The question is largely irrelevant. The real problems with climate science are being highlighted by intelligent people, not by cretins.

I'll make the reasonable assumption that you are pretty intelligent, and evidently you are of skeptical disposition. Have you ever read any papers on climate science? How about earth science? If not, as would be the case for most intelligent non-climate-scientists (not just not just non-scientists), I can say without insulting your intelligence that you have no direct basis for determining what the general thrust of the literature is, much less what the camps are, who populates them and how strong the relative arguments are within those camps.

There are plenty of researchers out there, qualified, with careers, respected by their peers, who look at the IPCC stuff and say it is not working. These are researchers who know how to think about hard problems.

Unless you've read the literature, this statement, too is presumptive. What it really means is that one or more intermediaries has told you this, and you believe that intermediary more than you believe another intermediary who thinks that most climate scientists are in agreement. So in this case, this entire argument comes down to trust in intermediaries. You don't know who the camps are and who really subscribes to what camp.

I did a "terminal masters" in ocean physics, so I have some direct familiarity with the literature, though certainly not as deep as if I were practicing in this field. My experience is that the camps lean much more towards accepting general consensus about the nature of climate change (largely anthropogenic) and the magnitude of the expected effects than the perception you describe. From what I know directly and from the intermediaries I use when I don't know directly, just about everyone in the climate science community now believes that the arguments around concentrations of carbon and warming are solid. So when people say how much warming will happen in a hundred years, that considered very hard to dispute. Where people have more critiques is how we will get there, and the closer in you get the less agreement there is. However, it's also true that for most of the really wide open questions about climate change, people have been equally wrong guessing towards faster and slower warming. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a great example of this - nobody from the global climate modelers (like a friend of mine who's doing his postdoc in this now) to the ice physicists understood until a few years back that when the ice sheets began to melt that the meltwater would lubricate the rock upon which the sheets are sitting and cause them to slide more quickly into the ocean. So there's an example where change was called slower. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, there has been a greater uptake of heat by the oceans that was initially expected, which will delay warming on a scale of years to decades, but could result in acceleration once the oceans warm up and provide less capacity to capture heat. So that's a delay in warming.

Just how many people do you know would go to a homeopath instead of a doctor? Sure there are some. But there are some green nuts too. Often they are one and the same. Funny that.

This statement is also full of presumption. Look at the sales of vitamins, herbal supplements and other non-FDA-approved quasi-drugs. Those sales speak to a large body of people who do feel comfortable taking remedies that are not scientifically tested. Again I challenge you to show me your basis for concluding that they're "green nuts" - sure sounds like your impression more than any data to me.

I don't think this a question of treating the public like imbeciles. There are a vast number of books out there for those that want to learn more about climate science. This is a question of trying to understand the state of a scientific discipline at a summary level, without investing the energy to really understand who thinks what and what their arguments are. And that is a recipe for confusion, even without the tremendous political pressure around the issue.

As a final note, I encourage you to dig into the literature and the real scientific debates directly. Some of the stuff can be pretty dense reading, even if you have some background in it. However, if you can google around for some concepts you can usually start to get the gist pretty quickly and even understand some of the critiques. I think what you'll see is debate of a whole different set of issues than are typically reported on in the press.

Without having read TFA, I'm inclined to believe that correlations exists for a simple reason. I'd posit that more of the CRA-regulated banks were local institutions with less access to securitization schemes who consequently maintained more prudent lending standards at the same time as being regulated by CRA.

The right wing talk show hosts obsession with CRA is a truly bizarre way to object to regulation, like choosing to make your last stand in a blind canyon. There's all sorts of poorly thought out regulatory schemes (the scheme in original article seems like a good example, to be honest), but CRA does not happen to be one of them. Hell, even the banks don't claim that CRA forced them to make crappy loans. If they're pointing the finger they say "Moody's told us it was OK", or maybe "it was the models and the quants" or "our risk manager has been fired" but they never say "boy I wouldn't have made all those bad loans if that nasty Barney Frank hadn't sent his shock troops up to the top of my big skyscrapers in NYC to force me to make loans to racial minorities." That kind of cracked-out nonsense gives any New Age hoo-ha a run for its money.

I agree with your view that his work here is very thin, but not for the reasons you cite. The basic problem is that it's a big, big assumption in social sciences data to presume that something ought to have a standard distribution from natural science. As Nate acknowledges, there are all kinds of reasons why that might not be so. Where I disagree is that I don't think he needed to do higher powered stats or simulations, which in social sciences don't necessarily provide more insight, I think he needed to do a LOT more homework on what the "natural" distribution of trailing digits is. Like doing comparisons for many firms, and potentially doing them over different times or types of elections - in other words, doing some exploration about possible hidden influences. That kind of homework is essential both for likelihood of success in showing his contention and because of the basic obligation of someone to be fairly certain they're right before intimating, much less outright accusing that someone has committed fraud. It would not surprise me if that turned that his argument was demonstrably false - e.g., a group like Pew showed something inconsistent with his general average of polls or with Benford's law, or Strategic Vision could show something about their methodology that created that bias. Frankly the most damning case he could make would simply be to present that kind of detailed homework that itself showed Strategic Vision sticking out from other pollsters. As it stands, I think he's put out a very thin analysis accompanied by fighting words, and he's fairly likely to get knocked down for it.

I think I agree with you generally, and I'd be interested in your take on homophones. Affect and effect are a great example of homophones that people struggle to distinguish, which has had the sad consequence of making room for that clod of a word "impact" and its boorish cousin "impact on". But to be fair to most people, you have to be something of a grammarian to recognize or care about the distinction between 4 forms of these words:

• Affect as a verb
• Affect as a noun
• Effect as a noun
• Effect as a verb

I've also noticed people struggle with "attuned" vs. "attenuate" and "intonate" vs. "intimate". I'm no linguist, but my experience having spoken Spanish from a pretty early age is that Standard English has a lot of words, with differences in them being intended to express things very precisely. By contrast, Spanish, at least as it's spoken in most of Latin America, has fewer words, and concepts are expressed more generally, leaving more room for meaning between the words. It always seemed to me that this was at least somewhat cultural - people didn't intend to specify things that precisely, and were comfortable leaving meaning more open (which often leaves a lot of room for double entendre as well). All that makes me wonder if the US and its English aren't evolving somewhat in that direction - people just aren't trying to be as precise in their written speech.

I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Since medicine itself is more art than science, doctors need to once convey the right information about the patient, but also pass along coded messages about their judgment on the situation that are tailored to the recipient. The example I know intimately is that if you're a pathologist and you see something that looks like it's a little suspicious, but you're dealing with an oncologist and surgeon who you think are a little too hot to trot in the surgery department, you're going to pull back on the language to give them a message that they can wait. Of course you also haven't met the patient, so you don't want to take over the decision of surgery or not. A lot that kind of thing goes into each handoff of the patient from one person to another. It's absolutely true that it scales poorly and queries ever more poorly. And it is a product of the way doctors are educated, so I'm dubious that just writing better software can fix it. I do believe the autonomy and control thing is part of the issue, but I think it works in a different way. Doctors work by using their "medical judgment and experience" (generally matching and interpolating patterns they've seen before) and they are called upon to act very quickly. At the same time, most work for small businesses in which they are part or majority owners. So they do very little formal development of their workflows, and tend to accumulate them without ever building in mechanisms for improvement. Look at the work of Brent James. They standardized workflows and then audited those standardizations, forcing a doctor to either follow the protocol or fix it, they began to really reduce mistakes and improve quality. That kind of effort is essential to improving quality, yet it's very rarely given much attention. IT isn't going to solve these problems by itself, but a good software development process could help if the docs buy into articulating and reviewing their workflows and the information they're passing.

DBAs should be screaming about that. The data integrity requirement has very little to do with the RDBMS itself - after all you can set things up in a standard RDBMS in a way that requires little structure and integrity. It's that data integrity makes the data consistent for reporting. If you want to report on data, and particularly if you want to do anything statistical with it, you need consistency and correctness. The Fusion idea is neato, but it's not going to get you around data consistency and integrity rules if you want to do any meaningful reporting on the data. Still, I wonder who this is targeted at (if that's even been thought about). There are a lot of tools to do pieces of this, particularly in the enterprise space. And I wonder who has large datasets that they're comfortable loading into some cloud server owned by index-everything Google and actually collaborate around it. Maybe I'm wrong, but in a business setting I'd be a whole lot more comfortable if I knew more about where the data was stored and what else the database was doing. I'd also be surprised if Oracle hadn't done some thinking about that as well. Maybe Google will push them along and they can offer it as a rampantly overpriced upgrade to their traditional database offerings.

That's a lot of faith that things are thought through with perfect foresight. I've been thinking about how baked-in light pollution is to American infrastructure, and I've come to think it's a pretty good example of how hard sustainable infrastructure really is.

So why exactly do we illuminate things at night? As far as I can tell it's primarily on safety grounds. That seems pretty reasonable and a good trade, right? A little extra light and voile a dark dangerous place becomes a safe lit one.

A couple crashes on a treacherous stretch of in relatively short succession, and the public demands that something be done about the dangerous road. The road authorities respond by altering the alignment and illuminating that stretch plus some before and after for good measure. Then light comes to be considered essential for safety on roads carrying a certain volume of traffic and becomes a requirement for receiving federal highway funding. This is, not entirely coincidentally, good business for both highway contractors (a strong lobby, both locally and nationally) and local electrical utility (another strong lobby locally and nationally). The question that's hard to answer is exactly how safer is the road? If traffic volume increases and there are the same number or more accidents, does that mean the lighting didn't work? But it doesn't really mean it did work, either. Try an exercise of adding up the wattage of street lamps as you drive along a highway from one city to another. Now think about all those watts being used to pump out light when there are no cars there at all, or very few.

You can repeat the exercise for people lighting their porches, then yards and driveways to secure their houses against intruders. Sure, pitch dark places have lots of dangers, and illumination does lower some dangers, but you can't eliminate the danger simply by simply illuminating more and more. Lots of crime happens during broad daylight. Clearly simple fear of the dark drives the impulse to illuminate everything, much like fear of flying drives insane and useless airport security, even though your likelihood of dying in a car crash is orders of magnitude greater than that of dying on a plane.

Finding a balance for these things requires pretty careful thought about when something actually works, and when it doesn't. In the case of infrastructure like lighting, where you have vested interests and an emotional overlay, and where public perception is that things should just work, that's very hard to do. But making our use of technology sustainable is going to require that we go back, try to dig out the real problem from the cruft and figure out when we can make things better by using less. It can be done, but I sure don't see a lot of signs that it's going to be easy.

I agree that advertising has always been the basis for the newspaper and that model is gone, likely never to come back. Beyond that we seem to disagree. The question is how you get something with the quality of thought of an Atlantic Monthly (or your own favorite version of that) to cover events on a close-current basis. To me that necessarily means that someone has to get paid for the work. Perhaps you would take issue with my view that the existence of such a news operation is invaluable for society at large, and perhaps we're arguing over how to get the newspapers from an advertising-based model to one where direct payments support them (which, by the way, is how the WSJ works). On the subject of the Iraq war and the misinformation, I had a number of conversations with my brother, and I think your assertion that newspapers don't want to be controversial because they fear loss of advertisers is basically right. I also think that the media was in a weak state (circulation issues, lack of senior staff, etc.), and the Bush administration was very forceful and savvy about manipulating the news. So while I think it was an egregious failure, I don't take it to mean that newspapers are henceforth going to be unable to resist such manipulation and report objectively.

As enjoyable as it is to bash the newspapers for all of their real flaws, I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous. I really don't. The difference between newspapers and random hearsay is (in the best cases) a lot of effort in developing broad and balanced sources, fact checking, having an editorial process for some degree of fairness and accuracy (as much as that's suffered in the past decade) and generally putting out a "report" on a subject (that's why we call them reporters). That's a lot of hard, often tedious work that is not going to get done well unless someone is paid to do it. And frankly we should all want to pay for that kind of good content to be made, even when we disagree with it.

It's become trendy to say that bloggers do much of the work of the media and that is simply delusion. First of all, nearly all blog entries (including a large fraction of those on this site) are built around a link of a publication which employs its writers. Bloggers do a great job adding bits, contextualize and bringing together info, but they are most often not the generators of solid base information they work with. So if we really do lose newspapers we are not going to have the People's Republic of Blogistan stand up and replace them with real reporting, we're just going to have gasbaggery in its place.

Now the newspaper industry as a whole needs plenty of creative destruction on top of that. Now that news can freely travel across the country and the world, there's no need for every paper to have Washington bureau and foreign correspondents, and consolidation is much needed there. Likewise the stupid forays of the 90s into "new media" and the debt-fueled expansions also call for some of these business to go under. But that's about restructuring companies and an industry, not replacing paid professionals with everyone's favorite opinion.

My hope is that the newspapers will force the issue on micropayments. I would gladly pay $1, maybe $2 a day for a combination of stories from the Washington Post, NYT, LA Times, my local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on occasion some random others that I learned about from some blogger. I absolutely will not pay $20/mo to each of those. So if they can figure out a joint payment scheme that makes sense, I'm all for that. Double bonus points if they can use it to make their archives affordable and not priced for company and institutiional use.

To me the problem is not so much skepticism like yours, but skepticism of the type that say "well it's been a cold year this year, there can't possibly be a warming trend." Your skepticism strkes me as healthy and informed scientific debate. What I find galling is the number of times climate change is challenged not to try to find a better answer but to prove that it isn't happening.

Take the cosmic ray question. Now independently that's a fairly interesting issue and a good way to look at how solar forcing might be varying. But as soon as the Svensmark guy got any sense that cosmic rays might be a substantial contributor to the solar forcing, he leapt out of the gate to claim that it alone explained observed warming trends. Since others have not been able to repeat his results, I'd call that premature to say the least. On his part, I don't think it's unreasonable that he would want his theory to upend current thinking - that's pretty much the route to glory in any scientific discipline. But the "contrarians" leaped on that as conclusive proof that warming couldn't possibly be anthropogenic. That on top of dramatically misstating measurements (e.g. George Will's bit on how Arctic sea ice area isn't actually shrinking) makes it very hard to believe that contrarians are interested in finding out what IS going on.

I came out of oceanography, so I have a couple friends who are modellers, and they can in fact integrate a first-order PDE. So I think I'd respectfully disagree that all the models are quite as crude as you say.

Nonetheless, almost any assessment of the state of modeling has to concede some of the points you make: namely that the models are not at a state to provide meaningful predictions of the course climate change will take. I believe that most honest assessments of modeling understand their flaws, though individual modelers may not be willing to accept limitations of their own work (imagine that). Where the models seem useful to me is to tell a confirmatory story to the carbon sensitivity calculations, which are much more robust.

In general I also tend to agree that the government should avoid solving the problem directly but adopt approaches that constrain the market to solve the problem. And in particular, I agree with you that a cap and trade system is likely to be the most effective, since it has targets that are measurable. I don't think I'd be as cautious as you describe in government intervention, since a) the carbon problem basically boils down to infrastructure for energy and transportation, and the government is always heavily involved in building and maintain that infrastructure, and b) there really isn't much precedent for solving tragedy of the commons problems like atmospheric emissions on a global scale, and such a framework is needed if we wish to continue to, say, eat fish from the ocean. I'd also note without taking sides that you're using precautionary principle in a different sense than it's often used, i.e. that new technologies must be very deeply tested for environmental and health impacts before they are allowed into widespread use.

Which also raises the question: why is this being done by the shuttle? Couldn't this repair be done robotically, therefore allowing a much smaller, less complicated and more expendable craft?

Having also worked in IT in the developing world, under very similar physical conditions described by the OP, my reaction is that the parent's points are all excellent.

I would add this:

MANAGE EXPECTATIONS.

It is particular important in this kind of setting to manage both your own expectations and those of the people to whom you're providing service.

In my experience, people to whom you're providing service don't appreciate how much more can and does go wrong with a computer than say a phone or a dryer - let alone networked machines or trying to deal with a connection to the Internet. It is worth a lot of effort to help them understand what it takes to provide a particular kind of service. In particular it's important to them think through the cost of that service, often to clarify that the cost of will add up to more they initially can imagine, but that in spite of those costs, there's still a lot of value. Back here in the States, I find that decision-makers in the nonprofit sector often tend to see costs in this limited way and make very limited plans for the ongoing cost of IT service, pile up deferred costs, and inevitably end up struggling along with marginal service and, quite often, higher overall cost.

Since you're an IT professional, I'm guessing that like nearly all of us, you find the potential in IT very appealing. So it's pretty key to constantly remind yourself that your tradeoffs between well-engineered and practicable are profoundly different than IT folks in the developed world and keep yourself grounded in what's feasible and valuable.

Other than that, I think the parent knows way more about this subject than the rest of us, so listen to him or her.