I know right?? Star Trek proves that even after 400 (?) years of voice command optimization, the best activation method is still to physically press the communicator emblem thingy. If Picard isn't too busy for a quick gesture to get beamed out of a warp core explosion, you can push a button when you want to know where the closest chicken nuggets are.

Wow, yeah science should never attempt to be interesting, especially for the lay audience. All of the longstanding questions, brilliant technological achievements, and research built on the shoulders of giants is completely worthless to talk about when all the had to tell us is "there's moving dust on it".

In other news I wasted a whole 8 seconds reading that first sentence describing your unnecessary editorial opinion and post script. Your summary was twice as long as it needed to be.

Seriously, 10 short large font paragraphs interspersed between amazingly detailed imagery is too much?

One of my favorite daily show punchlines was about some debate in congress during the recession about healthy school lunches. The punchline was "Congress can't deal with the economy, middle east, etc, because they are too busy declaring pizza a vegetable"

Yes and no. Ending a hugely expensive and unsuccessful program is a good thing. Allowing a special interest to essentially shut down an agency designed to monitor/regulate it is a bad thing.

Maybe not Mad Max, but probably a Verizon/Halliburton/Future toll road & fire dept conglomerate dystopia....not to say its not already here.

You taxes also pay for things you don't necessarily want but are a huge benefit to society at large...mainly keeping a very low rate of poor and elderly dropping dead in the street (social security/medicare/medicaid, the bulk of the budget). I'll give you those programs have their inefficiencies and can certainly be improved but for me, private industry has not demonstrated they could do it any better. Once any one company grows big enough its pretty much as inefficient as the government...only its mandate is profit for shareholders over all.

In return you get all the rights of citizenship in both the US and UK. Don't want all the benefits of citizenship? No problem, renounce it!

" NRA is "looking into this to see if gun owners were improperly targeted,"

I don't know who else would be targeted at a gun show so once the NRA picks up it's batphone you can bet the DEA will be as marginalized as the ATF (understaffed to monitor firearms nationwide, directorless for 7 years, etc), effectively ending the war on drugs.

Guess that means we should ignore you when it comes to astrophysics!

So you're going with "think of the children...err...grandparents". That always goes over well on ./. Exhibit A:

"Many of these deaths could be prevented and are known as “excess winter deaths.” Age UK said countries which experience much colder temperatures, such as Finland, Germany and France, have significantly lower winter death rates than the UK, because the UK has the oldest houses in the EU."

Apparently there are other factors involved besides heating oil prices. Then there is the classic "they turk urr jerbs!!!" Ignoring all the jobs that would be created with large scale clean energy adoption....not to mention stability. North Dakota is about to loose all the jobs they just got because Saudi Arabia feels like it. And I guess you didn't see any of the examples I cited where sweeping environmental regulations were put in place that fixed the potential problem without any overall economic damage. (For exhibit B see my other post)

Murray Salby. I'll refrain from the ad hominem on him and leave his personal history as an exercise to the reader even so it provides an obvious motive for being a denier (whoops I did it anyway). His argument seems to boil down to something like "natural CO2 emissions fluctuate and follow temperature rather than the other way around and are greater than man made emissions so AGW is no big deal" which might sound like a eureka moment (i.e. Everyone accidentally had it backwards!) but is in fact wrong:

https://andthentheresphysics.w...

Whatreallyhappened...classic data cherry picking for misdirection. I've debunked those enough in similar threads, I'm over it.

Indeed the climate has always been changing. It has been much hotter and much colder on earth. What that statement ignores is that neither of those conditions supported human society! The current bout of climate change is different because it's being caused by humans at an extremely fast rate. Sure the earth will recover but human society might not. If you think elderly deaths are bad, what happens when all of our farms have to move 1000s of miles and the 90ish% of humans that live within ~100miles of a coast have to migrate?

"I'm happy to be corrected" ....sadly, human nature suggests otherwise.

Nice myth. The "ice age panic" was one story that made Time magazine at a time when the majority of climate research indicated a warming trend due to human cause CO2 emissions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...
And about 1000 other sources if you google "1970 ice age"

I'm not going to try to convince you that AGW is a problem we should address (note I said "should be addressed", not panic over). Instead, are you afraid of something if those crazy scientists from your anecdotes get their way and the Fed institutes CO2 mitigation? Gas prices jump to $20/gallon? The government mandates CO2 trackers worn all the time? Economic disaster circa 2008?

I'll cite the elimination of lead in pretty much everything (no economic catastrophe) and the elimination of CFC's (no economic catastrophe). Also some fun facts on how we got to a point of not worrying about acid rain anymore:

"In 2007, total SO2 emissions were 8.9 million tons, achieving the program's long term goal ahead of the 2010 statutory deadline.[22]

The EPA estimates that by 2010, the overall costs of complying with the program for businesses and consumers will be $1 billion to $2 billion a year, only one fourth of what was originally predicted"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

So tell my why addressing CO2 emissions is a bad idea (not that you explicitly stated as much in your comments)

The gas tax was still $0.18 4 months ago. In fact, it has been since 1993. If prices went back up you'd be paying something like $3.56 instead of $3.51 with my hypothetical 25% increase. If that breaks your budget, don't be one of the morons that increases the sales rate of low mileage vehicles every time the price of gasoline dips temporarily.

The reason you think the gas tax is enough is because we're not in a crisis yet. This isn't exactly what you wanted but perhaps you could google more than 2 minutes:

"Nationwide in 2010, state and local governments raised $37 billion in motor fuel taxes and $12 billion in tolls and non-fuel taxes, but spent $155 billion on highways.[3] In other words, highway user taxes and fees made up just 32 percent of state and local expenses on roads. The rest was financed out of general revenues, including federal aid."

http://taxfoundation.org/artic...

Here is some data from federal gas tax:

"During 2008 the fund required support of $8 billion from general revenue funds to cover a shortage in the fund. This shortage was due to lower gas consumption as a result of the recession and higher gas prices.[4] Further transfers of $7 billion and $19.5 billion were made in 2009 and 2010 respectively."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Heads are not rolling. They are doing whatever the opposite of rolling is.

So what? That doesn't inherently mean its wrong. Maybe you could point out flaws in their selection of republicans for their survey instead of worthless partisan speculation.

I use gas. I've called and written all of my congressmen to tell them they should raise the gas tax (not that that does any good). Now is a perfect time because if you raise it 25%, no one (aside from fox news et al) is going to notice the difference between $1.82 and $1.87 (gas tax is $0.18 right now). At the very least, index it to inflation.

And you can bet those institutions have ignored the (probably) 30-40 years of additional evidence and have not updated their projections in any way and because some guys were wrong once you can completely ignore everything that comes from whoever they happened to work for at the time in perpetuity.

Side note: A case could be made that in 2010 NYC was underwater...great recession and all...

Huh, never thought of using a rhetorical question as evidence to unequivocally settle one of the most important health issues we face today. All those doctors must feel silly having wasted all that time researching.