Irony. So much of it.

You do realize that there are more possible solutions than requiring that we put entirely new people in every year, right? You do realize also that putting in new people each year is no guarantee that the puppet-masters will be unable to control the strings of government, right? Mull that over and then get back to me about your silly plan. No change is better than *bad* change. Good change is better than both.

As someone else pointed out, in what other field would it make sense to have the entire organization staffed with people who'd never done the job before? In the CS world, consider putting someone with a 4.0 GPA right out of college into a project lead position. Does that make sense? No, it does not. And it says nothing bad about the person's education. The fact of the matter is, running a large state, or even a small one, is no simple task, and the last thing we need is a bunch of naive, poorly-trained amateurs doing it (and certainly not as an irrational response to the very rational concern about the state of our government).

They're quite competent; they just don't do what's in the best interest of all the stakeholders.

So now you have neither capable politicians nor capable bureaucrats and staff, but a bunch of newbies every year. And you claim this will create a working, stable government? Maybe that works in the early Roman Republic when a bunch of farmers can come together a few times a year to decide what to do about the weirdo who keeps stealing food from the marketplace. It won't work now. No large organization can function in such a fashion.

Well of course legal oppression only exists because of government. That's true by definition of "legal". That doesn't mean getting rid of government gets rid of the ability for groups of people to systematically oppress other people. If government laws oppress people, they are used as a tool by existing sets of people with power and money. The government doesn't do it in a vacuum, and a government given no power by the true elite has no ability to enforce these things. If there were no government, as indeed there generally hasn't been in most societies for most of human history, then there are other ways by which oppression can take place: religion, vigilantism, crime lords and syndicates, corporations of various types, etc. People *will* organize in groups to solidify power and they *will* use it against others.

No, it's arcane. You have to learn all the workarounds for the various gotchas, misfeatures and outright bad designs in SS*S. It is dark sorcery and I hate it, and having to report to the users that "no, I can't do that because SS*S is a pile of shit".

Most of the heavy-handedness has been on the part of the well-funded denial industry. Pretty much everything you said applies much more to the denier groups than to the pro-AGW groups.

The scientists do complain about the media, both with respect to AGW and other fields. Scientific journalism is notably awful.

I am also annoyed by the folks in the media that blame every severe weather event on AGW as if these things never happened before we started pouring excess CO2 into the air. But the media is not the science.

> No, it would not. The age of a 35 year old in minutes would be 18,408,600. 30 minutes would roughly 0.00163% of that. Terra is approximately 4 billion years old. Simple math yields 6,518 years, not one year. The time frame I provided was actually six times longer than the time frame looked at by the scientists. That also means that we should be looking at the last five minutes, not the last 30. In both cases, the time frame is too short

I don't think measuring by percentages really means anything. You can say it's really small, but you haven't said why that actually matters, especially given that the configuration of land and biosphere has been considerably different for most of Earth's history.

> Now, to your second point, seeing climate change and showing that it is caused by humans is different things. Most of what I see is people saying "the climate has changed in the last 200 years and the industrial revolution started 200 years ago so climate change must have been caused by humans", which is the questionable cause fallacy.

It's also a fallacy to argue at strawmen.

Okay, I'll qualify that: the fact that it snowed in DC does not count as a data point against the AGW theory. That is, it's not inconsistent with our understanding of day-to-day weather variability in a climate that is being affected by anthropogenic activity.

The equivalent of 30 minutes would be looking at the climate from the past year and extrapolating from that. But we aren't doing that. However, I can tell you that what was normal for me as a kid, or what was normal for one of my ancestors from two hundred years ago, really isn't relevant to what's normal for me now. And more importantly, the question isn't to find normal (because there is no such thing), but to figure out whether human activity is a significant factor in the climate trends we've observed, significant enough to warrant action. We don't have to know everything about the entire history of the climate to answer this question.

I don't know why the climate from 2 billion years ago is relevant to now. Do we need to measure the motion of every planet in the universe to decide that Kepler's Laws are correct? Do we need to have measured the amount of sunlight at night for the past 10,000 years to feel secure in predicting that it'll be dark tomorrow night? No, we don't. That's not science, that's the opposite of science. We understand the system based on laboratory experiments, math and models and then make predictions. The predictions are correct or not, and if they are, then we have more confidence in our theory. More importantly, we look at what's relevant to the theory. Whether people on Earth fart during its path around the sun is not something we need to measure when considering activities on the scale of planetary motion. Similarly, it's unnecessary to measure climate activity from time periods in Earth's history when the continents were laid out differently, when the sun produced different heat output, when the biosphere was composed differently, etc. It's certainly interesting, but not directly relevant, just like the weather on Mars isn't particularly relevant to the weather on Earth.

Some humans will adapt, as has always been the case. Those nations and groups of people that are proactive about their condition, be it environmental, economic or cultural, will, in the end, fare better than those that don't. Since the world we live in is fickle and complex, even great empires are not immune, though they may take longer to succumb.

No, it's really going to be extremes in certain directions. We wouldn't expect a lot of colder extremes, and indeed, we generally haven't seen as many in the past few decades. Of course, the day-to-day variability of the weather will result in some places getting particularly cold, and that'll always happen, AGW or not.