Did you not RTFA? They had 3,146 responses from Earth scientists of whom 82% said yes to the anthropogenic climate change question, and "In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer reviewed papers on the subject of climate change". Why are you making baseless claims about 'select few persons' and 'select few publications'? What's 'select' about it, apart from actually asking people who know the most about the subject rather than Johannesburg plumbers, Sydney waiters or slashdot posters?

Oh screw it. If you want to believe that when you survey climate scientists they magically overwhelmingly agree when in there is really secretly no consensus, that's up to you. If you want me or anyone else to believe that, bring your own data to support it.

Um... the question was about whether scientists who study climate are in agreement or not. So I cited a survey that shows that yes, very clearly they are for any reasonable definition of 'agreement' (oh, and meterologists study weather not climate. If you don't know the difference between the two or why they're distinct then you should go look it up).

If you have a problem with the N then I suggest you take a statistics class or two. If you don't, then can you rephrase your problem with the data in a way that is comprehensible?

In answer to the question "do you think human activity is a significant
contributing factor in changing
mean global temperatures?" 75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes.

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

To the AC: keep posting, though. As Goebbels said, a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.

The critical thing you have there is that you are calculating the average velocity, not the fraction that is trotting along at > 2.65km/s. That will be e^(- (2.65km/s / 400m/s)^2), or about 1 in 1e19 methane molecules will have escape velocity. In the case of H2 that'd be a full 0.3% of molecules having escape velocity.

The actual loss rate will depend on a few other things, such as the mean free path of the molecules (i.e. how likely are they to bump into another before escaping, and how frequently they get their energies reset to a function of the average).

Look up Boltzmann distributions for more.

My european experiences being English, I can tell you a bit about the UK situation: there are a handful of constituencies which vie to be the first out with a result come general election night. The winner of this race usually takes about 20 minutes to tally 20,000 or so votes (note this includes transporting the ballot boxes from polling stations to counting areas). The last constituency results usually come in late the next day (usually the Hebridies and other large ones in Scotland), or after a few days if there have to be some recounts.

UK general elections are "which of these people do you want to be your MP?" plus "which of these people do you want on your local council" and that's it unless you've got a Mayor as well. In the USA IME, it's president (half the time)/representative/senator (2/3 the time)/a judge or two/measures A,C,D/propositions 81 through 89. Plus there are some districts that are a lot more geographically dispersed, so I'll give us that, but basically there's typically maybe 5x the number of things to vote on than in the UK, so it still ought to take not much more than a week to have everything counted by hand.

But here's the kicker for me though: in the UK, a new government typically takes office the very next day. In the US - at least at the federal level - there is over two months to get everything counted and recounted where necessary. There is simply no requirement beyond satisfying impatience to be able to count at even 1/10th the speed of the UK, and thus no need to introduce machines that are hard-of-counting, depending upon who you want to vote for and whose company built it.