way to Jupiter, the Europeans have an orbiter around a comet, and the international community has more orbiters around Mars than I can name. Congrats again to ISRO and the Indians for adding one more, there's plenty of room for everybody, and each new one is a great human achievement.

Don't know about Vostok, and don't want to look up the other Mercury missions, but on the second manned orbital Mercury flight, Mercury-Atlas 7, the astronaut on board manually controlled the reentry due to equipment malfunction in the spacecraft. "At the retrofire event, the pitch horizon scanner malfunctioned once more, forcing Carpenter to manually control his reentry, which caused him to overshoot the planned splashdown point by 250 mi (400 km). ("The malfunction of the pitch horizon scanner circuit [a component of the automatic control system] dictated that the pilot manually control the spacecraft attitudes during this event."[8])" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Two issues with this: TFA (one of them) states that the destination for these tourists will be the ISS -- the US taxpayers have already paid north of $70 billion for that plus the ongoing logistics -- maybe Boeing has worked out a compensation for that, but I doubt it. And 2) It isn't a given that Boeing can just use the result of government paid NRE for their own commercial uses; certainly when there is NRE on a product developed by one commercial company for another there can be severe restrictions on the use of the intellectual property developed via NRE; that's all defined in the contract. So the US taxpayer has already paid for the initial destination and will be paying the cost of development of the CST-100 -- I agree with the OP, Joe Taxpayer should get a cut of those seats which Boeing intends to sell.

If you feel that way then when your country is involved in a war which you don't approve of it is your moral duty to quit paying taxes (and take the consequences). You said, "no exceptions" and in moral involvement there isn't that much difference between funding a war and fighting in it directly.

And an interesting point about your 1st order explanation of AGW science is that it is the simplest and most straightforward explanation of the situation. The skeptics have to go to another level of effects to explain away why the climate should not be warming -- they have to find carbon sinks, or negative temperature feedbacks, etc. which make the model more complicated. So the persons who are demanding a simple explanation (and don't like the answer) actually want a more complicated explanation, but only to the point it supports their view. I don't have a problem with skeptics to a point but in the case of AGW, the burden is on them to explain why this 1st order description fails if they are complaining about the models getting too complicated.

In many cases there is no simple explanation to real understanding and the best you can do for a layman is to use analogies and simple models which inevitably fail when pushed too hard. A good example is quantum physics -- one of the first concepts for laymen is the Pauli exclusion principle -- OK great, two electrons can't occupy the same state in a atom, got it, but then you could ask, why then can two photons occupy the same state (not subject to the exclusion principle). Well, you answer, because electrons have spin 1/2 and photons have spin 1, ... uh what is 'spin' -- well it is intrinsic angular momentum, kind of like a spinning top, but nothing is really 'spinning'. OK so why does a spin 1/2 particle obey the exclusion principle and a spin 1 particle doesn't? -- now you are stumped because there is no easy answer that I know of, it just comes out of the math of quantum field theory. So in the end the expert just has to say, "trust me, it is all in the mathematics". Each simple analogy either fails or proposes new questions which require more specialized knowledge to answer -- soon you get to where fewer than 1% of your audience can follow you -- that's not lack of your understanding -- that is the nature of reality.

Depends -- We had a case in Austin a couple of years ago where a young woman hit a pedestrian at night, killed her and left the scene. The driver claimed she looked down at her phone before the accident,and drifted over to the shoulder. She got off with no jail time, I don't remember if she got probation. She wasn't police, but was from a wealthy family and worked as an aide to a state legislator.

I don't know what 'presentation' you saw but it is bullshit. At least for FY13 (http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/outreach/022212_budget_charts.pdf) the Human Exploration and Operations (formerly known as 'Manned') percentage of NASA's budget was 45%. Its hard to argue how human operations in space (mostly ISS related) is in any way "directed at climate change". The remaining 55% includes all the planetary missions and astrophysics which again can't be called 'climate change'. Where is the 75% directed at climate change?

Well, I've got karma to burn and this AC got modded up to +2 insightful, so look, the argument that the current President and VP have never run/managed "anything" and so are unsuitable for the positions would be valid EXCEPT that the previous President and VP had vast private sector and government managerial experience (or at least they were sold to us that way) and they screwed up running the country at least as badly as the current administration. So, from observation of the actual, real world experiences we've gone through in the last 15 years it would seem to be clear that previous managerial experience has no correlation with good administration of the Executive branch of the US government.