As far as I understand, there are no federal rules regulating voting in federal elections. Each state has a certain number of electoral delegates which they can dispose of however they like; electors are in fact not even required (by federal laws) to select the candidate chosen by popular vote in their state. They merely do so by convention, or in some cases according to state laws. In practice this means any state could implement a system of proportional representation of their electors (i.e., if ~40% of the people in California voted for someone, ~40% of the electors would cast their votes for the person). Similarly for voting mechanisms, and voting machines, I believe. If you wanted to impelement, say, an approval voting process, you'd have to do it state-by-state. Which seems both bad and good; harder to get the whole country doing it, but easier to convert one state.

What bad data are you talking about? The temperature record? The CO2 record? Both of those are fairly open datasets. Are you talking about data from, say, 1986 not being available? Is that really surprising? How much stuff do you have left from 1986? Scientists aren't always completely diligent about keeping around old data, little imagining that 20 years later some jackass who thinks they're guilty of (20-year sustained and multiply sourced) conspiracy is going to come around and ask for it.

The environment IS changing; this is observed fact. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is significantly higher, not only compared to what it has been historically, but going back prehistorically over many ice ages. Isotope ratios easily confirm that most of the increase is due to anthropogenic sources (carbon in the ground in petroleum, etc., differs from carbon in the biosphere). This is a good graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

So: we've already got a massive increase in a significant greenhouse gas, and humans are to blame. Now the ONLY remaining question to consider is: do I believe in greenhouse gases? Well, do ya, punk?

I'm not familiar with the relevant debate - link?

But the real question, for me, would be - WAS the rebuttal satisfying? Because that's what actually matters - how does the science stack up? And as far as I've ever seen, when it comes down to the science, AGW wins, hands down.

Are you serious? Maybe you should ask some Australians; they've had a drought for fifteen years. Maybe you should ask some Indians; if the Himalayan glaciers DO disappear, the water source for their major river system, responsible for a huge part of their agriculture, will dry up with it. Maybe you should ask some South Americans, who face the same issue with glacial melt. Maybe you should read about the effect increasing ocean acidification has on coral bleaching, and the resulting devastation to all sorts of marine wildlife.

Or maybe you should display zero intellectual curiosity and write this off as "a bunch of guys arguing".

I did not suggest that it negates the practical applications of logic; the GP, however, implies that with logic you can develop everything else. That is false; even empiricism (the basis of science) is outside the range of what just logic can do for you. It's a powerful tool, but it is by no means sufficient.

Mod this guy up. You CANNOT prove mathematics, Godel demonstrated that. Therefore I say the practical art is much more important - math and science itself.

If your (GP's) goal is to teach people how to think (which I presume it is based on your love of logic), it's better for them to learn to think analytically than to think rigorously. Rigor is fine in some contexts, but learning how to break down a problem into tractable pieces is a much better general skill.

Actually, this is not true. The material the US government produces is not copyrighted, it is in the public domain (domestically, anyway). This means there is NO copyright holder and therefore no possibility of any license agreement with them.

If the data doesn't fit your theory, the problem is most likely neither with the data (which is fine) nor with your theory (which may also be fine) but with the method you used to produce your data. You probably wired in an incorrect resistor, forgot to close a parenthesis in your Perl code, forgot to add the correct amount of EDTA to your reaction, etc. Then your results ended up looking like shit, and not surprisingly. Doing science is hard.

There's no need to postulate any grand conspiracies or take pot-shots at science in general. This paper is examining real people doing real shit. Most of the time we fuck up, and we're not smart enough to figure out where we made the error.

Yeah, mod parent up. Given the unmitigated disaster we're experiencing right now with regards to large-scale ecological destruction from our PASSIVE tampering with various natural processes, why do we think we've got the brains to get it right when we mess around with things actively? Given the history of large-scale government-controlled projects to alter land use and agriculture patterns in Russia (and China, where they're also trying weather modification), I would think they'd be a bit more cautious about stuff like this. Hubris knows no bounds, apparently. And has no memory.

It's not ironic, it's the old use of the word "liberal", as in, "free", as in "free market". A "liberal" in the old parlance is someone who favors laissez-faire economic policies and limited government. You know, what we call a conservative here in the states. Now we call this "libertarian" but the etymology is the same.

Okay, so take me through this:

This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido. They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.

In other words, they're comparing the INPUTS required to run a car to the OUTPUTS from a hectare of land - isn't this an apples to oranges comparison? They should really be comparing how much energy it takes to produce a hectare's worth of crops (i.e., how many fuel equivalents are consumed in the car and by the dog). This seems a big error in the computation. Also, the thing just doesn't pass the smell test. In all other carbon footprint calculators I can find, food is a smaller fraction of the footprint for an average person compared to driving & flying - often less than half or even a third as much. So if an adult human consumes less energy via food than they do in a car, are you telling me that a dog somehow consumes four to six times more food than an adult human? That a cat does? This sounds like a load of bullshit to me.

What the heck? Look, I'm as nutty of an environmentalist as they come, but the fact is that society depends on cars, and will for at least the short-term future. People need to commute, go on vacation, etc. More importantly, goods and services need to be delivered across long distances. We NEED non-polluting transportation technologies.

And, while it's true that sports cars are basically toys for the rich, I really wish you'd take more time to consider what exactly is going on here. Tesla, for example, didn't decide to build the Roadster as a sports car because they wanted to build fancy toys. They did it because that was the only economically viable way to construct a futuristic, non-polluting electric car in the near future. They've succeeded in creating some amazing technology that, yes, is right now being used in a fancy toy for rich people. But now that they've done that, they can move on to creating more accessible, down-to-earth models for regular people which will ease the burden on the environment. See the Model S.

No, it's not everything, but it's something. And right now, we desperately need a lot more something.

Basically, you're incorrect.

It's fairly clear that we're the cause of an extreme extinction event (see Holocene Extinction event), and while it might not be the worst (which goes to the Permian-Triassic event), it is certainly dramatic and might win in terms of rate (number of species disappearing per year). So, yes, humans are an abnormal influence on the planet, and in this context (introducing exospecies into a fragile environment), it's certainly relevant to separate the human influence from the norm (say, the previous hundred million years of evolution). Although Australia is probably a strange case, since we've screwed it up repeatedly in our various waves of invasion and re-invasion.

As for extremophiles, yeah, we probably can't kill all life on the planet. That's why I said "has a fair chance".

Well, I suppose this is marginally interesting, but poor methodology really makes this paper mean very little for me. For example, check out this brilliant passage:

These results did not reflect our expectations, as they put a lot more importance on gameplay and environment in relation to other categories than we had expected. We suspected the complexity of the categories was causing this,with some categories encompassing far more criteria than others, making them far more likely to be mentioned than others with relatively few criteria. In a rough attempt to overcome this, the count was divided by the number of criteria for each category.

In other words: "We didn't like the result we got, so we massaged the data until we got something we liked, and called that our method."