It's cold in Canada in the winter? Well butter my buns and call me Shirley!

There's been plenty of warmth in November and into December, including in Canada. Also, please remember the difference between weather and climate. Blurring the two sure is a religion for the denialists.

Well, there has been an increase since the 90s, but there are two things: (1) the increase isn't as big as it was, but it's still happening and (2) 1998 was such an extreme year that if you use it as an beginning point, you will see a flatter trend. The actual temperature trend, and the proxies, such as sea ice, glaciers, etc. continue to show a steady warming trend. The fact that it snowed in DC is irrelevant, nor is the fact that there are shorter term (on the order of a decade or two) warming and cooling trends driven by regional oscillations that don't really make a big difference in the long-term climate trends.

The article's headline is "Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium". You could have read that before mouthing off, but you chose not to. What does that say about you?

> If the sun isn't the major driver of temperature then why is it colder at night?

They said that solar variability is not a major driver of climate change trends in the past century. Nowhere are they denying the sun plays a role in temperatures and weather.

> Also why isn't the effect of carbon dioxide cumulative? How can we have colder years ... shouldn't every year have to be warmer than the past?

Why would you expect it to be such a simple trend? We're talking about a non-linear dynamic system, not heating up food in a microwave.

> Somewhere, there are people who took the science out of science --- maybe to argue with religious people or something --- but this social consensus crap isn't how real science is done.

Yes, it's your friends in the denial industry, not those doing the actual research.

Variations in solar output are not a major driver for the last century. That's what the article's about. It's clear you can't be bothered to read it because you already know the answer, spoonfed to you, no doubt, by the well-funded (http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/billion-dollar-climate-denial-network-exposed/) denialist industry.

Grasping at straws indeed. This is the map for November, and you're telling me that the AGW folks are grasping at straws?

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-percentile-mntp/201311.gif

I'm not sure how you can argue that "INSERT INTO foo VALUES (bar)" is anything other than a command to do something. The subpieces of DML may be declarative, but then again, to some extent, so are big groups of mathematical operations in C (if they don't have side-effects).

I keep seeing these quotes from Linux fanbois about those difficult and counter-intuitive wizards on Windows, but I've never encountered any issue of significance when installing drivers on Windows, and most stuff really does work out of the box (also generally true on modern Ubuntu and halfway modern hardware, but wasn't true even a few years ago). I mean, I'm sure there are some pieces of hardware that misbehave or create issues on any OS, but I really have a tough time believing clicking next through wizards for a few minutes or maybe downloading a special patch or version is in any way harder than grabbing Git versions of drivers and compiling them yourself, or having to remember the Magic SysRq key sequences to reboot when that last modprobe fucked up your video card.

Chrome is becoming a bloated piece of shit too. It used to start up quickly and load pages quickly. That's going out the window in my experience. They are also starting to have bugs that never resolve, or take a long time to resolve. One that's been bothering me recently is that YouTube videos playing in other tabs skip when you do pretty much anything in another tab. It's 2013 and it can't play sound properly under a modicum of load. Ridiculous.

That is incorrect. It has nothing to do with "would", but rather an alternative form of "will" which was "wol", quite common in Middle English (Chaucer uses it a lot).

The ECMWF model is fairly beefy. It's almost American in how many extra layers and grid details it has (bigger is better!). It runs on good hardware and has good data assimilation. It still screws up with regularity, but it's not as bad as the American models. It's not clear that the methodology is significantly different, though. The model uses the same kind framework as the American and other global models. That is, it's not built spectacularly differently, or in a way that signifies that a different underlying philosophy was used.

Uhh, the site linked is not in any way an AGW denialist site, and the article actually refutes a standard claim from the deniers that there was some global cooling craze in the 70s.

I've never read any linguistics book that says anything other than what I wrote above. They all explicitly mention that High German is called such because it came from the higher terrain of Germany.

There's no relevant to what you've said about there being different varieties of low German. That was never in dispute and is not, in fact, in dispute. I even mentioned it in my post.

Don't let the current distribution of dialects fool you. Historically, places like Muenster would have been solidly low German. Once East Central German became the prestige dialect, it spread and supplanted the other dialects, even in the north. The same thing happened in France, where historically, what we now call French was in fact a minority language from the areas around Paris.

High and low refer to terrain and not prestige. Low German languages were spoken in the lowlands along the North Sea coast, and high German languages were spoken much further inland. High German is traditionally further split into central and upper dialect groups, with the upper groups being in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, and central being in between those places and the lowlands. It should be noted that low German languages include Dutch and also English, which derives from an amalgam of Saxon and some other low German dialects (dialects at the time, though everything is now separate languages). English and Dutch are certain prestige languages, but still low Germanic.

Platt Deutsch == Low German. I've never seen any indication that these are anything other than synonyms. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German

I was using "dialect" here to refer to different varieties of continental west Germanic (that is, everything except Danish, which is north Germanic). I should have used the word "language" as that was my intent. Sorry for the confusion.