Mashiki, I agree. I've been here for years but the whole global warming, eliminate the cows rants are rapidly reducing my interest here. If Slashdot is going to become a HuffPost tech puff site, I'll just leave. I feel like I'm living through the rise of Idiocracy.

The submitter is a bit disingenuous to post a story about Japan's climate and then extrapolate it to the world and then uses another suspect study as an illustration of skewed science. You can't have it both ways. Global temperatures have been flat for 17 years. Maybe Japan has an increased temperature due to the radioactivity due to Fukishima and the simultaneous release of a new Godzilla movie.

The parent is 100% right. When I worked with SAS, we were able to do things with it that was not anticipated. The sort of thinking required is the same no matter what language you are using. The people using SAS are not typically programmers but people studying relationships and causality. Dropping them down into a lower level language will probably hinder those studies.

Beat me to it. Why all research must be scrutinized and verified by independent sources.

So your argument is that it is the sun is the that drive earth's temp?

That really is the problem, isn't it? IPCC has been 100% wrong on every forecast. At what point do we give credence to anything put out by this obvioulsy inept orgainzation.

The problem is that the alarmists keep trotting out the *same* nonsense and outright lies, and at some point we have to say, enough. Saying that people don't believe the science because the scientists don't take every crazy rant seriously and debunk the lies endlessly is to participate in the strategy to keeps taking money from the middle class and redistributes it to the wealthy.

Did you see what I did there? I just fed your stupid response back to you. It sounds just as banal coming from me as it did you.

Why is it the alarmists all post as AC, but the rational ones are willing to post with their names? I think it's obvious. Self assured people stand behind their convictions.

Well, you now know how the thinking masses feel about the invasion of a non-thinking species. The definition of crackpot is usually assigned to alarmists who run around screaming that the sky is falling.

Not one iota of fact presented. Just a stream of attacks. Pathetic.

Where the friggin like button. We have a winner. When people are paid to take a position, they lose thier ability to be unbiased.

Seriously anonomous coward? I put my name on it. Where's yours? Just because you are gullible enough to believe everything your overlords tell you, means you know jack. You response is an unthought out attack on me. Do you have pussy tattooed on your forehead? Again, if climate change is so critical, why do the solutions look like a means to extract money from the masses? Why do the solutions not look like solutions? Cap and Trade? Give me a break.

AC, I know you. You are a pedantic little pajama, hot chocolate drinking boy hiding behind his keyboard.

Debunked talking points? By who, DailyKaos or HuffPo? If you really have been around since the 70's, you would have remembered the drought and fires from the 70s.

Evidently climate scientists can ignore the data and falsify what they need to buttress the alarm.

The ends justify the means. The tired 97% of climate scientists agree...has been thoroughly debunked. People are seeing this for the scam that it really is.

If you doubt it, ask yourself why the solution to climate change looks like a tax increase. The have-nots want to whine about how the rich get richer and yet when the rich put forth solutions that will make them more money, the masses swallow. Al Gore gets a cut of every carbon transaction at the expense of the poor. California passed cap and trade. Twice a year, rate payers get a check for $30 - $40 for their "profit" in the cap and trade scheme. But rates just went up 25%; top tier 32 cents a kwh to 44 cents a kwh. This is the solution to climate change?

The largest producer of carbon is transportation. If that is so, why do I travel from red light to red light and then idle at the light? Escondido implemented a safety program where if you did the speed limit, you made it all the way through town on green lights. That was 5 miles of non stop travel. They dropped the program when revenue plummeted; people weren't speeding or running red lights. Most of the lights in San Diego are set so that if you do 10 to 15 mph over the speed limit, you will get a long string of green lights. Fast enough to catch speeders but not so fast as to create a safety issue. It's the money stupid. If the government really thought climate change was a threat, we would develop technology that would allow the traffic lights to communicate with each other and sense where the majority of traffic was located. Instead, I'll get a red light as I approach and there are no cars waiting. So, I sit there idling.

In the early 70's we were running out of gas. We were just months away from pumping that last barrel from the ground and gas prices soared. We were reduced to gas rationing. 10 years later, we were all driving gas guzzling Suburbans and Humvees.

In the early 70s, the alarm was that we were on the cusp of the next ice age. We were about to encounter global cooling and plans were introduced on ways to warm tjhe planet. Some solutions were, cover the ice with soot. Burn the forests, raise the carbon foot print.

People in general are stupid and gullible. Being in tech doesn't seem to correlate with critical thinking. If climate change is real; it's a threat and it's man made, I'll participate when the solutions look like solutions and less like a scheme to get more money from the masses. But my 50+ years as seen a string of alarms meant to extract money from the gullible only to see a decade later, we have moved on to the next alarm.

That is not my experience. Younger people are really good at reinventing that which has been invented. And then they want a patent for their 'new' and 'innovative' work. At 52, I've done mainframe, then micros and now embedded. I marvel at the lack of knowledge new college grads possess. When I go to recruit for job fairs, I find CS graduates who have not had a comparative languages class, have not programmed in assembly and the only programming class they have had is Java. Only knowing Java or other VMs isolates you from what the hardware is doing. This occurs at UCSD! So the "hotshots" build web applications. Big deal, you will be replaceable in 10 years.

I find that older workers who become unemployed became so by becoming irrelevant. How many jobs for Visual Basic developers? Is C# on the rise or the decline? For work going forward, Android is going to be the largest market for coders. That means Java...sort of. But to do interesting projects, you better know how to write C/C++ via JNI to do interesting things that the sandbox prevents you from doing.

At 52, I don't find my job in jeopardy. I still get approached by companies to try and lure me away from my current job, which I love. Others my age, don't keep learning. They still want to write all of their software in Perl, regardless of the suitability of the tool. (Thinking of specific individuals in my organization that may find themselves downsized.) Adapt or die.

I can say with certainty however, that the majority of young engineers ARE NOT impressive. Unfortunately, the bean counters just look at numbers and engineer bodies are plug in, interchangeable modules. And yet, I made a tremendous amount of money fixing the code that was outsourced to India. The source came back and failed open source scanning, meaning that code was ripped off, or the code was so poorly written, that it was unusable. The US Federal health insurance website is an example of this.

I agree with the parent. The solutions to curbing emissions has been cap and trade, a program meant to remove more $ from citizen's pockets by increasing the amount of money they pay for energy. California has just implemented cap and trade. Electric bills are going up. Do you think that utilities eat that cost? And of course, the middle men, think Al Gore's company, takes a little bite of every cap and trade transaction. These entities have produce a "product" literally out of thin air. The cap and trade industry produces nothing. It merely has created an industry that shears the sheep by whipping them up and telling them the planet is but a few years away from catastrophe. Sadly, people are stupid and gullible. The surprising thing is, you see them here, supposedly educated logical people and it is allways the same, "But we must do something, anything!"

Given today's technology, if carbon was a real threat, don't you think money would be expended on the problems that are the problems? Case in point. I drive from stop light to stop light on my way to work. This morning, one of the lights turned red on the main road, even though there were no cars waiting on the side road. Every time the cars accelerate from the stop, they emit more carbon than a car that is maintaining a constant speed. A few of the communities, in the interest of safety, implemented, do the speed limit, hit all of the lights green strategy. When traffic ticket revenue plumented, those communities reversed course and implemented a different strategy. Most of the streets now reward a car doing 10 over with a string of green lights. So speeding is rewarded but now there is a source of revenue from the speeders. But if carbon was a real, and impending threat, don't you think we would use a network of Beagleboard Blacks to manage and measure traffic to ensure cars spend the least amount of time idling? But carbon really isn't an issue. It represents .3% of the atmosphere. Yes, point three percent. Of course, if we are to avert the next ice age, we really need to get carbon up to 4% to produce enough of a blanket to keep the glaciers at bay. I drive through a valley here in San Diego California and see the boulder left here from an ice age. I'd hate to see that amount of ice again.

As far as percentage of carbon emmisions, residential accounts for 10% of those emmisions. Expect those same residents to pay for 100% of the cost.

Or maybe the alarmists don't have the brain capacity to see the bigger picture on geological time scales.