First, what on earth are you on about?

Second, how about we draw a line between "education" (which I'll define as evidence-based teaching, and a good thing) and "indoctrination" (which I'll define as belief-based teaching; not automatically bad, unless it conflicts with evidence).

Third, evidence is evidence. You can ignore it if you like, but it won't go away. And you can make whatever tenuous speculative connections you wish to any bizarro conclusion of your choice, but do keep them out of reach of impressionable children.

A shame the kids themselves don't get a say in their indoctrination & skewed education. I know parents need to make choices on behalf of their kids, but it's not always easy to watch.

Education is mandatory in most countries, regardless of religious beliefs, but I wonder how much control that allows over the curriculum.

Maybe it's the part where he makes unsubstantiated claims of bias and corruption against every scientist ever?

You only have to look back through his post history to see it all stems from his personal (and equally unsubstantiated) belief that AGW is a massive, money-grabbing hoax that all those "so-called scientists" have foisted on the unsuspecting public, no doubt at the prompting of the current liberal gubbermint (you know, despite similar research for 30 years). Seems clear to me that the cynicism resulting from climate science not saying what he wants to hear has spilled over into science in general.

When your only objection is some out-of-context and unsubstantiated quote about one of the reports from an unqualified writer, ignoring the actual substance completely, I naturally thought that meant you felt random opinions were actually important.

I guess they're only important if they say what you want to hear. Never mind the opinions of the respected economists and CEOs on my list (how many politicians can you count?), or the credentials of the reports' authors, or gee, the actual contents of the reports and all that cited data that backs them up, you go straight to the first contrary quote you can find, regardless of the total lack of substance or believability. Who exactly are you trying to convince here?

Wow, what an objection. No wonder you believe the denialists with that kind of genius of your own.

You could just read the Cook 2013 paper for yourself. Even just the abstract - it's pretty clear about that.

Where did you get that idea? In fact, where did you get the figure of 4000 articles endorsing AGW? The original link (Powell's study) makes no mention of that.

Perhaps you're confusing it with Cook et al 2013, which does say that 4,014 of 11,944 papers "expressed no position". Reading the actual study however shows that 0.7% of papers examined rejected AGW and a tiny 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.

Let me repeat: of 11,944 published papers, 66.4% expressed no position on AGW - they concerned themselves only with a specific area of climate science - and no conclusions can be drawn from them. Only 1% felt the evidence was inconclusive OR counter to AGW. Thus, of the papers that did take a position, including that no conclusion was possible yet, 97% supported AGW.

If you've read "analyses" that claim otherwise, they are being deliberately misleading.

Plus of course the half-dozen other studies over the last decade confirm and verify these results.

Which is an opinion from a single writer with no scientific credentials; not exactly a detailed critique. But if lay opinions are important now, here's some much more influential people that support the Stern Report's conclusions:

* Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK
* Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank
* Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency
* Kirit Parikh, Member, Planning Commission, Government of India
* Adair Turner, Former Director of UK Confederation of British Industry and Economic Advisor to Sustainable Development Commission
* Sir Rod Eddington, Adviser to the UK Government on the long term links between transport and economic growth, and former chief executive of British Airways

Already been done.

Do please enlighten us; what "plenty of evidence" do you refer to?

The reason the deniers are in such a minority among actual climatologists is because they have failed to provide convincing evidence to back up their claims, whereas there are many, many studies that show clear and unequivocal evidence of warming, and strong correlation with the calculated result from observed anthropogenic emissions. None of the alternative hypotheses have anything like the same correlation, and have been judged to be far less likely than the obvious candidate: human CO2 emissions.

If someone can provide solid and convincing evidence of a natural cause to the observed warming, then they'll be famous, but nobody has come up with any. If all the "skeptics" can do is attempt to cast patchwork doubts while ignoring that the data that has been confirmed and re-confirmed by multiple other observations of independent indicators, then IMHO they're more deserving of the label "zealot", and it's no surprise that most climatologists tuned them out long ago. The real scientists have seen the actual data; they know better.

So... 4,000 articles explicitly or implicitly agreed that AGW was real - and only 24 articles explicitly or implicitly disagreed. Since the rest did not even address the question, they're not relevant here.

That still sounds like a 99.4% agreement to me. 166 out of 167 climatologists (from a sample of 4024 relevant papers) are convinced by the observed data; human-caused global warming is very real.

Or, much more likely, non-straw-man scenario - trade boycott.

Australian exporters get their contracts cancelled, and Indonesian buyers go elsewhere. Wave goodbye to our third-largest agriculture market and a good chunk of that $14 billion of trade. How business-friendly is that?

All because our Glorious Leader can't bring himself to make even an insincere apology, thus sending the clear message that not only did we spy on them to gain unfair economic advantage, we're proud of it and we'll happily do it again. Would you do business with someone who regularly, illegally, and unashamedly rifled through your office looking at your private files for something to catch you out with?

Don't like proprietary apps on your tablet? Then flash your own choice of completely FOSS rom. CyanogenMod makes a few, and so do many others.

Granted this is (a little) beyond the average user - but the average user *wants* most of those proprietary apps and services; it's just you that doesn't want them (and if it's beyond you as well, you could always pay someone to do it for you).

Well yeah. The Android apps you would miss out on are (only) the ones that are designed to require Google's cloud services specifically (Drive storage, Maps navigation, Google's voice search, Play games syncing etc). No big surprise there.

There are entire categories of apps which don't need any cloud services of course, and many others where the apps are written to use alternative services, or where the bulk of the app is entirely usable even when a given service is unavailable (e.g. when sold through Amazon's app store). In all cases though, it's the developer's decision, and Google's cloud service APIs are completely optional & not part of the base Android framework.

What record? You linked to a blog that picks quotes from a book written by a mining consultant and an economics professor. There's no record visible there - no context, no dates, nothing hard - only someone allegedly repeating claims from authors with obvious agendas, that we can't begin to verify. Oh, and an unreferenced op-ed with loaded language and unproved allegations that gives no actual contrary data, but only raises questions from a known skeptic (Lindzen) while ignoring the opinions of all the other scientists mentioned.

But you go ahead and believe whatever random opinions you like. We'll just stick to the data that's been repeatedly verified in a dozen different ways.