And, I think the judge's almost glib comment near the end that this plaintiff has pursued over 100 previous suits to trial of this sort and can handle another one could indicate that she recognizes Righthaven's business model is Troll, which I take to be a (possibly unwarranted) good sign.

Sigh. The full, legal, proper name of my country is "United States of America," it is the only country with "America" in its name, and we refer to its people as "Americans" by the same construction that we (in English) refer to people from the Federal Republic of Germany as Germans or the Peoples Republic of China as Chinese. This might be one of the oldest stupid arguments on the internet -- it certainly was common on Usenet > 20 years ago.

Well stated. A complicated feedback diagram in climatology from 25 years could have served as a model for the Afghan diagram (Robock, 1985, Bull. A.M.S.) and its complexity is the message -- you can't understand this system without understanding all these connections. Gen. McChrystal should not have been laughed at for recognizing the problem. PowerPoint has nothing to do with this aspect. If anything the point should be that PowerPoint discourages diagrams and thoughts of this level of complexity, and thus encourages oversimplified thinking (which was also Tufte's point, mentioned by someone else). We probably need more diagrams like this.

That is so bogus. There are many fields of scientific study where all we can do is observe what happens now, try to reconstruct, often from proxy data, what has happened in the past before the era of human observation, and use extrapolations from physical principles (i.e., numerical models) to try to better understand processes. Climatology, geology, ecology, paleontology, much of astronomy, much of what we think we know about evolution, and a lot of oceanography -- in other words most things having to do with the large scale, have the same observational, not lab-experimental, basis. Climatology is at least physically based enough that we can try to project the future (arguing about accuracy of those predictions is fair, and that argument is a robust part of current climate research).

The canard about what we know in the 1970s is getting really stale. In the early 1970s, climate modeling was in its infancy and we were trying to nail down what, among many possible climate problems, was most likely. If your library has a copy of S.H.Schneider's The Genesis Strategy, look it up for a view of the uncertainty we had back then. News magazines picked up on the ice age side of things more back then, not because there was any scientific consensus at all, but because it sold magazines. By the early 1980s, the scientific consensus was that CO2-greenhouse gases were the imminent concern. Nobody has been seriously pushing the encroaching ice age as a problem for 30 years. This is how science works: hypotheses lead to research which leads to corrections and improvements.