Lets suppose, we just exclude the U.S., and then we have the consensus that GW is human caused.

I wish this where true. Here in australia, our new conservative government is in the process of shocking the locals by attempting to recreate the american GOP dream in a country that neither wants it or even understands what the hell the new government is doing.

Hey lets dismantle the UHC so we can have a complete screw-up of a system like the americans. Lets defund science because our science advisor thinks the world is 6000 years old and the CSIRO professors keeps saying embarassing things about climate change like "We should move to renewables" so we'll just fire them instead. Wheeeeeeeee!

1) where can we find a completely accurate (or even reasonably accurate) climate model? Even pro-AGW climatologists would shy away from claiming that they have one. Point is, the science is not "settled", unless everyone is agreeing on the mere fact that climate does change over time (which, seriously, no one credibly argues against).

Lets be clear here. "Pro-AGW climatologists" is a redundant phrase. In the *scientific* community (Ie not in the blogger peanut gallery), theres no more "ANTI-AGW" climatologists then there are "Creationist biologists". A very very tiny minority of mostly unqualified right-wing think tank employees at best. But actually nobody is "Pro AGW". Nobody wants this. My sister has been working on the hydrological parts of the modelling for the past decade and she utterly hates the science because the implications are so dismal. But its what needs to be done. Its like saying Oncologists are "pro cancer".

That humans are causing climate change isn't a debate anymore. Hasn't been for a long time, the science is fundamental and would require major revisions to fundamental science that we'd have to throw away 50+ years of scientific progress across the board. A whole new system of chemistry, a whole new physics going back to the 1800s (When scientists first started warning about the 'greenhouse effect' after discovering CO2's infra-red properties in the lab) , a whole new system of optics to account for why CO2 appears to be creating banding in the infra-red spectrum, it just goes on and on.

There are two things required for AGW to be false.
1) A mechanism that is stopping the CO2 humans are putting in from following the laws of physics by trapping IR light and introducing energy into the atmosphere.
2) A mechanism that is making measuring devices pretend that physics is still working as expected.

Perhaps when man makes CO2 its different to natural CO2 and instead of creating heat it creates some sort of strange particle that causes physicsts to lie, like orgone energy.

Does this sound strange? Well it exactly how strange science needs to get for AGW to be false. At this stage, scientists are happy to use the standard scientific model that says if you have a theory that predicts an effect and then the effect turns up in the observation, its a good bet the effect is true.

As for models, well yes, they are not without peril, however certain things can be predicted with certainty.Namely If you introduce x amount of CO2, it will trap in y percent of Infra red (and certain other spectra) light that is passing throught the atmosphere at the time. Since we have a good understanding of how much CO2 is in the air (We've more or less doubled it), we can do a back of the napkin calculation to work out how much energy is being added to the climate system. Remember, this is 1870s science here, nothing is controversial about this, and it can be verified in a high school laboratory.

The question then is how this energy manifests. The options are by heat (Warming) , by kinetic manifestations such as increased winds, cyclones, hurricanes, etc, by increased pressure gradients, such as the one that caused the huge chill over winter in the US, and so on.

Thats what the models are trying to work out. Whatever the case is, we know that the very minimal baseline is still pretty bad.

More to the point, the state of the art in modelling is that our models can attach error bands to the predictions. So "We think this is 80% likely to happen, give or take 5-10%" Currently we're pushing close to 100% certainty give or take a few percent. Not quite the sigma-5 type certainty of 'we've proven it" (Although we *HAVE* proven AGW), but pretty damn close.

At this stage its highly unlikely that the least-bad models will turn out over-done, and we can safely say with certainty that SOMETHING is going to happen.

Thus the precautionary principle states that even taking into account the small likelyhood we are wrong about it, we've got to do something, as long as the something isn't worse. Climate engineering might be worse, much worse even. Economic intervention however definately won't be (In fact most academic economists think climate intervention would have beneficial effects on the economy)

Theres also the psychoaccoustic nature of instrument familiarity.

Any experienced guitarist will tell you that if you pick up an unfamiliar guitar two things happen
1) They wont be quite as adept on it as they are on their own guitars.
2) The guitar will tend to "suggest" to them what sort of things might sounds good on it. This can be a pretty creative thing. I've written tonnes of lines just by picking up a new guitar and then blammo my hands just do something great.

Its a combination of the effects of muscle memory, and psychoaccoustics. The muscle memory isn't working quite as well forcing the guitarist to consciously think a bit more about what hes playing, and various attributes of the guitar will be suggesting to him things like "Hey this low strung strat wants me to play FAST" or "This soulful old girl wants me to play some blues on her", for instance.

The real magic happens after you've played that guitar for a few weeks and your muscle memory is automatic again and your head is completely around the personality quirks of it. Then and only then will the guitar truly sing in its own voice. The guitarist now knows things like "She's a bit buzzy around 7th fret" and "She performs beautifully around the second octave" and so on.

I would argue that violins must be the same. And if this is so how are we supposed to compare instruments not played to their true potential , even by master violinists, especially when stradovarius violins are renowned as eccentric violins that play best when the player has learned its ups and downs. Preferably in their prefered tuning (somewhat lower than modern concert tuning).

Now try this same test with a pre-war Martin D-28 and the best modern guitar you can find.

The modern guitar wouldn't stand a goddam chance.

Its frightening how good those old martins sounded. Why they can't get them to sound like that anymore is beyond me (Even martins re-issue D-28s dont stack up, despite being exceptional guitars).

Theres a lot of DNA conditions that are straight up "You wont live to 50 and theres nothing you can do to make it better" type things. Frankly for a young person, its better to just not know and go and live a healthy and normal life until the bloody thing reveals itself, than living a life in misery under a death sentence.

Living in ignorance isn't living a lie, knowing the truth and going on like its not real , however is.

Frankly, I'd take the ignorance.

The star trek replicator is still firmly in the realm of science fiction, because it straight up can replicate almost *anything* (Except , of course ,latinum, whatever the heck latinum is).

THAT would be the technology that would straight up have people arguing about capitalism vs socialism as arcane as arguing about feudalism vs agrarianism seems to us.

Post scarcity, particularly if we can sort out some of our growing environmental issues, would make for an amazing society.

Throw in the warp drive, and mastery of genetic manipulation, and you've more or less got the world of star trek. Minus the pointy eared aliens.

Righto. I'm in australia (Again, midrange ADSL2 and likely to remain that way for quite some time thanks to the our ludite conservatives deciding that australia copper is preferable to fibre for future connectivity and cancelling the NBN.) so I use netflix over a vpn and it works fantastic.

However the comcast situation there does sound like ia straight up anti-competitive shakedown. I wonder if the Justice department could get involved, or is the supreme court too much in the oligarch pockets now to be reliable for pro-citizen judgements?

Pretty sure Mein Kampf was considered "racist and controversial" by 1930s standards too, what with all the stuff about snuffing the 'weak' and wiping out the jews!

Whilst the tea-party wing of the GOP might be more or less unredeamable wing-nuts, I've never quite understood why the libertarians have tolerated the anti Tesla thing.

Libertarians in recent years have found themselves in the untennable situation of being forced to side with the climate change denialist flat earther society, having to weave weirder and wilder conspiracy theories whilst discarding more and more fundamental science to try and dismiss an unfortunate fact of chemistry and science that was largely proven over a century, because the suggested solution doesnt fit neatly at all into their "no government interventions ever" mindset. The more thoughtful libertarians must surely find this a situation as difficult as the smarter minds in the left find the anti-nuclear power sentiment. A troublesom matter of faith not reason.

So things like the Tesla would seem an obvious way out of this mess. It provides a market based solution, creates jobs, and generally ticks all the boxes that the libertarians want ticked, without forcing them to share the same podium with the creationists and "smoking DOESNT cause cancer!" whackjobs by reluctantly feining a belief that scientists are in some 100 year old sinister global conspiracy to lie about physics for some undeteriminable reason.

I dont think this is really the problem. I'm on a mid range ADSL2 connection and Netflix streams fine for me, as does youtube and most silverlight based sites (Silverlight was a misconcieved technology that nobody wanted, but to its credit, its video streaming worked exceptionally well).

The problem is straight up the fact that some of what I want to watch is on Netflix, some of it is on hula and yet more is just straight up not available.

Unless I use Pirate bay.

If the industry wants people to stop downloading unauthorized copies, maaaaybe they could consideri doing like them music industry did and fixing this. I havent downloaded an unauthorized mp3 in years because iTunes and spotify just work.

We only accept Gold Pressed Latinum in this station buddy. BY order of the Grand Negus.

Prune flavors would work. Worf always liked prune juice because it tasted like a "Warriors drink". I guess you could make inferences from that.

Here in australia your not supposed to listen in to police comms, but journalists, tow truck drivers and whoever else have been doing so for decades with no penalty.

That said I wouldn't be surprise if its encrypted (or whatever they do) these days.

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!