Well, but they might reasonably object that little ice ages are not the same as melting ice shelves? A short term drop in temperature is different to a rapid rise in temperature - assuming that the shelves are breaking up due to increased temperatures

I agree that it is unwise to pass opinion as fact, especially in climate change science.

One problem is the question : "what is natural?". The assumption (I think) is that the change is happening too fast to be natural. Or, more exactly, the change is faster than previously observed. Obviously, we haven't watched ice shelves for millions of years, but I suppose that there are ice core records

Personally, I don't want the ice to melt - whether it is faster than normal or not - but you could claim that there is a non-human ('natural') cause. The difficulty as always is to find this other cause...

Well, "OH THE COINCIDENCE!", really.

Except, ads are targeted, so "OH THE CORRELATION!" is more like it.

It's well known that the Lord was a 80th level Paladin, and did triple damage against the undead.

Ooh. For an impressive commercial option, consider 3D zeolites with WebGL :

http://web.chemdoodle.com/demos/iza-zeolite-explorer

(May require ffx or chrome, doesn't load in safari)

Unplug the computer, it's the only way to be sure!

Really? I do a lot of desktop and server java, but not much applet development. It's not great, and I expect that if you want to do animations, music and that, there are better tools for producing flash versions.

That may change in the near future. In my area, applets are often used for simple chemical structure editors, but there are some commercial and free/open-source javascript solutions for this. Even 3D molecular viewers, like twirlymol:

http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2009/01/twistymol-is-dead-long-live-twirlymol.html

There are many advantages, such as better page integration, no startup time, no "install java" popup, etc.

I would have said that it would be more convincing if "Al Gore" wasn't always preceded with "Reverend". Unless I'm mistaken, he's not a priest.

Hitler was not a mass murderer at the age of 5. If a divine being knows the fate of a child is to be a dictator, then there is no free will.

You know that burning straw men in arguments is very bad for climate change, right?

Heh. "In shock news today, the lawyers of a prominent games company invaded Poland at the head of a large army of tanks..."

Well one good example of generally used academic software is RasMol, and it's (spiritual) successor, Jmol. RasMol started as a project by Roger Sayle as part of a PhD on graphics software, but became the main free viewer for macromolecular structures.

Jmol has taken the idea of a viewer much, much further and is even used by mathematicians to show surfaces. It now supports translucent surfaces for orbitals, a complex scripting language like a subset of javascript, and reads a large number of file formats. It has been used in 3D caves, may come to Android in the near future, is used on wikipedia, and tons more.

The strange thing is that the project has gone through a number of 'owners' from the original author. the current one - Robert Hanson - is only the latest 'Doctor', in the metaphor of 'Dr Who' of Peter Murray-Rust. He publishes papers on his work with Jmol, just as the other Dr.s did : Dan Gezelter, Bradley A. Smith, Egon Willighagen, etc. So it is both open source and publishable, which are both important

Bah! I've tried to read code that was auto-translated from fortran to c. (Also, I was walking uphill to work both ways! :)