Historically, governments justified the "certification" requirements imposed on people wishing to pursue various professions by the consumers' inability to share the information required to make an informed choice of a service provider.

For example, arriving to a new city, you don't know, what taxi company is decent and which hires serial rapists — the city hall should issue "medallions" to the good drivers and fight attempts by the non-vetted to provide the same services without paying the authorities their due.

Uber is showing, how the consumer feedback, that's easy to provide and is immediately available to anyone with a smart phone, obviates the need for such certifications — along with the associated costs and the abuse-potential. Taxi-services is not the only market, where things can (and should!) be changed by the pervasive smart-phones. Plumbers and electricians would be next on my list of professions, which should not require certifications (though some may seek approvals from non-governmental authorities like "Angie's List", if they choose to). Then restaurateurs — patrons could report roach-sightings just as well (or better) than a city's health-inspector. Then lawyers and eventually, even veterinarians and human doctors...

Gain control? For what purpose?

For the same reason politicians become politicians (and policemen become pigs) — the feeling of control over fellow human beings gives them a high...

The way I see it, if this all bogus, we end up with cleaner air, less pollution and a better place to live.

Not obviously, actually. Tesla's wonderful batteries, for example, are a hell to make and aren't particularly easy to dispose of either. The early "green" toilets don't use enough water to do the job quite often — requiring multiple flushes, where an old one would've done with one. The mandatory recycling of this and that requires additional trucks on the road to haul the "special" refuse without clear benefits to the environment — in fact, often enough the stuff ends up in general refuse anyway after incurring all of the costs (financial and environmental) of the separate handling. The certified "green" buildings (sometimes?) use more energy, than regular structures...

You win either way.

Yeah. There is this line of thinking — Blaise Pascal, in his time, put forth the same idea on whether or not God exists.

Good to see, you aren't (any longer?) claiming it is the science, that drives your thinking about global warming... You aren't alone.

The Antarctic sea ice extent was not and is not projected to shrink in the near term.

Bzzz! False. Quoting the above-mentioned professor of "Climate Change" from Australia (emphasis mine): "Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up".

If you're not paying enough attention to the science to understand even that simple concept why should I think anything else you have to say is worth listening to.

You can keep looking for an excuse to ignore me — or just close your ears and sing "La-la-la". Truth remains — global warming was "oversold" to the general population by the usual alliance of the dishonest seeking to profit from the implementation of measures proposed to fight it and the stupid, who agreed with them.

The various dire predictions are failing to materialize — and even when they were made, none of his allies have questioned, why Al Gore himself purchased a wonderful piece of real estate on the coast rather than in the mountains somewhere.

To continue to push forward policies based on the same predictions — and the (pseudo-)scientific models that lead to them in the first place, is irresponsible if not outright criminal...

If it’s all a "liberal" conspiracy, what are they trying to gain?

All people already in government would gain increased governmental control over the citizenry's lives — the vast majority of them believe, they "know better" than their subjects — bless our little hearts — how to live. Which is why you haven't yet seen a "green" measure proposed, that reduced that control, have you?

In addition, the "green" measures cause the Capitalism to slow down — a cause dear to the Illiberals and the foreign handlers of some of them. Seriously, scratch a "green" activist, and you'll find a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...

I can see what you get to gain by denying the problem exists

Could you be more specific? What do I get to gain? Do you suppose, I — or the KKKoch brothers — have a wonderful new planet for ourselves (or our children) to emigrate to, when Earth becomes too polluted? Some kind of Elysium being built for the 1%?

It makes no difference to the topic of dire predictions not materializing... Because it means, that other predictions made by the same people using the same methods aren't likely to materialize either — and thus any public policies based on such predictions should be scrapped.

Wrong side of the planet.

Distinction without difference. Both ice caps were supposed to melt — dangerously increasing water-levels planetwide.

Temperature is up a little

Citation needed.

but the freezing point is up much higher, so the sea ice is forming more easily.

This would explain, why the water levels have not risen. And it would illustrate, how the "conservatively formulated claims" of the scientists become shrill calls for immediate action ("We must do something!"), when the politicians get to them — and dangerously wasteful such actions can be...

Somehow a quite conservatively formulated claim (subjunctive mode, "some models, 75% chance, 5-7 years, during some month of the summer") magically morphed into the strong claim "Al Gore said in 5 years time the Arctic will be completely ice free".

The actual scientists may be formulating their claims conservatively indeed. And the morphing does occur.

But it is not the critics, but rather the politicians and journalists — peddling the global warming panic — who are doing the morphing. "The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff," — are the actual words of Al Gore from 2007 — "It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now."

Yeah, he said "could be" — about as evasive as Geico's "could save you 15% or more"... But it increased — a lot — instead of shrinking so he was not even in ball-park. And thus, any scientific models used by to make that dire prediction are invalid and any policies based on those models ought to be abolished at once — regardless of how many solyndras have been financed already following those policies.

slashdot today!? ... difference between North and South

There is a distinction between the two, of course, but it is without difference to the topic of this thread. Both ice-caps were supposed to shrink (with dire consequences for the rest of the world, of course).

One expedition set out to measure the loss of the ice, found itself stuck in it — not that it changed the leading professor's opinion about the global warming...

My OpenVPN/Raspberry Pi proxy was a miserable failure...

Dare I raise the suspicion, that the underlying Linux is to blame? pfSense, on contrast, is based on FreeBSD and is — as mentioned by numerous people here — quite usable even on old celerons...

GNOME 3 is very innovative, and is built with no patent incentives.

Grandparent didn't say, the incentives are eliminated by the ruling. Only that there are fewer now... Still enough for GNOME 3 to be developed, obviously, but, possibly, not as well as it could be.