And just why *can't* it be 2.5 million, or 1.25 million? You've got underreporting of crime just by victims, one. Then you add on top of that LEOs who *don't* actually file reports for reported crimes, or downplay them to fudge their statistics. I'll agree, we're speculating on "known unknowns" here, but it's not an unreasonable guess.

Here's some basics: http://www.fbi.gov/news/storie...

1.2 million violent crimes reported, 9 million property crimes reported. Add on top of that the rate of non-reporting by victims. Add on top of that the improper non-reporting by LEOs. 2.5 million passes the smell test at least on orders of magnitude, and you've got no facts to refute that.

But hey, forget that for a second, and think about it - would you hire more cops to reduce crime? Would you put another 10k officers out on the streets to make them safer?

Would you equip these cops with guns? Wouldn't that mean, more guns in the hands of good guys == less crime?

Hardly what I'd call diligent.

A far cry from "proven to make up data and conceals data that doesn't fit his ideology".

Maybe you find this kind of diligence more to your liking? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

And this is known as lying.

Like using a trick to hide a decline? :) Or maybe identity theft and forgery? http://fakegate.org/

I'll gladly pillory John Lott for sock puppetry if we'll put Peter Gleick and Phil Jones in jail for their sins :)

Ted Goertzel considered multiple regression to be not of much use in proving causal arguments

And there we agree - data diving is notorious for being unable to differentiate correlation and causality (The China Study being a prime example - http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/... - the AGW scam is another).

That being said, John Lott has undoubtedly done a more thorough job than any other researcher in the field on trying to include control variables - for all the critiques that can be laid against him, there's simply nobody else out there doing a better job...and he's even *invited* his naysayers to critique his work, reaching out to them to try and add to the body of knowledge, looking for control variables they might think of that he might not.

Here's an excerpt, regarding Susan Glick:

"However, when the publicity broke on the story with an article in USA Today on August 2, she was among the many people who left telephone messages immediately asking for a copy of the paper. In her case, the media were calling, and she “need[ed] [my] paper to be able to criticize it.” Because of all the commotion that day, I was unable to get back to her right away. ABC National Television News was doing a story on my study for that day, and when at around 3:00 p.m. the ABC reporter doing the story, Barry Serafin, called saying that certain objections had been raised about my paper, he mentioned that one of those who had criticized it was Ms. Glick. After talking to Mr. Serafin, I gave Glick a call to ask her if she still wanted a copy of my paper. She said that she wanted it sent to her right away and wondered if I could fax it to her. I then noted that her request seemed strange because I had just gotten off the telephone with Mr. Serafin at ABC News, who had told me that she had been very critical of the study, saying that it was “flawed.” I asked how she could have said that there were flaws in the paper without even having looked at it yet. At that point Ms. Glick hung up the telephone."

Hardly what I'd call diligent :)

Want to talk about lawlessness in the US?

http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/

The problem is that LEOs regularly refuse to investigate or report crimes that happen, or misclassify them to reduce their severity - http://www.latimes.com/local/l...

It certainly could be as high as 2.5 million, but hey, I'll give you half of those as exaggerations, and we're still talking huge numbers.

More good guys with guns, less crime. A good guy can be an LEO, or a law abiding CCW holder.

Or is it your position that somehow LEOs are superior gun handlers? http://www.indystar.com/story/...

Read your cite, his critics made baseless accusations against him, and had to recant:

"Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to John McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate."

Go back to your Creationist land where your brand of "reading comprehension" means something...

Cite, or it didn't happen. John Lott may be annoying, and there's certainly room to question his statistics, but he's done a far better job than all the anti-gun "researchers" out there in actually doing the due diligence of getting as much data as possible and explaining both his analytical methods and any potential weaknesses they might have.

If you haven't actually read his book, you might want to give it a try, so you can actually argue intelligently against his work, rather than just parrot anti-gun talking points about him.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/c...

"Buckets seem so innocent -- how can a bucket kill a child? Unfortunately, about 20 children die in the U.S. every year because they drown in buckets."

If you're worried about one penis shot per year, and are willing to put fingerprint sensors on firearms to stop it, what kind of fingerprint sensor are you going to put on buckets, that *kill* 20 times more people?

Ready to regulate buckets, bitch?

Don't forget dirty hands, bloody hands, the moment when you're wounded and have to switch hands, or even whether or not it works after you've sent 100,000 rounds down range.

The corner case this addresses is the retention issue - what happens when a bad guy takes your gun out of your holster, or out of your hands, and uses it against you. The holster case is already well addressed by various duty holsters with level 3 retention, and the out of your hands case essentially means they're physically overpowering you, and they'll do just as much damage to you up close with the hunk of metal they've just taken from you.

They're addressing a corner case that has even less possibility of happening than 0.01%

Except if you look at the data, it absorbed about half of human CO2 emissions *throughout* history, including recent history:

http://theresilientearth.com/?...

So the question still stands - why did CO2 sinks in our environment increase their absorption at the same time we increased our emissions?

It's like you're pouring 10 gallons per second into a tub that has a drain that removes 5 gallons per second, and then when you move to 20 gallons per second, the drain magically increases in size to remove 10 gallons per second.

Something is moderating the size of that drain, and it's not the water coming in...

Also, from the cited report:

http://ozone.unep.org/Assessme...

"Total column ozone declined over most of the globe during the 1980s and early 1990s, by about 2.5% in the global mean, but has remained stable since 2000. There are indications of an increase in global-mean total column ozone over 2000–2012, consistent with model predictions. However, a total column ozone increase that would be attributable to ODS decreases has not yet been observed."

Money quote: "However, a total column ozone increase that would be attributable to ODS decreases has not yet been observed."

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.go...

The graphs can be seen here:
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.go...

Whatever effect can be traced to 1987, it looks like a one-time step change, without a definite trend.

Let's be very clear here:

1) oceans are *basic* not acidic. Reducing pH of oceans at this point is *neutralization*, not acidification;

2) ocean pH varies orders of magnitude more than any proposed amount of neutralization:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

"It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day."

It could be an indication that the compensation effect of the oceans is coming at an end.

How can you possibly assert that as an explanation? Let's assume, for the moment, that the missing sink is the oceans (rather than say, increased plant life, or some other part of the carbon cycle we don't understand) - the moderator of how much CO2 they could absorb every year must be the amount of surface area of the oceans, yet without changing the surface area of the oceans, you're asserting that they magically figured out how to absorb *more* CO2 in later years?

Please, *why* would the oceans in 1980 absorb x CO2 from the atmosphere, but then in 2014, they absorb Y > 10x?

Possible suggestion: Absorption of oceans is driven by ocean temperature, and from say, 1980 - 2014, increasing ocean temps absorbed more CO2 from the atmosphere. So then what regulates ocean temperature? Cloud albedo and solar activity primarily, with maybe some minuscule contribution from underwater vulcanism. Sadly, we've got no model linking cloud albedo to CO2, or solar activity to CO2, much less human CO2.

In any case, the fact that natural CO2 absorption has varied so greatly over the years indicates some other moderator than human CO2 emissions on final global CO2 levels.

Historically, about half of the pollution from human sources has been absorbed by the oceans and by terrestrial plants

Interesting. That means that as human emissions have increased, so have the CO2 sinks....so back when we were emitting 2x, the environment magically knew to absorb 1x, and now that we're emitting 20x, it absorbs 10x.

Here's the question - if the CO2 capacity of our sinks is upwards of 10x today, why did it only absorb 1x when we emitted less?

http://theresilientearth.com/?...

Here's an alternative - CO2 levels are driven by something else besides our emissions, and regardless if we emit more, or emit less, the "set point" will be adapted to, either by more absorption, or less absorption.

Here's the problem (and yes, it's endemic to both parties) - you're a fucking hypocrite.

This kind of story essentially acts as a rorshach test - the typical assessment goes something like this:

1) Something BAD() has been done;
2) Check if the BAD() thing was done by the opposing party;
3) If "Yes", conjure up maximum moral outrage;
4) If "No", downplay the size, scope, or severity of the BAD() thing.

If this was FoxNews checking with the CIA, you'd be outraged.

If this was the LA Times checking with the CIA under Bush, you'd be outraged.

Hell, you speak disparagingly of "the most popular news network" as a mouthpiece of the GOP, but gloss over the fact that the rest of the media is just as much a mouthpiece for the Democrat party! And you don't bat an eye at that!

Fuck all of you party partisans and your silly "rah-rah" team rationalizations. The issue here isn't about parties - the issue here is about the press being in cahoots with our large, powerful, ever expanding, ever intrusive, and fucked up government, under *any* party.

Because of course, every sick person died before the Democrat party came along, right?

I'm sorry, but you Democrat partisans can go hang out in the same hell as the Republican partisans - just leave us freedom loving folk *alone*. Stop trying to tell us who we can and can't marry, how many rounds of ammo we can have in one clip, what dirty words aren't allowed on TV, or how much insurance we have to buy.

Frankly, the best option we have is to never give a party more than one term in office - keep swapping them out, every 4 years (or 6 or 2 for congress critters), and maybe, just maybe, they won't be around long enough to *really* fuck us.

Good catch, I like their visualization tool here: http://extranet.nsidc.org/Nimb...

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any similar visualization for the arctic.

I think the take away from their work shows just how much natural variability there was, even during a regime of significantly less CO2:

“And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in the Antarctic was the largest ever recorded, according to Nimbus image analysis. Two years later, there was a record low for sea ice in the Antarctic, and in 1969 Nimbus imagery, sea ice appears to have reached its maximum extent earliest on record."

1964 high -> 1966 low -> 2014 above average

Since we have no 60s data regarding volume, I suppose that's an open question, but for antarctic extent to grow from 1966-2014 in the face of ever increasing CO2, points to some significant natural variability that overwhelms whatever influence CO2 might have.