Actually that's not true. India and China did very well out of being a cheap place to manufacture things because of the low labour cost. Now, factories that are almost entirely automated are replacing those staffed by unskilled workers. This means that no one is building them in developing countries and creating jobs there. The only reason that companies like Foxconn have for picking places in Africa for manufacturing now is the the lack of environmental regulation: a few politicians get paid off, but the local economy doesn't benefit and the local environment gets polluted. The path Japan took, of cheaply copying things, being a cheap place to build factories, developing local skills, and then competing internationally with original products, doesn't exist anymore.

Exactly. Few workers would complain about automation if they owned a share in the company proportionate to their contribution to the profits. If a robot means that the company can produce more without their going to work then their income would go up and so would their leisure time. Instead, they become redundant in a shrinking job market and the owners get richer.

Java doesn't require you to catch every exception, it requires that, for every exception that cam be generated in a method, you must either catch it or advertise that your method can throw it. This makes static analysis and reasoning about exception much easier, because you know exactly what exceptions a particular method can throw. Handling exceptions at the wrong place is a problem with the programmers, not with the language or VM.

As you SHOULD know, you cannot test future accuracy.

I'm sure the points in there are good, but I need to point out that while it is a "peer reviewed journal", you linked to something from the "Opinion & Comment" section. There is quite a bit of work being done to understand where all of the heat is going, but that has been discussed on here before.

If you link to that same editorial one more time, then I'll believe it.

As persuasive a source as an article by a British politician is, I'd like to hear from someone who actually does this for a living.

Well, looking up the thread, you are an expert in talking completely past a person, I'll give you that.

I mention that there is no such thing as a model which supports anti-AGW, and you retort that the "experts" are producing biased models. I used my highly advanced deductive reasoning to assume that you meant that the models not supporting the anti-AGW argument, which would of course be all of them. Obviously you only meant SOME of them. How silly of me. Please accept my most sincere apologies and may the Festivus spirit fill you.

Thanks for the nostalgia! I remember when people tried to claim that with a straight face back in the 80s, but no one believed it even then. Can you imagine that someone actually said that ridiculous crap in seriousness once? I'm glad we've moved past those ludicrously mind-bending contortions and can laugh about them now, knowing full well that no one actually thinks that way anymore.

Bzzt. I can share hugs, music, friendship, laughter, pain, and joy with others, but I wouldn't call any of those "possessions".

That presumes scarcity. If I share your post on Twitter, you are not deprived of it. Neither would I be.

The "we shouldn't even attempt science" argument.

So the climate scientists' responses to the poor temperature prediction has been to improve the models and look for why there is a discrepancy. That is scientific. The unscientific thing to do is mine Google for items which reinforce your opinion on the matter.

I have a very hard time accepting your characterization of every single model ever created as "bad", with no counter-examples of a "good" model. How can you assess the non-expert's criticism if there is no way to test their assertions?

But you nailed it with "non-experts". Non-expert's opinions are generally not worth as much as an expert's opinion. There are many, many non-experts latched onto this field for ideological reasons. It's like evolution.

But surely, then, you remember that science doesn't stop at the question. You need to actually do research. In climate science, that means collecting data and building a model. I think it is noteworthy that no AGW opponent has built a model.

You can call them anything you want, but they are following the scientific method to the extent allowed by the nature of an observational science. They self-identify as scientists. AGW opponents do not have a single model that they can point to, and as far as I know, no prominent AGW opponent is working on a model. They can self-identify as scientists if they want, but they certainly aren't sticking to "their" philosophy.

Thanks for the high-res version. Is there some technical reason that they omit the ocean data? I would think the oceans have quite a bit of photosynthetic activity!