The approach of the IPCC is to take the worst scenario that hasn't been conclusively rejected by the scientific community, and promoting that scenario most prominently, which is why we you see it being presented with judgement words, like "darkest yet." Their goal seems to be to make it look as dark, which is obviously not a good scientific approach.

Wouldn't it have been quicker to have just note you actually don't have any idea whats in the report?

The IPCC does nothing of the sort. The risk assesment framework of the IPCC is actually quite conservative and is regularly criticized by climate scientists and physicists for understating the risks involved. To its credit the IPCC takes the approach of a mass literature survey and then weights the results of the tens of thousands of research papers , and looks at what the median opinion is. Nobody is predicting a Venus result, however we do know that runaway climate change is both a very real possibility and rather nasty.

Whatever the case is , the predictions of the IPCC are not the high ends, not the low ends, but somewhere in the middle and the other outlier predictions are also presented with the approprite probabilities assigned.

Actually try reading the thing. The first thing you'll notice is these global warming denial blogs are not being very honest about what the IPCC actually says.

Someone is getting their pockets lined. This is politics Al Gore style. Its pathetic, "food shortages" yeah right, because we all know food doesn't grow when the climate is warmer........ Scare tactics by intellectually challenged pseudo scientists.

Well this ooky spooky vast left wing conspiracy certainly has forgot to line my sisters pockets who's been staring at satelite data and , you know, using physics and stuff (hint: The picture coming out of the science really isn't pretty)

Thankfully the christian right blogosphere will teach us about how real science works!

And yet death row is filled with people desperate to exchange their impending deaths for life imprisonent.

In fairness Python 3 isn't really as widespread as it should be. I think people have found the 2.7 branch just works well for them.

With that said I do wish people WOULD move to python 3. 2.7's unicode handling is infinitely awful and fragile compared to 3.

Reminds me a bit of one of the tropes from battlestar galactica. Adama knew from the previous war that the cylons where master hackers and could disable battlestars by breaking into networks via wireless and then using them to disable the whole ship, leaving them effectively dead in the water, so he simply ordered that none of his ship ever be networked and that the ship be driven using manual control. Later on they meet the other surviving battleship, the pegasus, and it turns out that only survived because its network was offline due to maintainance. Its not actually a novel idea in militaries. I remember in the 90s doing a small contract for a special forces group I can't name, and asked them about their computer network. He said they used "Sneaker-net", which is that any info that needed transfer was put on a floppy and walked to its destination, thus creating an air gap between battlefield systems.

I guess this isn't quite that, but it certainly seems to be a sort of variant of it.

Don't. Just forget the password. They can't prove you haven't. In fact its actually really common for people under duress to forget passwords for real, since memory can get quite impaired by anxiety (Its part of why torture doesnt work. The more people are freaked out, the more the brain reverts to a fight-or-flight baseline with faster reflexes and diminished cognitive skills)

We had a few arse-backwards white supremacists in the 1980s blow up some chinese resturants and a few things. Somehow doubt those hillbillies are going to be particularly sophisticated about their communication.

No its not. A naturalistic fallacy is where someone justifies a moral stance by a physical condition. It is essentially a round-about variation of the is/ought problem.

However, death has no real moral status, because we have no say over the matter. To say death is immoral presupposes that there is an alternative to death which IS moral, and for which we might chose.

But there isn't. Death isn't a moral choice, its simply something that exists, and we're all going to get knived by it some day.

Death *sucks*, but it isn't wrong. It just is.

The belief you "deserve" an experience, or are entitled to the enjoyment of other's work.

Won't SOMEBODY think of those more fortunate than us?

Well the Americans in WW-II pretty much pulled off the whole thing, plus the whole "invent nuclear weapons" things in about that amount of time.

Being that the whole "invent nuclear weapons" bit is already done, and the Ukraine has the physicists to fill in the middle bits, yeah 4 years is probably a good bet.

Problem of course is that they have about 4 weeks, not 4 years to pull this off so....

Pavlov hasn't really been a thing in neurology or psychology since the 50s. Lets get that clear before we start spouting grossly outdated theories before we really screw up and start spouting freud.

Dogs do analyse our facial expressions and the like to guage our moods. But its also how humans do it as well. We know that because people who cant, namely people with autism, suffer from something called "mind blindness", the inability to guage the internal states of others.

The thing is, we can only guess at what animals can't understand, because they can't tell us otherwise. But we also need to acknowledge these animals for the large part have the same brain parts we do (with a few notable exceptions, like an inability to process grammar) and often display similar reason to us.

We know they tend not to be as smart as us. We've got whacking great big frontal and temporal lobes, but we need to be very careful in assuming they dont understand us, just because they are mute.

The US dollar is worth anywhere from 1/29th to 1/539th of what it originally was worth after the Revolutionary War, so your statement is inane.

Theres really nothing bad about this. Its called economic growth and its why our western countries don't look like the backward-arse third world countries who've failed to increase the value of their products.

When I was younger, early 20s back in the 1990s , once of my best friends started to slip into schizophrenia (it ran in his family). He constantly jotted drawings and writings on paper, which grew increasingly more bizare. Started with pictures of aliens and UFOs (Which he'd say where just him having fun) but over time turned into numerological type things (My first letter is T my second is C, I am top cat, my age adds up to 9 which upside down is a third of 666 etc etc etc) and increasingly more paranoid mystery theories. He'd draw charts explaining the relationships between things.

And since he was a biology student, he drew lots of plants. Particularly his favorite, marihuana.

Whats to say this isn't the mad scrawlings of a schizophrenic mad man, 500 years ago? It'd certainly fit the pattern.

Doesn't matter. First to publish gets the prize. Second place needs to find a new phd

Yes it has. But that don't mean we'll survive it. A 4c warming over a thousand years triggered the permafrost melt (for a total of 10c warming) which damn near sterilized the planet.

Regardless, those massive shifts are not contemporary and not compatible with our survival. In fact we're not even sure 4c is particularly compatible with our survival if history has any say in it.