Evidently climate scientists can ignore the data and falsify what they need to buttress the alarm.

The ends justify the means. The tired 97% of climate scientists agree...has been thoroughly debunked. People are seeing this for the scam that it really is.

WHEN WILL THE SHEEPLE FINALLY REALISE THE LIZARDS ARE THE REAL MASTERS.

Man the crackpot denialist invasion of slashdot is getting tiring. What happened to the website that actually shouted down cranky god damn denialists, creationists and other conspiratorial loons.

Having worked in courts many years this is the biggest load of horseshit. Judges are some of the most fearlessly intelligent people you'll meet. The problem is the laws they have to apply tend to be arse, and they are oft required to rule on fields they have no expertise on. Making a shitty judgement in that situation isn't a sign of unintelligence, it's just the hand that's been dealt.

The person that starts the lawsuit can basically pick any country he likes out of at least these jurisdictions and more:

Yep, thats more or less an outcome of Guttnick vs Dow Jones(2002) in Australia where a judge found that if a user reads a page in australia that defames him thats hosted in the US , the place of publication is pretty much the users desktop.

In defamation law if a newspaper defames you, you can sue
1) The author of the article
2) The editor of the article
3) The newspaper
4) The publisher
5) The news-agent who sold you the newspaper
6) And probably his dog too.

So the entire chain of custody of the information from the author to your eyeballs is sueable. Combined with the guttnick ruling (And remember judges internationally tend to read each others rulings and incorporate them when it comes to issues of juristiction, you can pretty much sue the crap out of everyone.

Sucks to be a journalist.

Defamation means that the information is false.

No, it refers to speech that unfairly harms the reputation of someone. Truth is a *defence*, but its not the same thing.

In most countries a statement being true is usually enough for the complaint not to stick but often a truth being used in a deceptive way can also qualify as defamation. Conversely often "Genuinely held belief" can be a defence for it (although often couple with an injunction to fix the error)

Heres an example. Lets say Barack Obama has Asthma. I dont know if he does, but lets just pretend for the sake of this example. Lets also say that he really doesn't listen to his doctor and instead of using a preventitive he instead huffs on a ventolin puffer all day. Its something doctors consider poor asthma management and even counterproductive.

Now heres a defamatory statement: Barack Obama abuses drugs. Assuming the "puffs ventolin all day" fact is true, then this statement is true.

But its also defamatory, because a "reasonable person" (the usual standard in law) would deduce from the he's smoking blunts and blowing lines of coke. In other words I've unfairly hurt his reputation and created a false representation by telling the truth. And in Britain, and many other countries that would be defamation. But in the US? Judge probably won't even hear the case.

Religious types? Among scientists?

No , I said funding bodies, not scientists. The ones where Senator Cletus McGee gets on board and vetos climate physics research grants because his pastor told him physicists lie as much as biologists do.

Are you asserting that natural climate variation caused by factors other than human CO2 emissions never had an effect on animals or plants?

No. I said we haven't observed those effects on Emporer penguins before.

Natural climate variations other than human CO2 are a pretty small signal in the scheme of things. The cause of Climate change is overwhelmingly human caused. Why is this still a debate amongst the non scientitific community?

If you apply for a grant to study penguin breeding grounds . . . affected by global climate change . . . you can have all the money you want.

Holy shit no. Its well known amongst physicists and other earth sciences that even mentioning climate change can get you in trouble if you get religious types or conservatives on your review panel. Serious dude, climate science is harmful to your career due to all the political interference with funding and the pressures on atmospheric researchers from funding bodies to downplay long term negative consequences of innaction.

Scientists have been talking about CO2 induced climate change and the effects on animals and plants since the late 1800s dude. However regarding penguin migrations its been largely speculative.

OK, and this is part of climate change how? They have done it for years, but now it's part of "climate change"?

Right. We do the anti-science thing in slashdot these days dont we. *sigh*

Penguin observations are something I'm fairly closely involved with professionally. That climate change affects penguins isn't controversial amongst researchers, its something we've known for a long time and studies on it go back to the 50s at least. Basically , penguins don't use magic to navigate, but rather fairly detailed memory of environmental conditions and landmarks. "Hey this is where the water turns cold with the shore to my right. I better start swimming south where there are more tasty fish" kind of thing. The problem is, these forms of navigation are super succeptible to environmental change, and whilst climate effects of CO2 are only starting to become widely felt, the effects on the ocean so far have been huge, particularly near the poles Again , none of this is controversial, we know this to be true.

Now I'm not much of an expert on Emperor penguins (The project I'm working with does obersvations of fairy penguins whos range isn't as far south as the emporers who are strictly ice dudes) but my understanding is they have never been observed to change nesting location so the question is *why*. Well Antarctic is interesting in that it doesn't change an awful lot, theres not a LOT of variables at play here , but one BIG change is that warmer currents coming in caused by climate change (Some marine biologists joke that climate change should be could 'sea change' because it tends to dispropirtionately affect oceans, and a 'sea change' might be your career path if you do climate science and the fundamentalist right regains power and starts defunding evolutionary biologists and climate physics again).

So its a guess that its the cause, but its a good guess because it seems the most likely candidate, all things considered.

Wait till you get a load of us Aussies , cobba!

Whooping cough does seem to be a bit slippery though. There was a round in the 1970s where the vaccinations failed as well (Which is where I got it as a kid, and thus have had life long asthma problems)

American corporations won't go against U.S. government policy

US Govt Policy is whatever the companies paying the campaign contributors want it to be.

Of course they wont go against it. They thought it was a good idea when they came up with it!

Oh I was kinda trolling a bit with the commie jibe. My point there is that people see a carbon price as somehow "stealing" from them whilst ignoring their own impacts on others. There are no free lunches in science but a lot of supposedly "capitalist" folks seem to want one when it comes to disposing the by products of their consumption, in this case by driving up CO2 levels and putting the climate out of whack.

For an oscilloscope, $300 is more like a nanobudget, or even picobudget.

True, though you can often pick up a good old solid Analogue CRO on Ebay for that price and honestly those old girls will still do the job marvelously for 99% of use cases.

Nobody needs to "spin proof" of AGW, any more than they need to "spin proof" of evolution, the solar centric motion of planets or anything else in science thats already proven.