That's rather cynical and is oposite of what my experience was. I'm not saying the possibilities were infinite or even large, but my manager encouraged me to express my goals within the organization and to find a way to make it happen with no constraints on my salary. My problem was that I didn't have enough passion to make anything of myself. I ended up going to grad school in Physics (I had a B.S. in Comp Sci) and am currently working on particle track reconstruction and accelerator simulations. That's not to say the OP can't find his passion in a supporting role. There was a lot of cool stuff going on. I was just interested more in the science than in the comp sci part. So my advice is to checkout the national laboratories for job postings.

Your first citation only says that temperatures are lower in the area that was tested. This says nothing about the average temperature of the globe as a whole. I thought this went through the media and was straightened out 6 months ago.

Your second citation, if I'm reading the graph correctly, only lists CO2 levels up until 10,000 years ago! As far as I know there were no industrialized nations 10,000 years ago that were putting unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the air artificially. It is well known that rising temperatures can cause out gassing. That's all this study shows, really. If anything it warns us that if we artificially increase the temperature then there will be a positive feedback loop that will make things worse.

Your third point, though appreciated for it's words of caution, is basically suggesting that computer models are useless because they are tricky. That's ridiculous. It's like saying predictions made by scientific theories are useless because we're not sure that the predictions will be true. The models are made to fit past data and have been tested since they were written and found to be reasonable at least for the short term. You can scoff at that, but there's really nothing else you can ask of these models.

Finally, give me one example of a credible scientist (i.e. not being payed by fossil fuel companies) who has published a peer reviewed article that directly contradicts the general consensus and who has had their career destroyed.

Ah, so they don't understand that you can still use Carbon 14 proportions that are smaller than 1/2 what would be there in a living organism.

That's even better than thinking they pulled the number out of thin air. It's yet more evidence that they don't know what the fuh they're talking about.

Thank you for bringing this up! The -ism was an invention of the IDers in an attempt to make support of evolution into an ideology so that they could fight it on religious fairness grounds.

Many of the comments on the NY Times site are worth reading in this regard. The essay is over reacting and is just feeding into the creationist propaganda that scientists are ideologically equivalent to creationists. Biologists don't use the term, but now everybody thinks they do. Good job!

Control was supposed to be retained by the ruling elite, not the people. Working people have had to struggle from the very beginning against gross inequality between themselves and the rich and powerful. Also, originally one couldn't vote unless one was male and owned property, and much of that property was grabbed by those who were already rich and powerful enough back in England to get away with it.

Furthermore, the Bill of Rights may say it reserves any undelegated power to the states or the people, but can anyone name a single instance where the people actually have a direct say in what happens? The Bill of Rights was more of just a device to placate the masses in order to avoid revolt.

People act like the government has gone horribly astray, but I believe it's just gotten fatter. Our experiment in faux democracy worked quite well for a while; but now that the people have been lulled into a permanent state of complacency, the government has hardly anything to do but become more and more corrupt.

As the article mentions, this policy was easily abused in the past. I frankly don't see any reason to use it except to monitor dissidents. If you have good reason to suspect an individual, I don't see why it's so hard to just get a fucking warrant. It just gives me more of this feeling that the government doesn't even care if we know they're totally fucking corrupt anymore. What the hell are the people going to do about it? Stage a protest in a big city? Oooh, I'm sooo scared!