Are you just having fun, or do you really misunderstand complex systems this badly?

Here is an obligatory car analogy (OCA): Suppose you hitch a trailer to your car and drive it to work every day. Every day you add another big rock to the trailer. After a few weeks, you think, "hmm, my car is not climbing hills as well as it used to, and I would swear it's overheating more often than it used to." But your brother says "nah, those are just extra-steep hills, and it only overheats on hot days." So you keep adding rocks, one a day. After a few more weeks, you say "I'm sure there's something wrong, and I bet it has something to do with those rocks." But your brother says "no way, your car is faster than ever going downhill, and the overheating is just due to hot weather. Last week the weather was cold and your car didn't overheat at all. You keep telling me the car is going to overheat, but it's always done fine. I'm tired of hearing about it." Your brother is right about the variability, but does that mean you don't have a problem?

I don't know which article you're referring to, but honestly it doesn't matter. There is plenty of evidence that the atmosphere is warming, plenty of models that predict or predicted this as a consequence of increased CO2 concentrations, and no credible models that predict otherwise.

I have no idea where you get the idea that "most of the heating we should expect to see has already happened." We are still accelerating our CO2 emissions, and it will take centuries for temperatures to reach their final equilibrium even after we stop. We have seen about 0.85 degrees C of warming already (top of p. 5 here), and if CO2 concentrations reach 2x pre-industrial levels, we can eventually expect something around 3.2 degrees C (middle of p. 1110 here).

Given reasonable grounds to expect serious harm, the correct policy approach is to take action to avert that harm, not to do nothing and hope things will be OK, or to demand exact forecasts of the behavior of a highly variable system.

My point was that academia is no gravy train, and people who believe academics are feathering their nests by peddling climate fear are living in a fantasy world. It takes an incredible amount of intelligence and dedication to succeed in one of these fields, and the people studying climate all have easier, more lucrative options open to them elsewhere.They do this work because they believe in it, just as you do your work because you believe in it (I hope). Sometimes there can be academic pissing matches, but those are no different from the intellectual holy wars around operating systems, flavors of Marxism, etc. The remarkable thing is how much agreement there is about climate change.

In climate change research, as in other fields of science, you gain prestige (and grants) by formulating models that accurately explain the available data, and withstand the scrutiny of other researchers. You do not improve your chances by offering extra doom and gloom.

Further, no climate scientist has ever said we'll be dead in 5 years or anything remotely similar. In this case you're the one offering an extreme position to earn extra attention. Scientists generally say that climate change is a multi-decade process, with potentially dire consequences late in the century. The fact that you are not suffering yet does not refute the drumbeat of evidence that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise until we reduce emissions.

Which is ironic, since both the Clean Water Act and the EPA were established by Richard Nixon. There's really no reason economic conservatives should also be socially conservative and anti-environment, and yet...

You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.

More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.

The people doing this work are scientists. That means they work with probabilistic uncertainty bands, not vague measures like "within 80% of the predicted value". They also recognize that you can't make short-term predictions of a noisy system (the Earth's weather) with a narrow uncertainty band. So if anything they have erred on the side of making cautious forecasts -- i.e., things are turning out worse than the thresholds that scientists were willing to go public with (i.e., the lower edge of the 95% uncertainty band around anyone's forecast for a particular year's temperatures will be significantly cooler than their central estimate).

Because of this, no one would have been willing to predict (with high degree of certainty) that 13 of the warmest years since 1880 would occur in 2000-2014. But they have.

I challenge you to show me any global climate model that predicts that doubling CO2 concentrations won't warm the planet, or that shows that we would have had this century's steady increase in temperatures even if we hadn't increased CO2 concentrations. You can pretend there is no connection between CO2 and temperature, but you are the one burying your head in the sand.

I would say that it's actually much easier to prove that we are changing the temperature of the planet than it is to prove that "we are poisoning everything". The most visible toxic problems have been mitigated (at least in the U.S.), leaving a raft of much more contentious issues. I doubt the Republican leadership would go along with a new anti-toxic agenda.

It is also easy to make the case for human-caused climate change, at least to anyone who isn't prejudiced against it. There is no plausible way you can add as much CO2 to the atmosphere as we are doing without causing a significant change in temperatures. And there is no plausible explanation for recent temperature trends without including increased CO2 concentrations in the climate models.

It is also reasonable to expect that sudden climate change could disrupt the natural world. If you take a look at the geographic distribution of ecosystems and agricultural systems, where a few degrees' difference in average temperature results in sharply different species, then the reasonable conclusion is that climate change would most likely cause sharp changes to ecosystems, probably faster than they have historically adapted (it takes thousands of years to establish a thriving Northwest forest; they can't move north in hundreds of years).

A reasonable person would conclude that we should try very hard to address climate change, if for no other reason than the precautionary principle. Hoping CO2 will miraculously fail to warm the atmosphere, or that ecosystems and agricultural systems will miraculously adapt to new temperatures, or that someone will fix the problem later, is not a rational way to plan for the future.

I am one of those scientists (well, engineer actually these days), and I can say that you've got this pretty far backwards. I am an assistant professor, which means I have 6 years to prove my worth to my university. Part of that proof is that I must raise grants and fund grad students through a Ph.D. program. In fact, grad student support is the bulk of what I request in my grant applications -- my own salary is paid by tuition and legislative appropriations (I do teach classes too after all). But raising grants is currently nearly impossible.

I work on concrete solutions to climate change (e.g., studying how much wind and solar power we can use without cheap storage, or designing home appliances and electric vehicle chargers that can synchronize their demand with the supply of renewable power). Even in these "hot" areas, the funding rate for grant proposals is about 3%. Each proposal takes about a month of intense thinking, writing and document-chasing. Everyone competing for these grants has a Ph.D. from a top school, and the external review process is incredibly rigorous. So I would not call this a gravy train. I do this work because I think that humanity is on a reckless and destructive path, digging up hundreds of millions of years worth of accumulated carbon and poofing it into the atmosphere in 100 years, and because I think we can do better. If I wanted the gravy train, I'd be at Google or Microsoft or Facebook, not writing NSF grant proposals.

I already have a working, self-sustaining, exothermic fusion reactor. I made it pretty big, so that the necessary pressure is created by gravity alone. This design produces 400,000,000,000,000 terawatts and is completely maintenance free. It also uses a passively safe design so the reaction can't run away, at least for a few billion years. I managed the containment issues (and the truly excessive power production) by suspending the reactor in vacuum about 100 million miles from any population center. Rather than building a 100 million mile cable, I'm transmitting power wirelessly via medium-wavelength electromagnetic radiation. The reactor uses a simple blackbody emitter to generate the radiation. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford to build a good focusing system at the reactor site, so only about 1/10,000,000,000 of the power (50,000 terawatts) actually reaches my potential collector site. However, we only need 13 terawatts to serve our potential market, and really more like 4 terawatts if we can convert the energy to electricity.

Now I'm just working on a system to convert this medium-wavelength electromagnetic radiation into electricity at the collector site. A lot of the fusion reactor designs I've seen use the radiation to boil a fluid to run a turbine. But I'm thinking it would be much cooler to use semiconductors -- maybe use the electromagnetic radiation to excite electrons across a bandgap and create electricity directly? I've got working prototypes of the solid-state converters, and they're already pretty cheap -- I can produce electricity for about 15 cents per kWh. I think with a few more years' work the whole system will be cheaper than coal power (it helps that I don't have to pay for the reactor or fuel). I figure if I cover 0.05% of my collector zone (the Earth's surface) with 15% efficient converters, I can provide enough energy for everyone on the planet.

Could you please list one or more of these end-of-the-world scares that had as much scientific consensus as climate change, but turned out to be unfounded? Environmental history has more often been a case of "don't worry about it, don't worry about it" until the resource collapsed -- DDT, Cuyuhoga River, ozone hole, atlantic cod fishing, ...

Passenger 1: "You're steering too far to the right -- you're going to go off the road!"

Driver: "No way. The gap between our car and the edge of the road is tiny compared to the size of the whole road. Reducing it won't have any effect."

Passenger 1: "That's irrelevant. If you cross that margin, the car will go off the road!"

Driver: "No way. You and Passenger 2 can't agree about when the car will leave the road. So there's no problem."

Passenger 1: "But we both agree you'll go off the road if you keep going to the right!"

Driver: "Hold on, let me wade into the science here. You say the road slopes down at the edge, and Passenger 2 says it slopes up. Maybe it goes up steeply near the edge. That would slow us down. So there's no problem."

Passenger 1: "But it's just as likely to slope down! If it slopes down enough, we'll accelerate out of control. And no matter how the road slopes, you can't keep driving to the right forever. Eventually you'll leave the road."

Driver: "But I like driving this way. Besides, you guys still haven't agreed about what will happen if we leave the road. Or when that will happen."

Passenger 1: "But surely the smartest thing is just to steer back to the center rather than risk catastrophe?"

Driver: "Maybe we could build an extra section of road further off to the right. Or we could strengthen the car so it keeps running even if we leave the road. You guys should go study that and leave me alone. I like driving this way."

Like this?

As I read this article in the NY Times today I thought, "Hmm, how can the NSA search the contents of all e-mail leaving the U.S.? What about e-mail from one gmail user to another? Or messages sent between servers using SMTP with SSL? Surely NSA can't decipher those just by cloning the transmission links." Well, this may be the answer -- force the e-mail providers to hand over copies of any messages sent to or from machines with foreign IP address, or written or read via webmail on a foreign machine.

But don't worry, FISA will prevent NSA from obtaining copies of purely domestic e-mail or keeping copies of these messages for more than a few seconds.

Somehow I'd rather have a public discussion of what NSA can and cannot request, rather than relying on a secret court to protect our constitutional rights.

But can you charge the phone or send out video via MHL while receiving keystrokes through the same port, as the grandparent suggested? Sending power to the host is certainly not a standard part of USB. But maybe that's the only obstacle to overcome here.

You suggest controlling volume and playback by having peripherals act like USB keyboards ("support HID"). But in the USB world peripherals can only be connected to hosts (e.g., PCs), not to each other. And currently iPods and iPhones act as peripheral devices, making it impossible to connect them to other peripherals (e.g., devices that act like keyboards). This is true both logically and physically.

To be more specific, iPods and iPhones either have to act as peripherals and use a Type B USB connector, or have to act as hosts and use a Type A connector. In the first case, they could charge and send out audio and video using the approaches you suggest, but they can't receive HID information (as far as I know). In the second case they could receive HID information, but I don't think they would be able to charge or send out audio and video.

Maybe it's time for a true peer-to-peer replacement for USB?