I am loving reading all these responses explaining how people avoid distractions, even while succumbing to the distraction of posting on reading and posting on Slashdot.

(Yeah yeah, I know, maybe they're in a different time zone... I would bet money the majority are still in their working hours. Including myself.)

She always said if we didn't give it an extra second to stop zapping before we opened the door, we'd all die of cancer. I'm going to have to tell her about this for Mother's Day. :)

Here's an article with a counterpoint to your view.

You won't hear any disagreement from me.

I disagree there. American healthcare compares favorably with European healthcare when you take everything into account. We have some states that are doing better than others, just like you have some countries in Europe that are doing better than others. Some of your European countries have some very rotten aspects in government and in other societal areas. The PIIGS nations come to mind.

So you disagree with the statement "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". You're entitled to your opinion, and I think mine is on the side of history.

By what metric? I understand that emergency room visits have increased under Obamacare, which was one thing it was supposed to reduce. I'm sure there are some people with pre-existing conditions who get cheaper care under the ACA, however until the dust settles it's not clear at what cost. If you drag the whole system down to help some people, the value is certainly debatable.

Government has to get involved when people do bad stuff. That doesn't mean that the government should decide how much our doctors get paid. There is lots of lovely gray space in the middle between the stark black and white of extreme positions.

I disagree. Government is force/power/compulsion. It does not inherently seek the good of the populace. The more you hand over to the government, the less recourse you will have when faced with incompetence, corruption, and overall indifference to the needs of ordinary people.

I worked in the medical software industry for about 4 years. Funny enough, I actually wrote an ICD9 lookup UI. Medical software is mostly pathetic and dysfunctional, but government isn't the solution -- holding private companies accountable is the solution.

The abuses you describe have all happened in one form or another, though they're fortunately not the universal experience here.

Clearly you favour spellings that add a bit of colour to the Queen's English, eh? OK, just kidding, but it is fun to speculate that you might be from Canada or the UK.

No... if they predicted it and it fell short of their prediction, then of course it's OK to point that out. We can speculate that the heat went into the ocean etc., but the predictions of surface temperature change were specific enough to be falsifiable (like all good scientific ideas), and they were duly falsified.

Rule of thumb: pointing out true facts is always OK.

Absolutely, I am completely in support of continued climate science research. Perhaps someday they will understand exactly why pumping huge amounts of CO2 over the last decades didn't crank up the atmospheric temperature as much as they (rather prematurely) predicted. Hoping for understanding here is still a tall order, because the climate is so complex, chaotic, and full of tricky feedback cycles.

Sorry, from the last link, to nap.edu.

Mmmm hmm.

I think you mean "politically speaking".

No it doesn't. There's a real plateau that throws a wrench in the works for climate projections of carbon sensitivity. Mann and his peers have been scrambling to issue explanations for the slowdown/pause/whatever you want to call it.

Judith Curry rather sarcastically remarked to the effect that "if there's no pause, then how is it possible that there are explanations for it?" Which is, of course, an insightful observation. Science doesn't always give us the results we expected to get, and the thing to do is roll with it, not fight it.

C'mon, it's a fun tech project, and people should stop whining about it.

What's not funny is where we are going with this kind of technology. Always on facial recognition and people tracking is already happening some places in the world. Casinos and airports were probably the leaders in the field, but soon it will be everywhere. I despise the thought of a government database tracking people everywhere, not to mention law enforcement reliance on face recognition that (as evidenced here) may be less than perfect. "The computer says you did it, so you're guilty."

Forgot to mention -- have you forgotten about the ocean?

CO2 is a tiny part of the GHG picture, and it's not clear what effect changes in CO2 have on the planet overall. Since The Pause has shown that our most trusted projections of CO2 sensitivity were wrong, perhaps we should be open minded toward the possibility that this tiny fraction of GHG contribution is just that -- a tiny fraction of GHG contribution. A minuscule shift in cloud cover across the earth, and "poof", all the carbon reduction in the world doesn't make any net difference at all. (Not saying that happens, just that it's a possibility.)

The studies in question didn't attempt to interact with the damning evidence from the emails, in fact they carefully avoided addressing it.

If you throw out data from measurements are not known to be reliable proxies for global temperature, you are left with very little if anything; and certainly not with a thousand year hockey stick shape. The hockey stick is an artifact of cherry picking data. There are many reasons for an upswing in various physical measurements in the 20th century, including (yes) a warming temperature as we swing up from a low point on the multi-century scale, but also modern agriculture and its effects on things like tree growth.

Case in point, take Figure 6 -- the proxies seem to show a dip which we'd identify as the Little Ice Age of ca. 1300-1870. Not much else is obvious there, except the somewhat misleading superimposition of the instrumental record. It's not really fair to slap instrumental readings on the end of the proxies, since even assuming these proxies reflect global temperature in some way (big assumption), they will flatten out upswings like the instrumental record shows in the late 20th century.

Water vapor's status as the number one greenhouse gas makes it a hard problem because of the water cycle. What is the effect of cloud cover? How is the water cycle affected by more CO2? These are the billion dollar questions.

The Pause has shown that the most highly vaunted predictions of carbon sensitivity were mistaken. What we do with that from here is a tricky question. Simply changing the fudge factors for aerosol albedo to keep our predictions "accurate" is a pretty lame response (Mann's, if you hadn't guessed).

Maybe I'm wrong, but I personally would lump all three of those in with carbon reduction as "rolling back to more of the way things were", and therefore (a bit more) intrinsically safe than, say, dumping iron into the ocean.

At least with carbon reduction we're attempting to reverse climate changes through a mechanism believed to trigger those changes. However, with new intervention mechanisms that aren't fully understood, I don't trust anybody's model of what they think will happen.

My (likely) worst case scenario: an ice age in 100 years. That would be worse than global warming.