My favourite quote from the book was,
“Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

I feel like that was one of the main themes of the book, which I only read a couple of years ago.

I grew up hearing about how Farenheit 451 was a dystopian authoritarian state-control type story. I was completely surprised by the prominent role of individual agency and the poetry of the prose. The value of the book is completely lost in the "Coles Notes Version" (or the summary your friend gave you) because a good portion of the work is conveyed through the deliberate use of specific language.

I think you might be posting to the wrong audience.

The average highly-trained adult human can give the impression of higher than normal intelligence, even though they are fundamentally the same fumbling child they always were. They may say "insightful" or "interesting" things but are simply imitating something they read or heard somewhere else. The interesting thing is that they don't even fully realize that some of their contemporaries possess orders of magnitude more capacity.

If you are a programmer and can see the myriad of possibilities inherent in every state we occupy then you should be able to harness those few days of inspired capacity to create solutions for the crowd that they didn't know they needed.

You might end up still unemployed but you also stand a chance of realizing one of your many dreams, despite the bitterness.

While "you reap what you sow" may be true to some extent, the concept of a just world is generally used as a way to build an illusion of safety. For example:
The woman who gets raped was asking for it. If we are morally chaste, nobody in my family is likely to be raped.
The person who is poor simply isn't working hard enough. As long as I work hard, I will never be poor.

That reminds me of the All Children Are Gifted diatribe.

Yes you've got a valid point -- procurement in government is just as broken as the overall IT infrastructure. On the other hand, if someone isn't willing to raise a stink and put their job on the line to prevent a disaster of that nature, they don't deserve to call themselves a public servant. The "lowest bidder" is not the same thing as the "best value", and you have to be willing to fight for what's right.

I recognize you! You work for the [insert government here] ITS department down the hall from my office. You and your just adequate, barely competent colleagues are the reason I'm stuck with a brand new, yet somehow still limping, T520 that takes four minutes to start. You are the reason I can't "exceed the level of my cluster". You are the barrier to innovation. The attitude you just espoused is the reason our monolithic organization is stuck in the stone age. How is it that you guys can take five years and one billion dollars to develop an application that is buggy, user un-friendly, doesn't do the job it's supposed to, and cripples the department it's supposed to be helping by eating their entire IT budget. You and your colleagues have never heard of Brooks' law, are complacent, risk averse, and unimaginative. I hate you.

What observed increases in temperature?

As tantalizing as your comments may be, in this case they serve to undermine the scientific understanding of climate change and perpetuate confusion on a highly contentious topic that is already fraught with misinformation. The very fact that you *do* write in a grammatically correct, measured, and seemingly well considered manner lends credibility to what you are saying. You readers are likely not aware that you believe "whether [you are] right or wrong on specific details isn't what matters" and may take what you say at face value. It's a noble goal to get people interested in this very important subject; however, your apparent propensity for ignoring the facts in favour of presenting an appealing argument is only helping to further polarize the issue.

There is no anthropogenic hypothesis. That argument is a red herring and a perfect example of a tragedy of the commons. Just because your actions alone do not influence climate, that does not mean it is inconceivable for the collective efforts of humanity to influence climate. The Northern Atlantic cod fishery collapse is a contemporary example of the phenomenon. But to address your question:

The Earth has well known indicated and inferred reserves of coal, gas, and oil. They are not currently part of the short term carbon cycle. As we oxidise these reserves, we add a known quantity of carbon to the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been measured over several decades, and has been increasing. If the carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere, the Earth has to warm (physics). Up to this point, I have been stating facts that you--personally--can verify in your kitchen; the hypothesizing begins here:
1. Is there a mechanism that can offset the heating or buffer the carbon dioxide?
2. Is there a mechanism that can remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

The falsifiable, hypothetical answer to those two questions is "no". Our best understanding of climate does not offer any obvious short term carbon sinks or heat sinks. If you want to put a time-scale on it, the Ocean could potentially buffer the atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide on the order of maybe 1000 years. Unless another buffer exists, significant consequences should manifest in the next 50-100 years.

The PETM is relevant to contemporary climate change because the changes occurred over a geologically rapid 20,000 years. The recovery is estimated to have taken 120,000 to 170,000 years. The resolution of climate proxies for that time period is coarse enough to allow for a fairly large error, so maybe the perturbation took 100 years or maybe it took 100,000 years.

I wouldn't use the word "balanced" to describe the numerous mass extinctions and drastic changes to the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans. Since the biology, chemistry, physics, and geology of the Earth is all connected in one big system, there is always a response and often a "buffering" effect, but that doesn't mean that sudden, catastrophic changes haven't happened over and over and over in the past.

While vulcanism is sometimes associated with climate changes (e.g. at the Permian-Triassic boundary), there is no evidence to suggest unusual volcanic activity around the time of the PETM. Researchers generally believe the changes were too rapid to be explained by this mechanism. A popular contemporary theory involves the catastrophic release of methane hydrates from ocean sediments on the continental slope possibly combined with a global conflagration and the oxidation of terrestrial organic carbon. This may have happened fairly quickly and that's why the PETM is interesting.

Estimates of the carbon addition to the atmosphere range from about 2500 to over 6800 gigatons (by comparison, today's atmosphere contains maybe 820 gigatons of carbon). The changes occurred rapidly and the consequences were dramatic.

The Wikipedia entry for the PETM has more information and links to the references my statements are based on. I'm not disagreeing with the spirit of your comment, but please get your facts straight before posting. Your comment was modded to 5 interesting and contains extremely misleading information.

Here's the link to the experiment

You've made a good point, albeit on shaky ground. For example, we know that some climate cycles can occur over years or decades; some over millennia. Even the ones we know about we don't know exactly how they work. It is entirely plausible that there is a climate cycle at work of which we are completely unaware. However; I think this might be a bit of a red herring, and here's why:

Carbon dioxide traps "heat". That is a physical property of the gas and you can prove it to yourself using a simple experiment. We strongly believe that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has always been correlated with temperature. The question about time scales is relevant because we do not know how the Earth will respond to the contemporary rapid increase in CO2. If the Earth was a simple uni-variable system like the soda bottle experiment, it would certainly heat up; however, biogeochemical systems are often self-regulating, so that means that maybe the oceans will absorb the carbon dioxide, or maybe plants will grow bigger, etc.

So you're on the right track. Maybe 100 years will go by and all the carbon will be absorbed into a known (or hereto unknown) "sink". This is a risk management issue, so do the soda bottle experiment and decide for yourself.

Yes, but once we're done with the fossil carbon we've still got a long way to go before we get all that pesky carbonate out of the crust and back into the atmosphere where it belongs. Join the United Hadean-Earth Restoration Front today!

I hope you are being serious, because those are actually important questions and strike at the core of the science (not the politics) of Global Warming.

Sea surface temperature is a good global thermometer and was first systematically recorded during the Challenger Expedition from 1872-1876. Read "135 years of global ocean warming between the Challenger expedition and the Argo Programme" for more detail.

The simple answer is: Yes, there could be a 70 year trend we are missing. The El Nino cycle was arguably only first described in detail in 1969, so it is possible there are other trends we do not know about.

There are temperature paleo-proxies that can be used as thermometers for the deep past. Some examples include sediment cores, ice cores, corals, tree rings, and leaf remains which provide a variety of information about the climate based on stable isotopes and other indicators. Ice cores give us a continuous record going back hundreds of thousands of years, while other proxies give incomplete records from millions of years in the past. I encourage you to challenge the validity of these proxies and learn about stable isotope fractionation.

The atmosphere contains about 820 Pg of carbon, approximately 0.04% by volume. Each year, the net flux of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuels and land use changes is estimated at approximately 4.1(±0.04) Pg -- only 0.5% increase per year.

While the Earth's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide has a disproportionately large effect on controlling temperature. To prove it to yourself, you can do a physical experiment with two soda bottles and some alka-seltzer. We are measurably the cause of a small net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (see above); however, if you want to be sceptical you should ask whether that short term increase will lead to a long term temperature change.

I have always wondered about that myself, and the traditional answer is that it has a low residence time in the atmosphere. I do not know how thoroughly this has been reviewed.