"Death is just a learning experience"?

AFAIK it wasn't just cocaine, it was also alcohol abuse if I'm not mistaken..

And AFAIK (I'm definitely not an expert) cocaine definitely does do some serious brain damage and is a really different category compared to marijuana.

Marijuana is more like cigarettes, it does damage to your body, it's really stupid to use it, but if it does kill you it will only kill you slowly. AFAIK nobody ever overdosed on marijuana.

Take this with a grain of salt though, coming from somebody who doesn't even smoke or drink (well maybe one or two drinks a year).

But anyway, whatever bushes intelligence is, I believe he was easily manipulatable and manipulated by Cheney et al.
Don't think he meant any harm in anything he did.
Maybe he did, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

That's all just my opinion of course.

Not to start a flamewar or anything. But I can imagine that with all the substance abuse Bush jr. did when he was younger, I can imagine it could've had certain effects on the workings of his brain..

Not to pick sides in this democrat vs republican thing you've got going here, but your previous, republican, president wasn't exactly the epitome of intelligence... yet the democrats are supposedly the stupid ones? ok.

First of all, global warming is a terrible name for the thing, global climate change is a better name.
So in this case, if climate changes, it proves that the climate is changing.

Second of all, even though the temperature might be going up at a -global- level, weather patterns will change differently at different parts of the planet.
At some places it'll get dryer, at other places it'll get wetter.
At some places it'll get warmer, at other places it'll get colder.

Does it make sense to you now?

Well that's definitely convenient for you that if a report doesn't fit into your world view, then it surely must be unscientific!
Just because they made one or two mistakes in a report of more than 3000 pages, doesn't mean anything. That's actually pretty good!
If anything, Climatologists have been complaining that the IPCC reports have been watered down by politicians.

Err.. I'm not sure where you're getting that, but that's bullocks.
That goes completely against everything I've read and heard from experts in the field.

The last time CO2 levels where as high as now was about 15 million years ago,
and sea levels where also about 22 to 36 meters higher.
Global temperature was 5 to 10 degrees Celsius warmer.
I never said anything about "runaway" scenarios.
I did mention that there is a danger that we tip the balance that gave us this ridiculously stable climate for the last 20.000 years, compared to how the climate was before.

So by giving the Australian government more ammunition to pass this piece of legislation, how does this help?

Acted upon by politicians? That's almost a Contradiction in terminis! :)

Yes, that's why there are thousands of pages in IPCC reports..

You know we can start insulting and name calling here, but that won't do any good in any way.

From my point of view I could use the exact same sentence back at you.

As for my "reality has turned out worse than predicted" comment, just look at all the IPCC reports. Every time they release a new report, roughly their worst cases turned out to be the best case in the next report.

Like I said before, science is always a best guess.

If you want a 100% accuracy you'll have to wait until it's too late to do anything, does that sound rational to you?

No, my position is: when you look at the correlation between CO2 and temperature, which records, theories and models suggest to be tied together, and then look at the -huge- increase of CO2 released since the industrial revolution, then you should be worried.

Pot.. kettle?

I'm sure a lot of people who didn't believe in it before believe it now. What's your point?

Well I think this is mainly because we seem to have a short time frame to take any meaningful action. People get emotional when they think time is running out and people aren't listening or simply don't want to listen.

It's gotten to the point where talking about climate change is almost a religious discussion.

Most seem to disagree with him: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

So you're assuming that climatologists don't make observations, don't form hypothesis which they then peer review? Are you for real? There's more to climatology than just "a model" As for validation, the models that climatologists have been using have not been correct over time, that's true. Reality, so far, has turned out to be worse than predicted. (and no one cold winter doesn't mean anything about -global- temperature) Besides all that, what you expect? Double blind tests? We only have one world! Science is always about best guesses, and this is our best guess. To ignore and belittle it is unwise to say the least.

In a sense, when comparing climatology to meteorology, it is. Because at a global level you can determine, roughly, what the heat input and output is. And when you take that into account, anything you do from then on is essentially a closed system. At a local level -nothing- is isolated. That's why climatologists are way more certain about global trends compared to local trends. I may not have been correct to the letter when I said that, but I'm certainly correct in what I was trying to convey.

That these models have no predictive power is your opinion. These models where designed to make an attempt at predicting the future of climate with the current day knowledge, so these are actually a best guess at what's to come. Can we ask for anything more? And don't confuse with predicting global temperature change with predicting the weather. Local changes are harder to predict than global changes, since the world as a whole is, sort of, a closed system.

Good advice, maybe you should take your own.

Keep in mind that journalists don't always convey what the scientific community is trying to say very accurately. I'll try to explain it to you. In the last 20.000 the climate has been really stable, ridiculously stable compared to the climate before that. Before the temperature would go up and down like a roller coaster ride, I'm not talking about centuries here, I'm talking about periods of decades to years The thing that keeps climatologists up all night is that the numbers strongly suggest that human activity seems to bringing us back to this unstable climate. Why is that bad? Well it would, for example, make modern agriculture extremely challenging, and feeding the world would become more and more difficult over time.

And it looks like the propagandists are getting better and better at their game. And you fell for it.

Are you kidding? Climate science goes way back to at least a hundred years ago!

The problem is that the "debate" is 99.99% among the people who have no background in the material (or worse; have a reason to bring confusion into the 'debate'), and then make all kinds of bold claims without working through the details.

No, that's actually the best understood part of Climatology, and it's not "up in the air" at all. Did you know the greenhouse theory is already more than a 100 years old?

DRM, nowadays at least, isn't so much about piracy but more about killing the used games market. Of course they'll tell you it's about piracy, but it really isn't

Why do Americans (most? I don't know, that's my impression anyway) when they throw up socialism, communism, marxism and even with nazism, they usually seem to have absolutely no clue what they're talking about. Didn't they get this topic at school? (Horrible teachers?) Or is this is because of decades of anti-soviet propaganda? Not intended as flame bait, just honestly wondering why. disclaimer: I do not belong to any of the above political groups ;o)

No it's not foolish, it's short term thinking. The same kind of short term thinking which is the norm in, oh, just about everything we've been doing the last 20 years or so. It gave us such wonderful things as the financial crisis, our addiction to oil and the continued destruction of the eco system we actually happen to live in. Okay.... I take that back, it IS foolish