Reading seems to be hard for you, so I'll repeat myself for you:

You keep talking about the scientific consensus. What is that exactly? Is there are a secret cabal somewhere? Perhaps a divinely inspired holy book only available to the acolytes of the one true science?

If you can explain what this 'consensus' you speak of represents than your question might make a lick of sense.

You keep talking about the scientific consensus. What is that exactly? Is there are a secret cabal somewhere? Perhaps a divinely inspired holy book only available to the acolytes of the one true science?

Mann is one of the pinnacles of the AGW supporters movement. Your 'consensus' minded folks all hold Mann up as one of their heroes. If I was gonna cherry pick my sources, I'd choose a paper by someone that wasn't a strong and vehement AGW advocate. You don't need to read his conclusion, read his graph of historic temperatures, the green line of his updated reconstruction shows CLEAR AS DAY that the warming from 1850 through 1990 has been repeatedly exceeded over the last 2k years.

Mann's prior paper is also upheld by the IPCC(another 'consensus' body) as a pinnacle in their analysis. The idea of unprecedented warming since the industrial age began around 100 years ago is the lynch pin of the catastrophic AGW crowd. Incidentally, it is strongly contradicted by Mann's own corrections to his work here, science in action.

This paper is the follow on to Mann's previous one where he concluded the last century was anomalous.

If you read closer, you'll find multiple references where Mann notes that warming similar to the 1980's is observed over the previous 2000 years:
The EIV reconstructions suggest that temperatures were relatively warm (comparable with the mean over the 1961–1990 reference period but below the levels of the past decade)

The bigger truth is to just look at the graphs. His new(EIV) method graphs show repeated peaks much higher than the current proxy data. The last 'decade' he keep referring to is PURELY instrumental data, as the proxies don't come up that recently.

You are a brilliant little troll, aren't you?

I pointed that out twice, it was my OWN point when I previously told you"
"Mann's own conclusion at the end of this paper is to observe that only the last decade is an anomaly, a far step down from his conclusion in his prior paper observing that the last century was the anomaly."

I added some emphasis there so you hopefully won't miss it this time. Mann's previous paper declared the last century was anomalous, and upon reviewing his statistical methods, has cut that WAY back to merely the last decade. And furthermore, he doesn't note it but you can follow his data to verify, the decade that is warmer is also the decade for which there IS NO PROXY DATA. Reach your own conclusions...

Close, but you missed the point. Sadly, it doesn't appear that science is well understood on Slashdot anymore.

I provided direct scientific evidence that warming since 1850 is NOT anomalous within the last 2,000 years of history, and that similar warming to it has occurred multiple times previously. You dismissed the evidence by appealing to SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS!

You see, the scientific method and process doesn't care if 99 people in 100 believe the earth is flat, what matters is the one person with a space shuttle that flies around the earth taking pictures of the fact it is a sphere.

I am NOT misquoting Mann's paper what so ever. He reanalyzed his data with a different and by his own words more accurate statistical method, and his graphs of the results clearly show that the warming since 1850 has been exceeded multiple times before. My CORRECT reading of this very simple graph is further, and irrefutably evidenced by the fact Mann's own conclusion at the end of this paper is to observe that only the last decade is an anomaly, a far step down from his conclusion in his prior paper observing that the last century was the anomaly.

Please, demonstrate that I am wrong in my interpretation or that my source is biased and wrong. Just don't pretend like declaring CONSENSUS in any way trumps hard scientific evidence to the contrary, that's the work of zealots and ludites.

So sorry to bring data to a religious debate, I'll not bother you any further.

I suppose Mann is a denier now too? You can follow my link to his last follow up on his own hockey stick graph. He stands by his work, but even his own corrected reconstructions now show that the last century of warming is NOT an anomaly over the last 2k years, but has been matched on at least 3 or 4 occasions in that time. The most he is able to observe is that the warming of merely the last decade is abnormal, of course, that is based 100% on the instrumental record since none of the proxy sets his paper uses covers that time frame.

I'll observe on my own that the only anomalous warming is entirely limited to the short time for which we have no proxy data...

But yeah, go on pretending the science is settled and decry those still researching and studying the matter as deniers and heretics to your chosen ideology.

If nuclear power were safe, it would be possible for utilities to build nuclear power plants without government indemnification.

This statement is true if and only if government requirements are rationally based...
As most people, I don't accept that basic premise, you probably shouldn't use it.

The reason that doesn't happen is that if you factor in the cost of indemnification, it is *not* cheaper than the alternatives.

Ah, but which comes first? The ridiculous costs employed against nuclear are BECAUSE of the irrational fear of it. You don't get turn around and use those high costs to justify the irrationality too, that is irrational in itself.

The reality is that coal power kills more people than nuclear power. It kills more people not by a small margin, but at a hands down terrifyingly higher rate. Coal plants even manage to dump MORE radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear plant.

Look no further than the Fukushima disaster for the proof of nuclear safety versus other power generation methods. How many people have died so far because of Fukushima? How many are projected to get sick in the future? How many have been killed by hydro dams failing and wiping out those downstream? How many coal miners die through accidents each year? How many to lung diseases from working the mines for years?

Oh, and that isn't even mentioning that the Fukushima plant had the added mark that it's disaster was precipitated by not only the most devastating earthquake in the nations recorded history, but the worst Tsunami as well.

You original point about government indemnification makes my point better than yours. Nuclear is safer, and has injured and killed vastly fewer people than any other form of cheaper power generation, and yet the indemnification conditions on nuclear is astronomically higher than that for any of the others...

I dunno about you, but I call that irrational fear.

It's true that it's difficult to model the risks of global warming, but we have pretty good models.

No, we don't. Can anyone's models even project sea level rise 30 years from now within 5cm with any degree of confidence? Nope. Good luck projecting climate averages out to 2100(let alone the impacts) where it is supposed to really start kicking in.

The main reason people fear nuclear power irrationally is that it's very difficult to model the risk of nuclear power,

And modeling the risks of global warming is easier how? Seems to me it's a much, much tougher nut to crack.

I see 2 main reasons people oppose nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions. The biggest is that they just don't consider carbon emissions to be a serious problem. The next, and very close behind it, is how much easier it is to find problems than solutions. With electrics cars around the corner, nuclear power solves 90% of carbon emissions. It is much easier though to look at nuclear as a problem of it's own rather than as a solution to a bigger problem.

I forget who to credit it to, but people are like sheep. They fear the sheephound and wish he'd go away, right up until a wolf has them by throat.

When 100,000 people die of starvation, its said we can't feed them, or is it just that we don't want to feed them?

Or is it that the men with guns living much closer to them than us steal everything for themselves and use hunger as a weapon against those around them?

There is simply zero reason that North Koreans need to be starving so persistently that they average a full 6 inches less in height than their genetically identical, well fed Southern counterparts. Well, there is the fact their now dead God king needed to spend their resources developing nuclear weapons and long range missiles instead of feeding them...

Look at all the starving people in Africa. How many of them are locals that have been living safely in the same location for more than one generation? How many are displaced refuges who have been shot at or chased away by regional clashes and violence?

Lack of food isn't why people around the world are starving. Warfare from many levels is why the overwhelming majority are starving. They will continue to starve as well, since the people who care enough to help aren't willing or able to muster up the needed military force to ensure they are safely fed. Meanwhile the ones with the military force needed to see them fed, just can't be bothered to care. And why should they, anyone sending a military force in to 'help' would see themselves immediately blamed as a cause of any continuing suffering and starvation anyways.

I was going to go with:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of an ass load of backup tapes.

But you've beat me to it, well played good sir.

Maybe not. Having more HP out of an electric car isn't the limiting factor in good lap times. It might be great for drag racing, but when it adds an enormous amount of weight, it destroys lap times. When Top Gear was running test laps with Tesla's electric Lotus it was terrible for lap times because it was just too heavy to corner well, even though it could beat a gas Lotus on a drag strip.

Fallout 3 is the first game I came across that was fully supported by the community with mods, skins, and improved game play with patches to fix bugs.

You must be young.

  I remember mods for Wolf3D and Doom. I remember rarely playing vanilla Quake because there were so very many great mods for it. So many in fact that Quake's gamer/developer community spawned a host of new game companies, most notably Valve.

How about I speak your language. The problem is not religion, but blind religious devotion to an ideology. Which, by the way, leads to the fact that atheists are in no way immune to the problem.

Blind religious devotion to Stalin's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Pol Pot's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Mao's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists.

Putting absolute confidence in atheists immunity to blind devotion to any ideology is self-contradictory. Most of the worst cults start off with the acceptance of a similarly paradoxical premise.

Saudi Arabia. I don't care what lists it is or isn't on, it's where Bin Laden's from, it's where most of the 9/11 hijackers are from, it's a theocratic monarchy that keeps it's citizens in line with a combination of the threat of violence and a welfare state built on everything that's left over of the oil money after they've taken their share. They have numerous ties to terrorism, numerous human rights abuses and are not someone we should be supporting.

More over, it's where most of the money to support extremists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan is coming from too. I'm hopeful the Saudi royals will be going the way of Saddam and Mubarak soon enough. It's the dictators America does NOT support who look to have a longer run ahead of them in places like Syria and Iran.

As a dictator, the benefit of not taking American money is that you don't need to worry what the American public thinks of your repressive measures in the longer run of things. That fees up the kind of brutal measures necessary to maintain 'order'.