They did. It's a dangling participle for crying out loud.

Though I largely agree with the interpretation you put forward, the second amendment would get an F in any english composition class I've ever been a part of.

Here's the thing: even with all you've said here, driving "25mph+" is still neither necessary nor sufficient for someone to be "driving badly." Yes, point taken that often it is correlated with bad driving behaviors, but in those cases there is always some other bad driving behavior: tailgating, cutting off, dangerous lane changes, lack of signaling, not driving to conditions.

There's absolutely no problem driving 90mph in a well-maintained modern vehicle on a straight stretch of open highway on a clear, dry day with high visibility and no cars anywhere around you. Unfortunately these are also the conditions under which a radar-based speed trap also works the best.

Is driving 90mph dangerous under other conditions? Of course. But driving 65 in a 65 zone is dangerous sometimes too, depending on conditions. Focusing on just the absolute speed number is asinine. If the speed limit were really the absolute limit of safety, then why does moderate traffic often converge to 10-15 mph above that limit, and why aren't cops pulling over everyone they can in those situations? (Not to mention how often I've seen police vehicles -- without their lights on -- going not only far above the speed limit but also above the average speed of traffic. Often without signaling when they change lanes.)

Yeah. It's more like "news for paranoid techno-libertarians" nowdays.

Wow. That's it? You left out quite a bit. I can only hope for the sake of your intelligence that you're being purposefully disingenuous.

The fact that the parent was modded insightful proves the decline of slashdot as an intellectual resource.

I weep

I was actually hoping they would go for a "fountain-of-youth" or "life force of the planet" angle since they hinted at it. But then they mucked it up with the "corking an evil force" and electromagnetism and time travel and who knows what else.

And why does it create smoke monsters again? To punish people by giving them immense powers that they can use to then destroy the island? What?

I don't think the writers had as clear an idea of what was going on as you are implying they did. The mythology was a mess.

Should I believe the pro-AGW scientists who refuse to share their data,

Where are you getting the impression that a significant number of pro-AGW scientists are "refusing" to share their data? I hope it's not from scattered reports of individual accusations (such as "Climategate" -- where even then, the vast majority of the data in question is available publicly).

Do you have overall statistics of what percentage of published "pro-AGW" studies rely on "hidden data"?

Really, why do you believe this is true? Think hard on this.

or the anti-AGW scientists who remain skeptical of the data that is available?

Did these scientists study global climatology? Or did they study something else (meteorology, atmospheric physics) which doesn't concentrate on analysis of long-term climate processes?

What is the ratio of scientists who are "pro-AGW" to those who are "anti-AGW"?

It really has nothing to do with nuance or a "deeper" story. It has everything to do with a deliberately misleading story summary someone wrote to try to make a political point (in this case, that nutrition paranoia is getting out of hand or something).

But as your link correctly explains, this had nothing to do with the "low nutritional value" rule.

I'll just mention a few things quickly about the CO2 lagging temperature issue:

1) Basic logic: If you're trying to disprove "A if B" you can't use "A and not B" -- you need to have "B and not A." In other words, temperature rising without CO2 rising first does not disprove that CO2 rising wouldn't cause temperature to rise. But if you saw CO2 rising *without* temperature rising, it would (well, it would be a stronger argument -- it's still a complex system and would need more analysis). AFAIK, that doesn't exist in the record.

2) There are many things that can cause temperature to rise, CO2 concentration being only one of them. This is reflected in the climate models and current theory. In the ancestral record, IIRC, orbital variations trigger the initial rise in temperature. Rising temperatures then cause the oceans to release more CO2, and according to models, that CO2 has a feedback effect making the hot periods longer and hotter than they would be without it.

3) After the industrial revolution, you DO see CO2 rising first, then temperatures following. The whole point is that every climate model ever made cannot account for the recent rise in temperature without using the greenhouse effect from that CO2 rise, even taking natural non-man-made forcings into account. That's the essence of AGW.

If someone could create a complete earth climate model that predicted all observables as well as the AGW models but did not show a large effect from man-made CO2 (ie, take it out of the model and most of the warming is still there), then I'd be interested. As far as I know, this does not yet exist.

Your straw man of AGW is a bit odd in its emphasis:

First off, this isn't a prediction, but rather a question of historical fact. Second, I'm not sure "unprecedented" is a fundamental aspect of the theory of AGW -- popular media presentation notwithstanding. It seems to me that CO2 concentration is unprecedented however. Third, what does the lead/lag of CO2 vs temperature have to do with the magnitude of the warming trend? Finally, I would just mention that the rate of change is probably the important metric here, not the absolute temperature.

Warming-trend-is-created-by-man-made-CO2 is basically a re-statement of AGW itself, not any prediction thereof. And the "critical tipping point" aspect doesn't again seem to be a fundamental part of the theory. Again, it seems more like the kind of thing that's trumped up in the media. I don't recall any scientists claiming that the earth will end in a burning husk.

I'm really wondering where you're getting these ideas from. They seem like a strange mash-up of anti-AGW memes with no organizing principle and no intention of checking your impressions against any facts.

Also I'm wondering why you're not mentioning some of the clearly obvious falsifiable predictions: Like the fact that earth-climate-models are generated using assumptions about how CO2 affects radiation in the atmosphere, and the implications of models can be compared with current climate data?

finding more data that supports your theory does not protect it against even a single bit of data that refutes it

So what's that "single bit of data" that just kills all hope of AGW? I'm intensely curious.

Give me just one. The real kicker. I don't want a spamming of scattered nitpicks. Go ahead and kill AGW for us once and for all.

I'm not sure what you're proposing here. We're talking about temperature data. There are various independent sources of this temperature data, of which CRU produced one. All the various independent sources are in very close agreement. What are you proposing to "start over" on?

There is abundant evidence from satellite data that the surface measurement estimation methodology is horribly out of sync with reality.

Wait.. are you talking about the satellite data that was shown to have huge systemic flaws due to timing anomalies and was corrected years ago? http://www.grist.org/article/the-satellites-show-cooling

Uh, get the historical data, "massage" it in ways that seem reasonable to you, and publish your own results?

The real question is, if their (or any climate scientist's) publications were so flawed, why hasn't anybody done this?

Even before you've gotten a chance to analyze it and publish on it yourself?
Even data that doesn't end up being published?

Describing the algorithm isn't sufficient?

What I keep seeing over and over is references to all these examples of methodology problems, bad organization, etc. What I haven't seen is anything linking these problems to actual published works from the group. In fact, I've heard that most of the data they were "refusing to release" was never actually used in any publication.

Evidence showing a disorganized work-in-progress proves nothing to me. Where are the actual flaws in the published literature? And who's working on new publications to correct them?