The "improbable cell" is a very common straw man put forth by the creationists. Certainly, you are right, there is essentially zero chance that a single cell could spring into existence from nothing, which is why no scientist worth their salt would ever make such a claim.

Instead, the first cells came about only after a lot of molecular evolution happened. This is pretty common knowledge.

If indeed AGW is such a threat, such a dire situation, then everyone should be more than willing to set aside their anti-nuke bias and ignorance and embrace it as the one way we can solve this problem.

Yes, nuclear is an option, and yes, we should explore it objectively (as if that's even possible at this point..), but it is hardly accurate to say that if you accept AGW, it follows that you must endorse nuclear or you are a horrible hypocrite.

The trouble is that there has been so much FUD around AGW that we haven't been able to even have the conversation about what we're going to do about it.

Most likely, though, there isn't going to be one solution. There will be many, depending on where you live. Geothermal energy works great in Iceland, not so much in Arizona. Arizona gets a lot of sun, though, so solar is more feasible there, but not in Seattle. Seattle could use tidal energy, though, which wouldn't then work in Wisconsin. You get the idea - tap into the resource that is nearby.

you are picking a hundred year window, and saying anyone that uses a different window is wrong.

Um. No. That is nothing like what the article is saying. The article is saying that there is a natural, periodic cooling trend that runs about every 11 years. Furthermore, this trend is sitting on top of a general *increase* in temperature.

To put it another way, think of the 11-year cooling trend as a sawtooth function. If you just sample the downhill section, it will look like a decreasing function, but over time, it is constant.

Now, take the above function and overlay a positively slopped function that has a slope less than the absolute value of the negatively sloping section of the sawtooth. The result is that you can cherry pick periods of time and still claim a decrease, but if you look at a period of time beyond the known 11-year oscillation, you see an increase.

yeah, because "I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year 'reconstruction'." would mean something entirely different if it was in context.

Well, I looked at the email, and unfortunately, the rest of the email doesn't really provide much more context or an explanation of why the author of that comment dislikes that paper.

As such, we have little information, other than knowing that one scientist doesn't much like the work of another scientist. There is nothing in the criticism of this one, specific paper to indicate anything other than professional rivalry.

In fact, looking over these emails, I see evidence of frustration and a desire to convince people, but I don't see anything that indicates a widespread cover-up. As before, nothing to see here that undermines the science...

Sadly, I think we are heading towards justifiable violence as the only means to take back control of our countries and our lives. Protests and legislative bodies are accomplishing next to nothing and the situation is getting so bad, that my only choice will ultimately be violence or incarceration.

I hear your frustration, but let's give this more time. The thing about non-violent protest is that it takes a lot of time to work. Note that the African-American civil rights movement ran for 13 years.

The Arab spring and popular protests across Europe and the US haven't even hit the one year mark, but already the national (and international) dialogue is changing, as evidenced by this very thread.

Yes, there is a lot of bad shit going down, but for the first time in a while, there is reason to hope that change will come. Just be sure to take *some* kind of (non-violent) action to push that change.

They could also provide this benefit via donations to charity.

You're right. They could provide this benefit through charity, but they don't. When that changes, we can disband the government.

First of all, I agree with what you said.

On the flip side, though, there are a lot people labeling taxation as theft without recognizing the benefit (ie, roads, schools, safe food, etc.) that are purchased through taxes.

we have a perfectly functional system for overthrowing the government on a periodic basis: voting.

That is probably the funniest thing I've seen posted here for a long time. Our election system is broken. In our system, two major sources of power (ie, the political parties) pick a handful of candidates and let the people fight about which one of the pre-chosen people they want to be in power.

Furthermore, the winner is decided in part by the people, but there is a LOT of money that gets spent in elections and the more money you can spend, the more likely you are to win. Right now, the only practical political choices boil down to either a Republican or Democrat, both of which are run by a small group of elite. This is why we have things like the Bush dynasty - do you really believe that father and son were both president because of their merits and not their wealth and influence? Hell, on the other side of the coin, we almost had a Clinton dynasty starting when Hillary was showing real potential to take the oval office.

If that's not enough to start you questioning our "perfectly functional" system, I would suggest you read all of the articles posted on slashdot about the trouble with the voting machines used in most elections!

To change this, we first need enough people in the streets to generate enough political capital for someone to step up and try to represent these new voices. Even if that doesn't work, they are already having an effect. Without them being on streets, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, and the longer they stay on the streets, the more people will talk about why they are there and these ideas will start to spread.

My only hope is that this kind of movement can generate enough momentum to actually cause a change.

FYI, you would be a lot more convincing if you stopped just linking to things that you've said already. I tried to follow your argument, but I kept on seeing you do some of your own analysis of situations, then link to your analyses as fact.

You may have some very good points, but you are so deep in your own layers of thinking that it is hard to believe anything you say and I don't personally feel that it is worthwhile to spend long hours digesting every little point that some dude posted on the internet.

I get it, you want to fleece the rich.

Well, that's the strawman version of the argument.

Right now, it is possible for a single worker to produce more than every before in history. Given that statement, we may expect that right now our society is, for the average person, more wealthy and that we have more free time than ever before. It turns out, though, that all of these great gains in wealth, etc. are concentrated in the top few percentages of people.

That is the specific complaint - that the income/wealth gap is spreading and that the only solution offered by the politicians (specifically by the GOP) is to put more money in the hands of the wealthy, as if all of our economic woes are due to the rich just not having enough money, which is total, complete, utter bullshit. If that is the solution, why is there a problem?

It is painfully obvious that we need a fairly significant shift in our thinking. We also need to stop sitting around reducing the "other side" to a bunch of whiny, stupid, people. There are smart folks in the Tea Party and there are smart folks in the Green Party, and they all have valid, if incomplete, perspectives.

How about the fact that we don't fully understand liquid water?

Your post addresses some of the basic understanding, but it is more complicated than you paint it. After all, if it wasn't why would there still be a lot of research into it? Consider this thought experiment:

You have a large solution of water with 3 oil molecules floating around inside of the water. Eventually, these 3 molecules bump into each other and stick. By having these two molecules start acting like one, there is a relatively large entropic penalty to be paid, and our understanding of a lot of these other forces doesn't explain who is paying for the entropic loss.

I had exactly the same response to the article - they've created a mathematical model the reflects what they observe, but they still don't really understand the mechanism. Looking at the comments of the article, I found a link to the original article. From what I can understand (by reading the abstract), it sounds as if the work was (surprise) a lot more complicated than the article linked above. From the abstract:

A quantitative and general model is derived for the interaction potential of charged bilayers that includes the electrostatic double-layer force of the Derjaguin–Landau–Verwey–Overbeek theory, attractive hydrophobic interactions, and repulsive steric-hydration forces. The model quantitatively accounts for the elastic strains, deformations, long-range forces, energy maxima, adhesion minima, as well as the instability (when it exists) as two bilayers breakthrough and (hemi)fuse.

In short, as far as I understand it, their model is built upon a lot of existing models and considers many, known phenomena. If you dove into the actual article, you may get a sense of the "why" but it strikes me as a complicated enough of an explanation that it would probably take a strong background in physical chemistry to fully grok.

Does gravity work because mass distorts space or because of gravitons? At the heart of it most science doesn't care why, but it does care what.

No, it is engineering that really doesn't care about why. Steel is stronger than wood, which is why we build big buildings out of steel and not wood, but to make a building, we don't need to understand why, only how it behaves.

Science is all about explaining why something happens. If someone could determine, conclusively, the mechanism of how gravity works, that would be a major scientific discovery. At that point, then, we'll how to ask why THAT happens, and thus science continues.

The average females instinct, no matter how independent and successful she is, is still to "settle" with a provider (due to the large investment she makes in the offspring). That hasn't changed. The males instinct (to spread seed far and wide due to lesser investment in offspring) is to mate with as many females as possible. This also hasn't changed.

Further to this point, you can see how female and male sexuality play out in the absence of the other gender (ie, homosexual relationships). On the one hand, you have male dominated gay clubs where there is a culture of lots of quick and meaningless sex. On the other hand, you have the following joke (which I originally heard from a lesbian friend of mine):

What does a lesbian bring to the second date? A U-haul.

(These are, of course, generalizations. There are plenty of lesbians having quick, meaningless hook-ups and plenty of gay men in long-term, committed relationships.)