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they have brains as large as ours and can be taught a variety of intelligent things in lab tests.. one doesnt need limbs to use tools. If people can remember the Crow that could use tools?

Recently there seemed to be an article on dolphin communication http://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/>here.

I think we underestimate the intelligence of creatures around us constantly and don't give them enough credit as is.

And Gee who is more intelligent, they get to play with each other, eat, sleep hang out and have sex all day.. while we work and toil for a buck, just to get money so we can have a day off once in a while so we can have a bit of time to do the same... hmmm. my vote is with the dolphins.

but that is just my 2 cents. dont get me started on cephlopods.

Chtulu for president.

Sorry, here's the link to the essay - it didn't come through before.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686

Probably not it's been disputed.

The exact wording, from the abstract is
The anatomy of Gansus, like that of other non-neornithean (nonmodern) ornithuran birds, indicates specialization for an amphibious life-style, supporting the hypothesis that modern birds originated in aquatic or littoral niches.
Which can be summarized as 'if something looks like a duck, then it likely live, at least sometimes, in water'. Doesn't mean it does, but it is likely. Also note that the researchers admit that this is just a single data point, and no real conclusions can be drawn. Also of note is that other researchers are not convinced, as the development to modern birds, or all varieties, probably took many different paths, leading to birds occupying various niches, from tress to water.

I thing I notice is missing in the summary is that these fossil remains are not crushed. They are three dimensional, and of great detail.

The exact wording, from the abstract is
The anatomy of Gansus, like that of other non-neornithean (nonmodern) ornithuran birds, indicates specialization for an amphibious life-style, supporting the hypothesis that modern birds originated in aquatic or littoral niches.
Which can be summarized as 'if something looks like a duck, then it likely live, at least sometimes, in water'. Doesn't mean it does, but it is likely. Also note that the researchers admit that this is just a single data point, and no real conclusions can be drawn. Also of note is that other researchers are not convinced, as the development to modern birds, or all varieties, probably took many different paths, leading to birds occupying various niches, from tress to water.

I thing I notice is missing in the summary is that these fossil remains are not crushed. They are three dimensional, and of great detail.

[...] questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later.

I would venture they did it for the same reason that US satellite systems lost polar icecap sensors and other climate sensors... Here are two articles from Nature and Science journal... Apparently this is a non-news outside of a scientific community, for some reason...

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060612/full/441798 b.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/578 0/1580

After years of promoting global hysteria it is nice to see the editors slashdot present the other side of the debate.

Yes... hysteria. I love how people can assume that pumping killotons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every day - or about 6.6 tons per person per year in the US alone (that's a cool ~1.98B tons/year in the US) will have no negative effect - or an effect of any sort, positive OR negative.

What's even better are the "related stories" here on this page. One points to a study that shows of all the scientific papers on global warming, 75% agree that global warming is a human-caused condition, 25% take no stance, and a whopping 0% refute that man has anything to do with it.

We know there is a hole in the ozone layer - we've seen it, photographed it. Changes of that variety will have cascading changes all over - the butterfly effect on the environment.

Now I'm not saying that global warming as it currently stands will cause Noah part II, but the truth remains that there is something happening, courtesy of man, that is effecting the environment in a not-so-positive fashion.

The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, Science, 3 December 2004

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5 702/1686

From the Science article:

That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts,
published in refereed scientific journals between 1993
and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords
"climate change"

So they just grabbed everything, and evaluated the papers' position on the consensus view of global warming. 75% Implictly or explicitly supported it, 25% did not offer a position (mostly these were methods papers detailing a method not a result, or paleoclimate papers that did not deal with current climate issues), and 0% disagreed with the consensus view.

And to be specific, the consensus view is "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), or equivalently, "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." from the National Academy of Sciences. Additionally, the National Academy of Sciences, The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all have issued statements that agree with the IPCC. These aren't rinky-dink outfits, they are the cream of the crop of academic science, noble laureates, etc.

The fact that you can find a small number of cranks to claim that global warming is "debatable" really means very little, see Flat Earth Society, etc etc. The scientific community as a whole has made up their mind, and it is clear that global warming caused by humans is occuring.

-Ted

If we can't trust Science magazine in this society any more, we're in a lot more trouble than you think. Here's a list of the journal's editors:

http://www.sciencemag.org/about/editorial_board.dt l

These people aren't "environmentalists." They're some of the most respected scientists in the world.

As for the Americans on the list, the "vested interests" they're funded by is primarily the government (they're also funded by their universities and occassionally by private sources, but the government is a huge chunk of funding, although I admit I don't know exactly how much).

Gore based his claim on a survey done by UCSD Science Studies professor, Naomi Oreskes. She summarized her findings in a Washington Post editorial that can be found here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A260 65-2004Dec25.html

From her editorial:

There have been arguments to the contrary, but they are not to be found in scientific literature, which is where scientific debates are properly adjudicated. There, the message is clear and unambiguous.

The Journal of Science paper in which she details her survey can be found here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/ 5702/1686

Naturally, claims of bias in the right-leaning popular press have followed. See this U.K. Telegraph article for an example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml

Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

Just as soon as you read someone saying that we aren't responsible for global warming, remember that you can go on over to Google and find plenty of respectable scientists that say we are. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/570 2/1686 Maybe Bob Carter disagrees with the conclusions that Al Gore has drawn, but to say that he has done the entire scientific comunity a disservice is exaggerating things a tad bit. Perhaps Mr. Carter should look around and check out some viewpoints besides his own before glibly dismissing those other viewpoints as "junk science"

I'm reading the original Science article now (sorry, only available to subscribers, although the Science summary may be available to the general public).

The reason that the gas and liquid transport through nanotubes is so much higher than you might expect is due to the smoothness of the inside walls. The classic hydrodynamic equations have some amount of surface roughness inherently built into them. If you just naively scale them down to nano-dimensions, you'll predict very high resistance to fluid flow. However carbon nanotubes have "perfect" inside walls, that are atomically flat. This allows the water molecules (or gas, or whatever travelling inside them) to travel without "getting caught" or "bumping" into defects. In essence the atomic smoothness of the walls brings us into a whole new (nano) hydrodynamic regime.

This effect was predicted by computer simulations previously, but now has been actually observed in real samples. Very impressive.

I work in neuroscience, and Fromherz has been doing this for a long time:
A neuron-silicon junction: a Retzius cell of the leech on an insulated-gate field-effect transistor.
Science. 1991 May 31;252(5010):1290-3.
pdf
All the same, it is an interesting field, but don't let this post lead you to believe that he (and others) haven't already been doing this for 15 years.

Even if we did think that we had found something beyond nature would that mean that we *really had* found something supernatural, or just that our knowledge of nature is limited? For early man, lightning seemed to be beyond nature, but of course it wasn't.

Carl Sagan posed a test for the existence of God: if pi, represented in base 11, were to contain a string of 1s and 0s that form a circle when plotted on the right-sized screen, then that would convince him that God really did exist. However, it may turn out to be the case that pi contains any arbitrary string of digits, in which case his test will be satisfied ... but for the wrong reason. It would be a natural rather than supernatural satisfaction of the test conditions.

So either way, your epistemology is toast. You cannot prove conclusively that something which seems to be beyond nature actually *is* beyond nature; nor can you prove conclusively that all of the many open questions in science can in fact be answered by science.

The good scientists know this, which is why relatively few of them, with the exceptions such as Sagan and Dawkins, will make grandiose claims about science demonstrating the non-existence of God.

Specific factual issues:

1. You're incorrect in claiming that literalism is a 20th century phenomenon. The central point of the Bible, the resurrection of Jesus, was taken as literal truth by the majority opinion from 1st century until roughly the 18th century (F.C. Baur, I think, was the first, IIRC). Generally speaking, historic theology worked within a combination of literal and allegorical interpretations until the 19th century.
2. You are wrong to think that the Bible was seen as inaccurate until the 20th century. Even until the late 19th century, the Bible was considered a reliable guide to archaeology. Some still try to use it in that way.
3. There is no "anti-science movement" in the United States. That term is a scare phrase used to try to link various separate arguments (creationism, flat-earthism, anti-global-warming-is-man's-fault, anti-ozone-layer-is-man's fault, anti-birth-control, anti-vaccination, etc.) into one coherent package. But there is no such coherent package, and there is no "anti-science league" or any recognized leaders of an "anti-science movement." Different individuals have different takes on each of the issues mentioned above, and there is little correlation between one's opinion on one issue (say, creationism) and another issue (say, vaccines).

   The term "anti-science" is really just an ad hominem attack in disguise. The term is used to label certain groups so that their arguments against belief X, held by many scientists, can be dismissed out of hand on the grounds that the group in question is just "anti-science." That's a classic ad hominem fallacy. If X is right, then the identity of its adherents and of its detractors is irrelevant.

This article from doing actual measurements found a highest strength of 63 GPa:

Strength and Breaking Mechanism of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes Under Tensile Load.
SCIENCE, VOL 287, p. 637-640, 28 JANUARY 2000
http://bucky-central.mech.northwestern.edu/RuoffsP DFs/science-9.pdf

This report showed actual measured tensile strengths up to 150 GPa:

Direct mechanical measurement of the tensile strength and elastic modulus of multiwalled carbon nanotubes.
B.G. Demczyk et al.
Materials Science and Engineering A334 (2002), 174, 173-178.
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~cumings/PDF%20Publication s/16.MSE%20A334demczyk.pdf

  Both of these studies were done on multiwalled tubes since they are larger and it's easier to make attachments with them.
  In the earlier study in Science, the authors from SEM imaging noted that it was actually the outer single-walled nanotube that broke first therefore it was carrying the load. This would make sense from the way the attachments were formed which could only form a bond with the outer surface of the multiwalled tube. Therefore the numbers quoted were for the strength of this outer single-walled nanotube using as thickness only that of this single-walled nanotube.
  However, in the later study in Materials Science and Engineering, the authors believed the attachments were made to all the layers of the multi-layered nanotube, which would explain their higher measured strength.
  The prevailing theory is that the range of strengths is due to the number of imperfections in the nanotubes. So we should be able to look at the nanotubes at the nanoscale using SEM,'s, STM's or AFM's and find which ones have the least imperfections. These should be the strongest tubes.
  In the Science study, 1 out of 21 of them, 5%, have the best strength, 63 GPa. At a production of millions of tubes at a time this should still be feasible economically and technically.
  The lengths of the nanotubes in these studies were however, were at the micron scale though. Nanotubes have been created at the centimeter length scale, but as far as I know the strength of these have not been tested.
  Note that the reported strengths of centimeter long or longer "fibers" made of nanotubes being less than 1 GPA are not measuring the strength of individual nanotubes at these lengths. This is because the fibers are composed of the nanotubes stuck together end to end by weaker Van der Waals forces, rather than the much stronger carbon-carbon bonds that prevail in individual nanotubes.
  Here is one study that detects, characterizes defects in the nanotubes at the nanoscale:

Resonant Electron Scattering by Defects in Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.
Science 12 January 2001, Vol. 291. no. 5502, pp. 283 - 285.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/291 /5502/283

  Methods such as this might make it possible to find the nanotubes with the least defects beforehand and therefore automatically select those of the highest strengths.

      Bob Clark

The BBC article mentions a couple of articles in the current issue of Science. Here's the text from their research abstracts:

Controlling Electromagnetic Fields
J. B. Pendry, D. Schurig, D. R. Smith

Using the freedom of design that metamaterials provide, we show how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will and propose a design strategy. The conserved fields--electric displacement field D, magnetic induction field B, and Poynting vector S--are all displaced in a consistent manner. A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields. Our work has relevance to exotic lens design and to the cloaking of objects from electromagnetic fields.

Optical Conformal Mapping
Ulf Leonhardt

An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there, regardless of where the light comes from. Ideal invisibility devices are impossible due to the wave nature of light. This paper develops a general recipe for the design of media that create perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics. The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials, practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have access to the full papers.

The BBC article mentions a couple of articles in the current issue of Science. Here's the text from their research abstracts:

Controlling Electromagnetic Fields
J. B. Pendry, D. Schurig, D. R. Smith

Using the freedom of design that metamaterials provide, we show how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will and propose a design strategy. The conserved fields--electric displacement field D, magnetic induction field B, and Poynting vector S--are all displaced in a consistent manner. A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields. Our work has relevance to exotic lens design and to the cloaking of objects from electromagnetic fields.

Optical Conformal Mapping
Ulf Leonhardt

An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there, regardless of where the light comes from. Ideal invisibility devices are impossible due to the wave nature of light. This paper develops a general recipe for the design of media that create perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics. The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials, practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have access to the full papers.

Check this out and the response of the scientist who anti-global warming stuff is based on and finally this study of peer reviewed journals (ie not armchair science)

There are serious scientists who question the theory that global warming or climate change as it's more properly called now is caused by human activity.

Would you point me to some serious scientific studies that shows this?

Could it not simply mean that it changes in size? I'd be surprised if it *didn't* change in size, based on all the variable energy in the solar system. The sun changes, the planets change place, etc.

That's actually very likely taken into account. When Voyager 1 found the heliopause, they were pretty sure that the termination shock was moving inward fairly rapidly due to it being past solar max, and so Voyager 2 would catch it pretty soon. This sounds like it happened quicker than their predictions expected. See here for more details. Note that they thought at the time that Voyager 2 might encounter the shock in 2005, but it might actually not catch it at all (as it might start moving outward again).

I saw the guy mentioned in the article (Ed Stone) give a talk on Voyager 1's results, so I'm pretty sure he'd know, especially since he, y'know, mentioned it.

I also happen to think that as we investigate more and more pairs of close species, we will find this is not at all an uncommon pattern. There are lots of hybrids out there in nature, and you can be sure that genes make it across "species boundaries" with some regularity for quite a while.

One final note to destroy my credibility. Is anyone surpised that people had sex with chimps? (Okay, proto-humans with proto-chimps) We are a couple of horny species. I don't know too much about chimp sexual habits, but we humans sure are a kinky bunch to boot.

The global spread of wireless networks brings a great opportunity for their use in environmental studies. Weather, atmospheric conditions, and constituents cause propagation impairments on radio links. As such, while providing communication facilities, existing wireless communication systems can be used as a widely distributed, high-resolution atmospheric observation network, operating in real time with minimum supervision and without additional cost. Here we demonstrate how measurements of the received signal level, which are made in a cellular network, provide reliable measurements for surface rainfall. We compare the estimated rainfall intensity with radar and rain gauge measurements.

linkage

YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THIS ITEM:

Biologically Inspired Artificial Compound Eyes

Jeong et al.
Science 28 April 2006: 557-561
DOI: 10.1126/science.1123053

Biologically Inspired Artificial Compound Eyes
Ki-Hun Jeong, Jaeyoun Kim, Luke P. Lee*

This work presents the fabrication of biologically inspired artificial compound eyes. The artificial ommatidium, like that of an insect's compound eyes, consists of a refractive polymer microlens, a light-guiding polymer cone, and a self-aligned waveguide to collect light with a small angular acceptance. The ommatidia are omnidirectionally arranged along a hemispherical polymer dome such that they provide a wide field of view similar to that of a natural compound eye. The spherical configuration of the microlenses is accomplished by reconfigurable microtemplating, that is, polymer replication using the deformed elastomer membrane with microlens patterns. The formation of polymer waveguides self-aligned with microlenses is also realized by a self-writing process in a photosensitive polymer resin. The angular acceptance is directly measured by three-dimensional optical sectioning with a confocal microscope, and the detailed optical characteristics are studied in comparison with a natural compound eye.

I've never seen $$$ for wind power that included cost of construction and maintenance and tax credits when calculating the cost of power.

Most of the figures thrown around for wind power include the cost of construction spread out over the expected life of the windmills, and production estimates are generally based on an estimated 30% efficiency. Not including tax credits, the latest estimates I've seen are around 10-15 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to 7.3 cents on average for coal (but that includes subsidies and tax breaks coal receives).

As you probably know, Nat Gas is the most expensive fuel on earth for making electricity. In most places it is used for "peaking" plants because of the cost. And, of course, it is still a global warming contributor (if you believe in global warming), comes from the Middle East where they are trying to kill us for taking it.

The U.S. only imports about 15% of it's natural gas, and 95% of that is from Canada. We get very very little of it from the Middle East (table) Also, NG is used for waaaaay more than just peaking power. It's a very popular fuel for new plants in urban areas with significant air quality problems because of its relatively favorable emissions. Unfortunately, it's price is a lot more volatile than other fuels.

if you believe in global warming

Most people who pay attention do, especially those who know what they're talking about. The only real debate left is whether it's human caused (although there's not much debate left there), how fast it will occur, and what the exact impact will be.

Another story is how safe is living in the zone right now. And based on the natural level of radiation around the world, it is safe. Or put in another way, there are places around the world that are much more "contaminated" by natural radiation and no journalists care. Apart from Ramsar which bears the world record in natural radiation there are large areas with elevated background radiation larger than the Chernobyl zone. And "people living in these HBRAs [high background radiation areas] do not appear to suffer any adverse health effects as a result of their high exposures to radiation".

The article makes a common error: asserting that China's CO2 emissions are rising. This is just White House propaganda to undermine Kyoto. China is actually *cutting* CO2 output. Here is an article from Science to that effect. This particlar article only discusses up to 2000, but the downward trend has continued since then.

Uh, where did he show this?

Moreover, there are three separate questions:

1. Is the planet becoming warmer? A tough question, knowing that calorimetry is the most delicate kind of physical measurement. What do you measure, when, for how long? Methods and opinions differ. Magic satellites giving you a single figure for easy comparison are wishful thinking. You need a data interpretation method, and that's where opinions and tempers flare.
2. Is it a long-term trend? Also a tough question. Historical data is sparse and sometimes dubious. Not to mention that the methods and instruments have changed. For instance, the Albany, NY weather bureau reports average temperatures decreasing since the start of the century. Does that prove anything? Is this a fluke?
3. Is the observed change man-made?Again, a difficult question. It's not like you can run a parallele experiment on a second Earth devoid of mankind, although some people are planning it. Earth went through extreme temperature swings before the first ape showed up. The Deep Core ice-sampling project showed variations of about 7C (14F) in less than a century, several times over the last 200,000 years or so. That's huge. More over, the sun activity is not a constant. Sun activity variations wiped out the Maya (see "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" and google for more.). Astronomers think that the Mars icecap hasn't grown up as large in the last Martian winter as compared to pictures sent by the Viking probes: If that's true, it's not because of human activity. Then of course there is the well-known CO2 effect. How do we separate the natural and man-made causes? What's predominent?

I don't have answers, and serious scientists are very cautious too. Good data is too scarse, and too much money is involved for rational debate.

Most debates on the subject don't even acknowledge the existence of these separate questions, so how can they even be constructive? Both sides end up yelling at each other, but they aren't talking about the same thing.

RTFA where it appeared in Science, not the media mush in the New York Slime. For important articles like this there is not only the actual article, full text but also a condensation and explanation in the perspectives section. Read that and you'll know what this is actually about.

RTFA where it appeared in Science, not the media mush in the New York Slime. For important articles like this there is not only the actual article, full text but also a condensation and explanation in the perspectives section. Read that and you'll know what this is actually about.

RTFA where it appeared in Science, not the media mush in the New York Slime. For important articles like this there is not only the actual article, full text but also a condensation and explanation in the perspectives section. Read that and you'll know what this is actually about.

How about caring about someone who actually exists right now and is starving and dying, RIGHT THIS MINUTE? Shall I give you examples or are you all up on the world's issues?

How about trying to prevent droughts in Africa?
What about preventing the wars predicted by the Pentagon as a result of global climate change?
What about trying to prevent a predicted increase in hurricane frequency and strength as a result of raised ocean temperatures?

Now it's your turn. Name me ways in which doing something about global warming would result in a loss of life, and I'll show you a matching number of ways in which not doing something about it will result in loss of life.

Also, no one in this world is starving and dying for any reason other than geopolitics. Drought in Africa kills people because the abundence of the rest of the world is not brought to those in need. No one is starving because of efforts to prevent global warming. No one.

So your parents were scientists or they got their info from the media?

If it's the latter, then that is exactly the parent posts point (if you bothered to even glance at the links).

The media reported an Ice Age was imminent. Peer-reviewed scientific journals did not.

Contrast that with today, when after a review of 981 ISI science journals, 75% of them were found to either explicitly or implicitly accept that global warming is occuring and that it is the result of human processes.

None of them were found to support the idea global warming is not occurring or that it is not the result of human processes (see here for details.

original article in science

It can reasonably be disputed based on our current evidence.

the fact he is giving the NOAA extra money for research rather than prevention is quite interesting

The Mayor better check the climate models for his cities future:
Science is showing predictions of a massive rise in ocean levels, say good bye to most of the below sea level land he is looking at, and good bye to almost half of Florida, too.

The Magazine shows a map with the new coast line significantly further inland, with the 'lost cities' of the coast outlined in red.

If the polar ice caps keep melting at there current speed,
your future work commute might look like a scene from WaterWorld!

If no one knows it's happening, it's not an EXPERIMENT - it is a retrospective analysis

Big difference philospophically, and a terrificalyl interesting topic.

See this paper in Science -
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/570 7/219

Providing a single counter-example does not disprove any statements I made, nor does it disprove the existence of a consensus of climate scientists on the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Apparently your error is in believing that consensus implies unanimity. While they are similar concepts, they have different connotations, especially regarding the existence of (a limited number of) dissenting viewpoints. It is an important distinction.

I have provided another link to the article, which the straw-men in your post makes it apparent you did not read or digest. It most certainly does find a overwhelming consensus in the published, peer-reviewed articles of climate scientists.

Here's your source. I'll dig up some others but did you know C02 was higher duing the dinasaur era? We're not even making a dent on the Earth, I'm afraid. I'll post the links on how our forests but you're spouting 70's era Rachel Carson crap that's been proven many times over as nonsense on acid rain. Please READ a bit. Try reading Bjorn Lomborg's book. I will post more information for you later, try reading it with an open mind.

I thought there might be some interest in the actual science here:
Antarctica is losing "152 ± 80 km3/year of ice" according to the abstract which can be found here.
I'm not sure about the article's status as it is not in any journals yet, but there was a similar study performed by these same people about Greenland's glaciers recently.
Apparantly, the study makes use of sattelites which measure gravity in order to guess at the mass of the ice.
On a side note... when did the "the Greenhouse" become a buzz-word?

Wrong. There is widespread scientific consensus on the existence of global warming, and that human activity is contributing to it. A 2004 Survey of 928 peer-reviewed research articles related to climate change from 1993-2003 concluded that:

"Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."

Noteworthy is that none of the articles dissented with the consensus opinion. None of them. Not much of a controversy, at least among people who know what they are talking about.

What is dangerous is jumping to the conclusion of why it is changing. If we were to "accept" the opinions of a few climatologists that human nature is what is causing the climate change...

I beg to differ. In a recent study by Science Magazine, a search of the ISI database on the keyword "climate change" yielded 928 peer-reviewed papers, NOT A SINGLE ONE OF WHICH disputed the conclusion that global warming is caused by man-made changes to the atmosphere.

The so-called "debate" only exists in the popular press, where (in a misguided attempt to provide "balance",) 53% of articles express doubt on global warming. Red-staters may not like this article very much either, but I challenge any of them to find a respectable counterargument.

The most unexpected is the presence of numerous genes encoding central protein-translation components, including four amino-acyl transfer RNA synthetases, peptide release factor 1, translation elongation factor EF-TU, and translation initiation factor 1.

What is actually most surprising is that anyone voted for it at all. The LDS ("Mormon") church has no stance on evolution (or any other scientific theory), and, differently from many christian churches, teaches as doctrine that the universe and everything in it was "organized" over an undefined period of time rather than called out of nothing in an instant. In fact, I read a few years ago that Utah produces more scientists per-capita than any other state. This was reported, favorably, in the LDS Church News! Church leaders have taught that the "days" mentioned in Genesis were just a way the ancients tried to express long periods of time. BYU, the church-owned university, has had multiple papers on evolution published in Science magazine (along with Nature, the premier peer-reviewed science journal.) As a member of the LDS church myself and lover of all things biology-related, this is personally signifiant to me. I wouldn't be part of a chuch that rejected science based on oppresive dogma. Are there "Mormon" whacko fanatics? Sure. Do the rural areas of Utah, like rural areas everywhere, have more than their fair share? Yes. Are they encouraged by the church? No.

Here is an article published last year:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/111 5356v1

Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland
Ola M. Johannessen, Kirill Khvorostovsky, Martin W. Miles, Leonid P. Bobylev

Abstract:

A continuous data set of Greenland Ice Sheet altimeter height from ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites, 1992 to 2003, has been analyzed. An increase of 6.4 ± 0.2 centimeters per year is found in the vast interior areas above 1500 meters, in contrast to previous reports of high-elevation balance. Below 1500 meters, the elevation-change rate is -2.0 ± 0.9 cm/year, in qualitative agreement with reported thinning in the ice-sheet margins. The spatially averaged increase is 5.4 ± 0.2 cm/year, or ~60 cm over 11 years, or ~54 cm when corrected for isostatic uplift. Winter elevation changes are shown to be linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation.

To quote a presumably non-biased source

Science 27 January 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5760, pp. 506 - 508
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121416

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311 /5760/506

claims to show that the net energy contribution (or consumption) of ethanol depends strongly on a number of factors that are not necessarily easy to determine.

Citing a particular country does not necessarily prove that a process is both economically sensible and scalable. Many countries heavily subsidize both energy and agriculture in ways that can distort incentives.

That is because this slashdot-linked review is an over-simplification of the actual study. The mice lacking the gene probably have lost the ability to remember they were subjected to aggression previously. That is they are behaving naively. They aren't kissing up, they just don't know they were picked on previously. You should read the F study RTFS http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;311 /5762/864 but your conclusion is supported by the article, from what I can see, maybe the article should RTFS.