'Climate Change' is the all-encompassing fashionable (I Fucking Love Science!) term that brings the magic government money - unless you question the orthodoxy, of course.

Four score and twenty hogsheads ago...

"Apprenticeship gap" is the term I was looking for in my other post, good one. I've worked on a couple of already-published articles about offshoring and engineering and I'll use your term for Part 3. If you have any recommendations for insightful resources on the subject I'd appreciate it.

People in the plant design business have been suffering from offshoring and increasingly-automated data-centric design software.

Expensive, sophisticated, software run over the internet by people earning 1/10 to 1/3 "western" hourly rates means that as older, more experienced workers retire, they are not replaced (or at least not on a 1:1 basis).

Most of the problems with offshoring are miscommunication, time zones and cultural.

Tasks that were formerly performed by younger people entering the field are now done by the software (eg., cable routing, single-line diagrams). Offshoring and automation are great for cost reduction but this does not bode well for people looking to enter the discipline.

Do you think more CO2 in the atmosphere would result in more vegetation growth?

How about more futzing around with more powerful models and statistics software as well as skills erosion? In my field of engineering much of it is push-button automated now - I can see where that could lead to a degradation of basic skills over time and a temptation to generate more and not necessarily better work.

It's at 400 now, apparently.

At what point do reduced CO2 average global levels start to negatively impact plant growth?

It's models all the way down.

You're raining on the doomers' Malthusian parade.

You cannot reason people out of a situation that they have emoted themselves into and the global warming issue is more of a PR war than anything else.

"The summary and TFA are carefully choosing their words to make it look like a land slide sized change in energy production"

Of course there's obfuscation, this is a global warming-related story and discussion! It generates page views, heated arguments and consequently money.

He should have referenced global warming, it's more fashionable these days.

Donations from foreign governments?

Can't a paper printout be carefully manually modified? Photocopy it, then destroy the original digital file and original printout.