Interesting, the theory of AGW was rejected for the same reason up until the 1950's, the narrow CO2 bands were said to be overlapped by the broad H20 bands thus "cancelling out" any warming from CO2. Work on infrared technology for heat seeking missiles lead to higher resolutions that showed the bands were interleaved rather than overlapped (as expected).

......you're in more dire need of a blow job than any white man in history. - Robin Williams.

Martian methane plumes have been observed remotely, they appear to be a localised seasonal phenomena. It's not known if biology or geology is the source, I believe the rover was supposed to do isotopic analysis of the methane to determine if it was biological in origin. The fact they can't find any methane at all is odd, and we all know that the phrase "that's odd" has lead to some amazing discoveries.

I've followed climate science for a long time and it's interesting to note that the methane cycle on Earth is also poorly understood and notoriously difficult to model with confidence. It's a genuine problem in climate modelling that is fiercely debated in the community, but for some reason climate "skeptics" rarely (if ever) mention it.

The name change isn't due for a few centuries, astronomers still think it's funny.

There's some pretty good volume estimates based on declassified sonar maps from the cold war, volume is now roughly 1/5th of what it was when I was born in the late 50's.

Since when has a retail electricity supplier ever needed an excuse to jack up prices? Excuses are for losers like you.

The market does not assume the rules, it IS the rules.
A "market" is not a building, it's a set of rules governing trade, therefore a market free of regulation is an oxymoron.
If anyone can play the market then it's a "free" market.

Spiral arms are shock waves. The stars themselves don't move with the wave, they are created by it.

Yep, a lot of bad management comes from the fact that people project their own morals and behaviour onto others. It normally mellows with age and experience, but sometimes it hardens and you end up becoming just another scrooge.

At the end of the day the number of hours you work needs to be enough to keep the company profitable and everyone employed. If you're young and ambitious, then working long hours for a unprofitable company is a dead end career path, so much so that by the time you're 40 you want to get out of the industry. I saw that as the path back to the blue collar hell I came from. At 55 I can claim with some credibility that I successfully avoided it. My contract says 37.5hr/w, I'm very flexible but insist that any variance in hours is an (unpaid) two way street. I prefer to work from home and manage tasks via email but I also realise regular human contact is required 2-3 times a week just to keep the 25-30 people in our playground on "the same page". Meetings can be demoralising, but not as demoralising as beavering away for a week or two on something that will never be used.

Note to self - fuck up the first task on Monday morning.

Baby boomer here. The word you were looking for is "won't", not "can't". The only reason you work for 100hrs and get paid for 40hr is because your still too young to tell the boss "no" and remain employed. Also at your age I had a real job out at sea that involved heavy manual labour and 35hr shifts with a 30min break every 5hrs. Now go do something useful and stop bragging about how you're being ripped off by the boss, it makes you look silly.

Yes, a good manager shields his team from the rest of the company.

Sure you can grab someone else but as someone who has hired more than a few developer's I must say I've never seen anyone come up to speed in a dev job in under 3months. More often it's 6 months before they know enough to be useful.

Churning devs to find those desperate enough to put up with that sort of crap will hurt the company a lot more than it will hurt the individual devs. Tell the boss why you're leaving and tell all your co-workers too. They may not agree that the ship is sinking but they will remember your warning when it does.

There are plenty of reasons to plant trees, but they can only ever play a minor global role as a carbon sink, even if you plant fast growing softwoods and bamboo, there simply isn't anywhere near enough unused space left on the planet to cope with our emissions.

The maths is simple, the Earth's life support systems can "scrub" about 2-3Gt of worth of carbon emission/year, we currently emit 10-12Gt/yr. Considering trees are not the largest carbon sink in the system, increasing forested area is a GoodThing(TM) but it's not a silver bullet wrt AGW. I like the idea of carbon credits, but to obtain them you should be able to point to a block of sequestered carbon, it it's much too difficult to measure what a living forest emits/absorbs to know what effect it is having as a living carbon sink. For example many types of forests (including the amazon) actually emit a net excess of CO2 when stressed by drought.