If they can pull more people out of poverty, what the U.S. does won't matter to China and India because their domestic markets will be larger than the United States. Currently they have even worse social inequity than we do, and the poor performance of their own markets forces their own people to look elsewhere for work.

Yes, I'm also a solid Democrat. But this has been a long time coming and IMO it's even in line with Obama's recent agenda on the Middle Class! The problem with the guest worker programs is that they devalue the local workers by diluting the market for them. The effect is to create a sort of "disposable worker" from our own citizens.

Now, of course jobs can be sent overseas too, but if the alternatives are to have foreign workers work at home, or in the U.S., neither choice is a win for our own citizens.

It continues to seem silly to have such a thrust on STEM education in the U.S. when the job market for STEM workers consistently goes to overseas hires, whether they are here or in their home nations. We need to work on the job-export issue as well.

Nothing in that article disputes the confidence that the past decade was hottest. It simply disputes which year in that decade was the worst. Nor does it dispute that the trend is increasing temperature per year.

Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.

Decreasing doesn't mean reversing. And we have physical observation of ice melting, and releases of previously-sequestered gases on sea bottoms, underground, etc. These things all take a heat input. What happens when those buffers are spent and there is nothing to sink the heat input?

Had we depended solely on experiment for everything, we would know much less about the world today. When direct experiment is not possible we still have observation and modeling, and certainly that is science. And of course most of our models do scale, simply because of long observation at all scales. Were this not the case, we would still be arguing about the heliocentric theory, because we can not move planets and suns in order to prove it from first principles, and the orbits of planets would not necessarily scale to suns, etc.

Sure, the earth has large processes that regulate each other, but there is nothing purposeful in their existence and positive feedback is as likely as negative. The Earth is as likely to be naturally fragile as naturally robust. So you can not place faith in unseen processes that will tend to mediate insults to the environment.

If there is some unknown non-anthropocentric cause for climate change, we are still in the position of having to resolve the issue through some modification in society's behavior, rather than consign the victims.

It's not surprising that fitting a model to something so complicated takes more work. But it's irrelevant when the thing actually modeled gets progressively hotter.

Yes, I know. but it's more polite than telling them where their head really is. :-)

i pointed this out before, but google's policy of forcing people to give their *real* names is incredibly dangerous. google set themselves up as the *authority* - the guarantor - that the person you are contacting is exactly whom google *says* they are. now, given that it's possible under gmail to register very similar email addresses (with and without "." in them) we have the potential extremely litigous situation where someone could be deceived and then sue google - rightly - for damages based on google's guarantees - safety about identity - not being properly upheld.

contrast that situation where *everyone knows* that you don't trust email. or any kind of unconfirmed interaction on the internet.

and i think this is what people felt - subconsciously - both inside google as well as outside, that there was something very very badly wrong about forcing people to both disclose but also to allow google to "certify" their identity.

the other thing is just that... google+ is... simply... devoid of excitement and interest. it feels like it's a single-track uninspiring place, with one direction that Thou Shalt Go: google's waaaay.

contrast this to how facebook operates (or how myspace operated): i realise it's information-overload, but that's *precisely* what makes facebook (and made myspace) an interesting place to be. there are several ways to get to the same stuff.

strange as it may be for someone who is alarmed at the ease by which it is possible on facebook to track someone down merely from their first name (yes i met someone at a party, couldn't remember their surname, but managed to guess their approximate age, guessed that they must live in the approximate nearby area, then used the advanced search on facebook to find them... took a couple of weeks to work out i have to admit, and no i am *not* going to describe here on slashdot how it's done...) ... ... despite that, i have to say that there is actually something useful, and just generally more... homely about facebook than their is about *any* google products. google products are just... sterile and functional. you use gmail to send mail. you use google search to... well... search. but you use *facebook* to tell everyone you know that you wiped your arse today, and that's hilarious.

it also occurs to me: i wouldn't want to put personal stuff up on google: they might index it and let people search on it. and i think that's really the key, there. facebook is closed. you *have* to have a login. your personal stuff is *not* indexed publicly in search engines.

so, sorry google: you got it wrong on this one, and you can't be trusted, even if you said you'd get it right.

Um. That dozen years was the hottest dozen in history. Much more clearly than any individual year was the hottest. You might wave away one year as inaccuracy. But not 10 or more. See the NOAA data here.

The NOAA data says there has been no hiatus and the 10 hottest individual years have all been since 1998.

Our control Earth is history. We can see that this Earth killed most macroscopic surface life a few times in history, and we have evidence for why that happened. We can see that it once would not have supported our sort of life. We can see how its atmosphere developed and how ecological networks have formed. We also have a pretty good understanding of gases and their behavior, and we can measure the gases in the atmosphere and the gases emitted from our civilization.

We can readily disprove theories of lucky socks and umbrellas causing rain. We can't, however, explain how any atmosphere would be able to tolerate inputs of the sort our civilization produces without some change.

Oh, right. A vast international liberal cabal is adjusting historical temperatures. I guess they've replaced all of the almanacs in libraries with cleverly rewritten versions. And so on. In every country, regardless of the languages they speak and write.

And the last several years have just happened to be increasingly hot.

Take a look at any of the photos of the Earth from space. The planet is big. But the atmosphere is really thin! You can easily tell the difference in pressure if you only go up 8000 feet or so. It is that piece that we're unbalancing.

blind leading the blind, here, but my non-specialist-physics background might be a bit easier to understand than someone who mentions "QCD" at you. the way i understand it is that when you have particles around, they have E.M and gravitational fields, and they have binding forces and so on at the very-close (atomic) level which kiiinda mean that if you get close to them with another particle you either get sucked in, or banged away (like billiard balls) - actually _very_ much like billiar balls, in that you have to get *really* close in order for a deflection to occur [at all] but when you do you really know about it.

and, what we also know is that in non-vacuum there are *lots* of these particles. so, relatively speaking, even in a gas like any one particle really doesn't have to go that far to get banged-up by any other particle.

in other words, your average particle or your average photon (cosmic ray equals a photon with a very high energy content) has a huge amount of "resistance" applied to it, in *all* directions pretty much. this "resistance" means we end up with solid matter (ok gases too) that *stays* solid. stable. follows newton's laws and so on.

in empty space, there is *no such resistance*. there's nothing to get in the way, nothing to interfere with particles or rays. so even the smallest disturbance when two photons (cosmic rays) happen to cross paths, or one hits an atom, can result in "smaaashhh, wheeee!" any by-products of such collisions, which would normally be instantly destroyed by neighbouring particles, preciselybecause there *aren't* any neighbouring particles, the by-products get to stay alive for much longer [possibly forever].

so my take on this is that it's not so much that "empty space has energy", it's that empty space - by *being* empty - doesn't "resist" (so to speak) the creation process of particles. *scratches head*. ... a bit like how if you have one extrovert in a party that's only just started, has huuge rooms, and nobody knows anyone else, the extrovert will stand in the middle of the room happily dancing and the very few other guests else will hug the walls, but if you have *lots* of extroverts in the room, then, well... it's just an another awesome party :)

throw-away comment, here :) i did a funny little bit of experimenting a couple of years back, when someone posted here an article about the density of deep space (the number of atoms per cubic metre) having been measured. anyway, remembering my o-level chemisty and i went, "hmm... that's interesting: i wonder if there's a relationship between that particle density and avogadro's constant.

so... i went... density = 7 * 10e-26, avogadro's const = 6.023 * 10e23, multiply the two together you get 4.2154. just for fun take the cube-root and oo! you get 1.6153982. now, to within experimental uncertainty of the measurements made of the density of deep space vacuum, that number should instantly be recogniseable +/- a bit, as the golden mean ratio (1.618 etc etc).

so we have a relationship - which has absolutely no quotes real quotes meaning whatsoever [ traditionally called "numerology" in a disparaging way in the physics community... ] between the density of particles in vacuum, avogadro's constant, and the golden mean ratio, in a formula that has very low kolmogorov complexity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity). which, as i do not have the kinds of hang-ups that the physics community has about these kinds of things, i find to be... beautiful.

and that's in and of itself enough for me. i don't care what the physicists say :)

anyway, as this is slashdot, i thought i'd happily derail the conversation with a nice bit of random semi-related nonsense, and see if anyone notices...