That's a good point, I'll make sure to ask if they have any specific assurances this is not going to happen again.

P.S. in my case the service dropping authentication was not a joke, but perhaps some real discussion can come out of the hopeless noise that is April Fools day.

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Whether we have time to implement some sort of industrial-scale solution to the impending scarcity of water that (A)GW will likely bring so we can keep these new crops alive remains to be seen.

A warming climate means more rain overall (across the globe) as there is more water in the atmosphere.

If one views such issues primarily as energy problems then we may well have something of a.. well, problem on our hands

First of all, a warmer climate also means overall more energy in the system.

Secondly, because of advances in fossil fuel extraction like Fracking, there is no energy problem for anyone that actually needs energy. It's just a matter of the thin veneer of pretending energy doesn't matter to civilization being stripped away, which happens quite rapidly.

These are shown for about 5 seconds of a 20 minute instructional video, and none of them even show an Apple logo.

So in other words, the jurors could easily assume they are Samsung products. :-)

That was, as the quote states, never the real debate. The scientific debate is between those who don't think the rate of increase is harmful, and those who think it is - but time and data have not been kind to the evangelical data-deniers.

It also does not change the fact that climate change of even 2c over 100 years will not make Botswana worse or better for the people who live there. It doesn't matter if it's more arid or more rainy when all your farms have failed and gone fallow, and are maintained in the state on purpose.

Only political change will help.

As for being on the knifes edge, they are way past that. The knife is cutting deep already. Quite a lot of have died.

It's absurd to equate a small shift in temperature over 100 years to an abrupt transition to the vacuum of space. There are lots of reasons to think the first world might send a lot more aid to those countries over the next 100 years, or they simply improve themselves (as some places in Africa are).

You also seem to ignore that most starvation in Africa is caused by politics, not climate issues of any kind. Botswana was a fertle country - without any shift in climate it was changed to a wasteland where people are eating rats (if they can find any left).

You mean This link from the Wall Street Journal giving a more reasoned overview of the report?

The one that people calling others "deniers" are censoring so the world cannot see it?

That is a good link. Good enough to try and bury it would seem.

As is true on both sides, most people arguing have no financial stake.

If you think about it oil companies arguing against global warming is just stupid, because they make as much money from people running AC as they do heat. They also have interest in the alternative energy industry - they see that coming and WILL be making money that way too.

The people mainly engaging in banditry here are the warming alarmists, scooping in government funds or starting "green" companies that snap up government loans then shut down after a few years, after making the founders very rich and of course funneling a percentage to the politicians who voted to give the companies the loans to start with.

Our food crops are all massively bio-engineered.

And you are claiming that with temperature changes of 1-2c over 100 years, there is not enough time to bio-engineer new strains that like it slightly warmer?

it was bred selectively for thousands of years.

Across many different climates, so you can just start growing strains from the climates warmer than the region you are in now - or over 100 years, just create some new strains. 100 years is plenty of time to do so naturally, even if you did want to discount doing so artificially (and frankly I think that's kind of insane given it's a more targeted and quicker change).

there's a LOT of third world and poor countries out there where even a small shift in climate would kill millions.

How do you come to that conclusion - we are looking at a degree or two of change over a HUNDRED YEARS. That's not even enough that plat or animal life would fail to adapt to over five years, much less one hundred.

Mankind especially is very good at adapting to even quite sudden changes in climate, as are animals. They will move between regions, they will adapt to conditions. Areas naturally see drought and wet years over the lifespans of animals, they have to be able to deal with that - so they can also adapt to an overall change as well.

Wow, the climate deniers are out in force on Slashdot today.

Well it's funny you should mention an overwhelming show of force, because I have sure seen a LOT of news outlets promoting this most recent bout of religious warming alarmism.

We already know that the warming we will see is not anything to get excited over (with CO2 levels rising, warming has not gone up much so we know that CO2 does not cause runaway warming as posited).

We also know the alarmist models were all way out of whack in prediction of everything bad - from sea level rise to overall temperature increases, the models have predictive lines formed a decade ago that are far higher than actual measurements we take today.

Here's the part where you can tell real science from SCIENCE, the screaming variety. You see, real scientists upon finding the models aren't working would try to find new models that worked. Instead what we get is louder and louder proclamations that WE ARE ALL DOOMED, DOOMED I SAY.

Here's someone that gives a more reasonable overview of the panicky IPCC report - as he notes, the current report is LESS scary than the IPCC's previous report, yet they are playing it up as if it were worse.

And he has something to say about the use of the term "deniers" - basically you and others are misunderstanding the counter argument at hand:

In climate science, the real debate has never been between "deniers" and the rest, but between "lukewarmers," who think man-made climate change is real but fairly harmless, and those who think the future is alarming.

This is the outlook of a reasonable man, as all of the "deniers" have been - simply because we see no reason to scare others, or divert money from REAL pollution control efforts to attempt to reduce emissions of a basically harmless gas.

The ultimate would be sub-dermal, say on the back of the hand.

Or a ring... it's also in a great position to measure blood flow and more exposed to the world.