Hey, it's Steve himself, posting as AC!

"Despite you're apparently perfect grammar"
*your
You weren't criticizing the content of my post, you read one sentence and proceeded to type your criticism based on that single sentence without reading any further. Ironically, the criticism you chose to level at me was to ask if I had even read the original post. At this point maybe you could just admit you jumped the gun and save yourself any further embarrassment.

no, we don't have winter on occasion. We have summer on occasion.

sure, and when crop yields are 25% of what they used to be, resulting in worldwide shortages, starvation, and prices inflating 500%, what do we do then?

Organic farming is incapable of providing enough yield to meet worldwide demand. So while you are correct, you have not solved the problem that led to the need for pesticides, herbicides, and genetic modifications.

You typed "You're post goes like this". Which means "You are post goes like this". Moron

Go back to school. The lead in sentence is merely a setup for the content of the paragraph. You also need to learn the proper use of your versus you're.

So you got as far as my lead in sentence and decided to flame me with a reply asking me if I read what he said? Good work Sherlock! You deserve some major down-modding for that...

He addresses exactly what I said? Really? Show me where he said the average consumer is aware how much more it costs for the two year contract vs an up front purchase. Also show me where he mentions the large number of customers who don't give a shit and just pay whatever the bill says without thinking about it. These are the two primary reasons that the carriers continue to be successful pushing this model. Apathetic customers, uninformed customers, and customers with excess disposable income create enough of a base to keep the model going.

From a consumer point of view, the whole advantage of the long term contract is it allows you to get very expensive models for a much smaller comparative monthly payment. It's accepted that the company will profit over the life of that product more than if they had sold the device up front at $X.XX dollars. The carrier covers the up front expense, in exchange for a revenue stream with a profit in the future. However, I'm not so sure the average consumer knows how much extra profit that will net the company. And then there are those that just don't want to bother thinking about it and just pay the bill. The other factor to consider is the replacement of the unit should it fail before the 2 year contract is up....this is the part of the deal that consumers should be concerned with, as any accidental damage can end up costing you far more than you bargained for when you signed on.

Posit: An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually crack all your passwords.

First, don't bother comparing Venus to Earth. The atmosphere of Venus is 93 times heavier than the atmosphere of Earth, and it's twice as tall. Likewise, Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% CO2 yet temperatures on Mars are lower than Earth. However, the atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than Earth. There is plenty of debate as to how much of a role CO2 plays in the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus, but the fact is we don't have an accurate answer yet. So please don't try and use Venus as an example. Second, why would you assume most of life that we know would die out if Earth flips back to a hot house phase? It was the ice ages that have seen mass extinctions. The hot house phases are marked by rampant growth of life and diversification of species.

"The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal scientific or mathematical jargon".... Sorry, but 'trick' isn't scientific or mathematical jargon. Please look at the tree ring proxy in question. Please note that it matches the temperature reconstruction pretty closely for a while, and then goes in the opposite direction. The 'trick' eliminated the obvious visual contradiction. It wasn't an issue of making disparate data sets fit. You can believe what you want, and obviously you've made your choice and have proceeded to dig. I think the right thing to do would have been to come to the conclusion that the correlation of the tree ring data with most but not all of the temperature data means it should be excluded, not 'tricked' into fitting.

Your clarification that the climate scientists were trying to hide the decline of the tree ring data as opposed to hiding the decline of the temperatures isn't very reassuring. If they've used tree rings to reconstruct worldwide climate temperatures as a proxy, and this proxy diverges from observations to the point that they have to "hide the decline", I think there's a definite problem with their science. Doesn't this invalidate the entire climate/temperature reconstruction that includes these tree rings? Why would they have to use a statistical method or 'trick' to make the data fit the theory? That doesn't sound like something a scientist interested in discovering the truth should have to do. Unfortunately, this isn't about pure science, as there is plenty of money and politics involved on both sides of the argument. There are reputations, careers, and honor at stake too. The email leaks revealed the science isn't as clear cut as they would have us believe. They also revealed that there are some climate scientists who are quite unwilling to even consider any evidence that contradicts their own beliefs. It's especially concerning when they advocate hiding or even deleting info, data and communications in order to avoid having to respond to FOI requests. Why would they need to do this?

you might want to think about that one a bit more....