Sorry? In what way are CANDU6e and ACR-1000s "old", "not the best" and "not the safest"? They're quite new, are based on fantastic designs with nearly perfect safety records, and perform as well or better than any other designs ever put forth for nuclear reactors. I'm an American and I'll happily stand up and say that no US company has come up with a better design than either a CANDU6e reactor or an ACR-1000 and I challenge you to find anything in operation or under current construction that's a better design than either of those.

If we built nothing but ACR-1000s for all new power plants, we'd have 80 years of cheap, safe, clean power.

[citation needed]

In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite. Japanese requirements for seismic safety at that site were that it should be capable of withstanding an earthquake of about 7.75. The earthquake which hit the nuclear power plant was a 9. The best outcome for TEPCO in this scenario would be to simply be able to say "we met all safety requirements, but the quake was massively larger than anyone expected and so now we're doing everything we can to help". Instead, the plant actually withstood the quake and, what's more, actually shut itself down automatically during the quake. What happened next is what screws TEPCO (rightfully so).

Two people who were working at the nuclear power plant actually received more radiation than the "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to higher cancer risk" (http://xkcd.com/radiation/). Modeling and estimates say that between 100 and 1000 will have a somewhat shortened lifespan as a result of this disaster, but those are quite likely erring on the very high side considering that actual measurements of radiation in plants and soil within the exclusion zone have thus far been much lower than what existing models would suggest should be there. Most of what's actually been observed has been stuff that's very difficult for humans or animals to really get exposed to unless they're sitting there eating fist-fulls of dirt (due to the fact that the radioactive materials in question bond strongly to the stuff in the soil and thus aren't readily absorbed by plants of animals in normal contact with said soil).

This was a 40 year old power plant with known safety issues that neither the owners or the regulators took seriously. It was a 40 year old plant that got hit by an earthquake nobody involved in safety for the plant saw coming. It was a 40 year old plant that survived all of that and was only finally brought down by terrible design issues that led to small explosions and a fairly small release of radiation that may or may not result in a small number of people with slightly shorter lifespans. If that's the worst you've got against nuclear power plants, you should be dropping to your knees and praising Jesus for giving us the intellect to harness the power of the atom.

Coal kills thousands of people every year in mining accidents, plant accidents (mostly fires and explosions), and due to radiation exposure and heavy metal contamination of ground water from all the waste products. Hydro power plants have killed tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands in single accidents. Solar power kills a number of people every year due to various causes such as installers falling off rooftops and electrocutions. Electrocutions and falling deaths during installations also kill a number of people working on wind power every year. If all you people have are Three Mile Island (where nobody died and nobody received any significant radiation exposure) and Fukushima (where nobody died and two people received enough radiation to warrant concern for their health looking forward, but who are just fine today), then you might want to actually step back and rethink your arguments.

The fact is, mankind has not yet discovered ANY form of power generation which is safer for everyone than nuclear power. Should nuclear power plants be designed properly? Yes. Should they be regulated and monitored for safety with real and reasonable standards? Absolutely. Is there any alternative we know of today which is safer and as or more effective? No. Sorry, but there just isn't. Maybe one day in the distant future we'll come up with something we can actually use, but right here, right now, a CANDU power plant is the safest and most effective power plant you can have.

"He said it would take more time and better technology to get to the melted fuel, most of which had fallen into an area the endoscope could not reach."

The current tools simply can't go where the fuel is, so they can't yet inspect it. They've confirmed there are no major breaches and are now looking over the information they've been able to gather to see what everything looks like inside. The fuel comment was a regret about the limitations of the tools they have to use, not so much a cause for alarm about anything being amiss.

I take a slightly different tact on that whole front. Based on just the satellite-collected data, I'm perfectly happy stipulating to the fact that there's been a small, observable, upward trend in the global average temperature over the past century. However, we lack sufficiently data with sufficient accuracy OR precision to say whether the upward trend has any significance in terms of differences in historic climate shifts. Certainly we've seen sudden, massive shifts in climate within human history (e.g. the Little Ice Age) which were obviously not caused by human activity. Further, many of those sudden, massive shifts don't show up in our typical climate measurement techniques. Sticking with the Little Ice Age, we have huge amounts of data from human accounts to say that the entire planet cooled significantly during this period. Yet when we look at indicators like glaciers, they don't tell us anything about it.

Let's repeat that: with our current climatology methods and techniques, we can't find a 300-year long mini ice age that human beings around the planet all observed, and it only happened 350 years ago.

So yeah, when someone tells me "omg we've NEVER seen temperatures change so fast and it's because people and carbon and stuff!", it'd be laughable if the ignorance weren't so sad. We can't track a 300 year long mini ice age using the best techniques we have for reconstructing historical global climate changes, and we can't do it with the cleanest, clearest, easiest data. New flash, boys and girls, we know Jack F. Shit about what kinds of sudden shifts happened thousands of years ago, let alone millions of years ago. Any sudden shifts - ANY sudden shifts - are lost in the data smoothing. Using everything we have today, there's zero chance we'd be able to detect the warming that's happened over the past 100 years from AD2300.

Why is that important? It means we have no idea if the warming we're observing is anything abnormal. We don't know what's happened before now, we barely know what's happening right now, and we don't know what actually drives changes in the global climate. If we knew how the global climate functioned, we'd be able to construct a functional model of the climate, pop in historical data from around the world, and get pretty accurate results about the next several years or decades following the last year of data entered. What we actually have are models where you have to fudge the data going in and/or add arbitrary constants within the model to make the results reasonably accurate for more than about a year (which is a joke). Even when arbitrary constants and false data are entered into the models we have to skew them in the direction we know they ought to go, their results become completely wrong within 18 months to two and a half or three years. In other words, they don't work because we don't build them correctly because we don't actually know what drives the planet's climate. And I'm not even getting into issues like tree ring data which totally throw off the whole thing.

So we don't have good data, we don't have a functional understanding of the Earth's climate, and we're supposed to believe that humans are destroying the planet and making it uninhabitable. Worse, we're supposed to sign on to proposals intended to alter the course of Earth's climate change with horrifyingly misguided geo-engineering schemes. My God, some people actually want us to sit down at the controls of the machine we don't understand but which we need in order to live and to start smashing buttons on it because they're convinced (without any real evidence) that we hit a button along the way that caused a problem.

This is sheer idiocy on a scale beyond imagination. It's like putting a small child at the controls of a 747 mid-flight and screaming at him to fix the plane. The result can only be a predictable and stupendous catastrophe in which an arrogant, stupid species causes its own extinction and the extinction of much of the rest of the organized life on this world.

Humans are dumb.

We don't have 130 years on record. We have horribly incomplete records using inconsistent methods and untrained individuals doing the measuring and recording using non-standard devices and at inconsistent and non-standard times up until the 1970s when we started observing things scientifically from orbit with real tools.

The data we have from 1930-1970 is crap. The data we have from before that is vastly worse. Imagine measuring the temperature once since 1912 in a completely random part of the planet and claiming that's the global temperature for the world in the century from 1912 to present. Now take it a few steps worse than that and you have our temperature measuring for the ~500ish years prior to the 1920s. Take a few steps worse and you have our measurements for the ~5000 years before that. Rinse and repeat moving back for the life of the planet. Then compare all that data to the precise, exact measurements compiled into monthly or annual averages for the past ~30 years and raise unholy Hell about any differences which can be observed.

This is not science and it's not scientific, but the ferocity with which those who question it are attacked does bear a striking resemblance to many fundamentalist/extremist religious sects.

Precisely. The issue is not one of people being unwilling to face basic facts. When presented with the basic observed evidence, nearly all people agree that temperatures around the world have risen over the last century.

The problem comes when we go from "we've been observing temperatures at a bunch of locations for the past century and we're seeing an overall trend toward higher temperatures" to "humans are destroying the planet and everything's going to be destroyed and under water in just ten years unless we radically alter all human activity across the planet right this second". Those who question the methodology used to arrive at the second conclusion are typically labeled "deniers" or "idiots" or some other derogatory term and then ignored. Nevermind whatever evidence or valid questions they may present. And when difficult questions arise which cannot so easily be ignored, the two big fallbacks are the trusty "you're not a scientist, all the scientists alive all say the same thing and they're smart and you're dumb!" and the always popular "you're raising the bar again trying to apply the scientific method and actually expecting model results based on hypotheses we already know are right to produce results that remotely resemble reality and OMG WTF BBQ !!!11!1!"

I don't question what is observable. I question results from rigged models that can't function without someone hard-coding much of what leads to the results. I question the ideas behind such models. I question the methodology of core sampling. I question the removal of peaks and troughs for the vast majority of history and then comparing that data to the peaks and troughs observed today. I question the accuracy of measurements taken at monitoring stations where no one with any relevant training was charged with taking those measurements and when the time and tools were not standardized. I question the oversimplification of "oh look, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in my lab where I don't have a functional ecosystem representative of Earth's, a magnetic field representative of Earth's, any representation of most of the kinds of fields, particles, and energy that interacts with the Earth, or any sort of separation between those things and my shitty lab experiment where I removed 99.999999999% of the things that drive the global climate and interact with said carbon dioxide".

Further, I resent the explicit claim that there's a "consensus" among scientists regarding either the source or the result of global climate change and I especially resent the implicit claim that the existence of such a consensus would -in any way- alter the validity of questions raised by any individual, regardless of their educational or employment background. Were we to take such stupidity seriously, people like Srnivsa Rmnujan (a poor child in India with no formal mathematics training who was given an advanced trigonometry book at 10, mastered it by himself by age 12, and went on to do tremendous amounts of new work of his own) and Albert Einstein (a Swiss patent clerk who kinda discovered much of modern physics) would never have been allowed to contribute anything to human society and we, as a species, would be vastly poorer for it. When -anyone-, regardless of their background or qualifications, makes valid points and raises valid questions, anyone interested in scientific truth will listen and will raise their voice to make those points heard and to get real answers to those questions.

I've asked many AGWites what evidence would disprove AGW. The most common answer I get is "nothing, because it's already been proven." Folks, if nothing will disprove what you're claiming, it ain't science; doesn't matter where you got it from. Think about it.

But again, I don't care whether John Huntsman sits at home reading science journals or whether he sits at home thinking about how God created the world 6,000 years ago. As a geek, I care about the policies he'll put in place which will either help or hurt things like science education. If the guy thinks Jesus rode dinosaurs to school, I don't care. If he thinks we should be teaching that in science classes around the country, I have a problem with it. I want to know what a candidate will do if elected to help or harm the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural world; not what they think. What goes on inside their head isn't of any concern to me whatsoever and doesn't affect me or anyone else.

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, but that's the unstated risk one takes when one lends money denominated in the currency of the debtor nation. Were we not the holders of the world's reserve currency, we would not be able to get away with what you're describing. Be that as it may, China (and everyone else lending us money) has implicitly agreed to take the face value of the currency as repayment for the debt and thus we're not technically defaulting.

It's also kind of unfair to say that since the US Federal government controls fiscal policies (i.e. spending) and the Federal Reserve Bank (which is more or less an independent and separate animal from the former) controls the monetary policies driving the US Dollar's inflationary loss of value.

The models are garbage because they're based on terribly incomplete science. That's not the fault of science, but rather the fault of arrogant idiots and grant hounds who need to show extraordinary results to continue bringing in cash so they can show more extraordinary results.

There's nothing anti-science about recognizing when a scientific pursuit - such as understanding the mechanisms that drive the global climate - is in its infancy and requires significant more study before definitive, policy-driving conclusions can be reached. It isn't about being perfect to the day; it's about being accurate enough to know that you have a solid understanding of the fundamental principles behind the process or system you're describing.

Einstein was a scientist; and a good one. Its because of his work that GPS satellites work as well as they do. If he settled for the kinds of results many climate "scientists" do when they warn of dire consequences if we don't make major policy changes, we'd have GPS satellites whose effective resolution would rapidly deteriorate the moment they got into orbit and you'd be sitting here screaming about how I'm a Luddite when I point out that the GPS satellites put in orbit 6 months ago can't even help me determine what state I'm in.

Good science based on understanding of fundamental, driving principles of nature makes specific, accurate predictions. There exists no climate model which does that. The ones that work the best are the ones which have huge amounts of data excluded and replaced with false information and hard, arbitrary constants to help them get closer to historically accurate climate representations. They don't function based on the principles driving the global climate and thus the conclusions drawn from them are worthless.

From the standpoint of any decent scientist, they're absolute shit.