I was relying on the headlines/summaries you wrote in the post. If your summaries don't show any indication of being on topic then why would I read the articles?

I've done plenty of reading and I don't recall prominent climate scientists making alarmist predictions about the current time frame. You can always find the random person who said something dumb (or poorly expressed) but the scientific consensus has never talked about catastrophes in this time frame.

And I didn't say there was a consensus we were past a tipping point, I said we might be and some people thought we were (or that passing it was unavoidable). But that's completely irrelevant to the discussion about current weather catastrophes.

Seriously dude, the claim was climate scientists were making dire predictions of imminent catastrophes.

I countered that they forecast the catastrophes for decades in the future, and the imminent part was the tipping point.

You responded with a list of climate scientists warning about an imminent tipping point. I don't see how your list proves me wrong.

But those predictions are all completely consistent with eachother and what I was saying.

In '89, we got about 10 years before some stuff becomes irreversible.

Come 2000+, now a bunch of stuff is irreversible.

They aren't saying we're going to see major effects in the next couple years, but we are probably past the point and we're going to see major effects in the future (though they'll probably be mitigated if we start reducing).

So what I see is a quote by a single scientist of unknown reputation, referring to an unspecified portion of Britain in the near future getting little enough snow so that they'll have a different cultural experience of winter. It was certainly an ill-advised quote and sounds extreme but he might have seen exactly the result he expected.

So? Growing seasons have changed, that's fairly well documented. And he doesn't give a timeframe for Wales having no permanent snow cover.

The others are more of the same, the only one that might make a prediction about the current timeframe is the first and even then it's not clear exactly what he's talking about.

I'm also unclear what this has to do with the claim

None of them give a date of 2000 or make any mention of a tipping point.

Cite? I've generally heard 2020s or 2030s but that might be true and they might have been right. For all we know we're already past the tipping point and are going to get hit no matter what.

Yeah, you're only the 2nd highest gross emitter responsible for ~18% of the worldwide emissions (and probably a lot more of the cumulative emissions already there). You're practically a nation of vegan hippies!

1) Nobody is claiming that climate doesn't change - the debate is over the source(s) of that change.

I still see lots of people claiming that it's mostly due to the urban heat island.

Well AGW theory promises problems like flooding, and preparing for AGW can help us mitigate or even reduce those problems.

As for your skepticism over the theories, the only way to truly prove the models correct is to wait for the consequences to happen, and at that point it might be too late to act.

For a country the size of the US $1 billion is minuscule, even if the skeptics were right and the science was shoddy group think and the models were wildly inaccurate, the potential size of the problem is so big that this would still be a good investment.

Maybe, but perhaps it's the purpose of the experiment and they make up for it with an awesome afterlife, which sounds like 'god works in mysterious ways' except in this case god might be a grad student.

Depends what they're interested in, we'll run simulations of proteins that take months to simulate a few microseconds.

Most of our games only render the part of the game world that the user is actively interacting with, why wouldn't they do the same? If we're the point maybe the moon as a fully rendered object only existed when we were walking on it.

Maybe, but if we are living in a simulation maybe the real world has characteristics that change the question.

Maybe the real world has deities that are regularly and obviously involved with the running of the reality and our universe is the results of an experiment that says "what happens if there are no visible gods?"

Or maybe they're mostly happily atheistic and they're wondering what would happen if people were given a more superstitious nature.

Maybe they're energy beings wondering what would happen if you change the laws of physics to allow these massive fireballs they called stars to form, and we're some kind of weird phenomena that's popped up in the simulation. Our consciousness isn't really a feature of our universe but a flaw the simulation that they don't notice because in the real world consciousness is a phenomena that occurs everywhere and is easily explainable.

If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.

I can recall a lot of sports broadcasts where the announcers mention how an athlete has made an adjustment to their technique, sometimes trying to get better results, sometimes working with new equipment. It's not that uncommon but they usually do it at the start of the season.

Making a change that requires a change a month before the Olympics, that is uncommon and obviously a bad idea.

It's not telling them to change their form, it's just that if the new material feels different it might throw off their form. They're not changing anything, but they might have to get used to something that feels slightly different.

I don't think that's anything new for a top athlete, they're constantly refining their equipment and technique, but doing it that close to the games is a bad idea.

As a guy who understands the effects of cold temperatures I'm going to say that's a bad idea for the winter Olympics.

As person of either gender who watches the games I'm going to say that's a bad idea for the winter Olympics.

FTA:

The vent thing if true could be an R&D screwup but the form effect might be more important. Maybe the suits are great but have a different feel and response and that affected their technique. Depending when in January they got the suits that might not have been enough time to tweak their form.

Well if Darwin wasn't a Sedaris fan he sure didn't know what he was missing.

Why couldn't the manufacturer set up dealerships with the ability to respond to their local communities? Why couldn't they improve on the efficiency by analyzing data on the large scale? If the local dealership model is that much superior why don't the manufacturers embrace it without the aid of legislation?

It might be that forcing manufacturers to use 3rd party dealerships is somehow better for the economy as a whole and ends up better for the manufacturer as well by forcing them away from irrational actions but it's a fairly interventionist conclusion.