I don't want to oversimplify, but it is quite reasonable - and to me not overly "complex" - to postulate that the models do not properly account for ocean dynamics. It is entirely possible that every single model has it all completely wrong - we've been here before with "global cooling". But back then the models weren't very robust, and you actually had competing models with wildly different predictions.

Perhaps I'm more comfortable rolling with the science because the science doesn't threaten my ideology. I fully accept that we are probably warming the planet, but I also don't think that humanity will stop burning easy energy resources. As a result, I'd like to see the models applied to planning for the inevitable instead of a Quotidian quest to stop using fossil fuels. We're going to need to do a cost-benefit on things like seawalls for major coastal cities, flood control, and irrigation systems, and I think the models can provide valuable insight.

It is hard. Producing a new creative work, be it a film, piece of software, book, or whatever, is hard and often expensive. Copying a creative work is cheap to the point that it's barely worth measuring the cost. Lots of influential companies have business models that revolve around doing the difficult thing for free and then charging for the easy thing to make up for it. They're eventually going to be displaced by companies that realise that it makes more sense to charge for the difficult thing - we're seeing this in software already, with open source companies giving away code that's already written for free and charging for writing new features or customisation (or, in some cases, entirely new programs).

In 100 years, people are going to look back on DRM and restrictive copyright in much the same way that we look back at the laws that required motor cars to have someone walk in front of them with a red flag. Regulations that can't possibly work in the long term, designed to prop up an industry that's suddenly found itself obsoleted by new technology.

Uh, yes? Because that's how you write code that handles errors correctly. Exceptions come from three sources:

• Runtime exceptions. These don't need to be caught or declared by Java code, but you can generally avoid them by making sure you have null reference checks and using iterators for collections.
• Exceptions that you throw yourself. You know you're throwing these and the odds are that you want the caller to handle them (if you're using exceptions for intraprocedural flow control, then you're an idiot). So advertise them on your method. Done.
• Exceptions thrown by methods that you call. These are all advertised by those methods and checked by the compiler (or your IDE), so there's no excuse for not knowing that they're expected.

This stuff isn't hard. You know at every call site what the possible exceptions are, and you know this because the compiler won't let you explicitly throw or fail to handle any exceptions in your methods. The exceptions that a method can throw are in the JavaDoc and are checked at compile time, so you'll get a compile error if you don't either handle or advertise the exception.

Good error handling is one of the key things that differentiates good developers from bad. If it's something that you find hard, in a language that goes out of its way to make it easy, then you might want to consider other careers.

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.