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I thought gold was just created the same as everything else heavier than iron, in a supernova. So a quick google shows that colliding neutron stars would provide a new mechanism but it doesn't discount the old mechanism https://www.smithsonianmag.com...

Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling.

All this fuss about how fast CO2 concentrations rose and no thought at all about how long a mass extinction actually takes.

The largest known mass extinction 252 million years ago that marked the end of the Permian period lasted a minimum of 12,000 years and may have taken as long as 108,000 years. You all act like it happens overnight. It doesn't. Natural mass extinctions take thousands upon thousands of years. So many thousands of years that it's relatively easy for human intervention to prevent a lot of them entirely. We will certainly save all the species with cute, fuzzy babies. Odds are we'll save every other species we find useful or interesting, and many more besides. Mass extinctions take so long that you only have to be paying as much attention as we're paying now to notice a niche starting to go empty and do something about it. Foolishly, perhaps, because mass extinctions are natural, have happened repeatedly, and are irrelevant to the survivors. If your species lives through it, you don't care what happened to all the rest. A new food web will grow up in place of the old one. And if you don't think our species can't artificially maintain a food web to support ourselves, you haven't been paying attention—we already do.

That mass extinction involved 6 million cubic kilometers of lava, by the way. That should sound like a big number, because it's a fucking big number. Enough to cover the continental US a mile deep. People who run around waving their hands about "mass extinction" events over a little burning coal should bear that in mind.

Tesla is just another Tucker.

You think that's bad? You should see the military CARGO PLANE that flies over my house every couple of weeks at approximately that altitude.

That's nothing, you should see the Bomb they dropped on a house.

PS: Snopes confirms that Casor was "among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court." Not Politifact but equivalent. And The Smithsonian states has an article titled "The Horrible Fate of John Casor, The First Black Man to be Declared Slave for Life in America". I guess Snopes and the Smithsonian can no longer be trusted?

Except you're painfully wrong.

Evidence of humans in the Americas go back further. A 14,000 year old village was found on Triquet Island, northwest of Victoria Canada. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-oldest-north-american-settlements-found-180962750/

Controversially, James M. Adovasio, Dennis Stanford and Joseph and Lynn McAvoy; and on the wilder side, Albert Goodyear and Tom Demere say there is evidence for humans in the Americas that goes back much further. Their evidence and theories are not generally accepted. Good reads though.

Your logic is something else. It's pretty easy to beat up a straw man. I never said coffee leads to addiction. I said that the using of high levels of caffiene over periods of time leads to addiction. If you don't think caffiene is physically addictive, well, you're going to have to argue that with the scientists. They say it is. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

My experience with it says it is too. When I stopped using it I felt lousy for weeks and had major headaches besides. Those are the withdrawal symptoms of caffiene addiction.

Yes, there is a lot of coffee at 12 step meetings. There is also a whole lot of tobacco. What else do you expect from a bunch of addicts, than for them to move from one addictive behavior to another? True, caffiene isn't as destructive as heroin, meth, coke, opioids, etc... but it doesn't mean it isn't addictive. If addicts didn't think alike 12 step programs wouldn't work, and they do work. First time I went to a 12 step meeting I thought I was listening to people telling my story, rather than their own.

It has been proven time and time again that addicts think very much alike. They have problems they don't like to deal with so they like to alter their mental state rather than deal with the issues. Twelve step programs work because, if a person follows the steps, the addict deals with those issues that they have never dealt with before and thus get past their addictive behaviors.

The only way to beat addiction is to deal with the inner demons every addict has. As long as a person will not deal with those, they will never stop using the substances that are killing them and ruining their lives.

Here's a link to how addicts think. http://www.edrugrehab.com/how-...

One of the most overlooked, yet most significant innovations of the early 20th century might be the Post Office’s decision to start shipping large parcels and packages through the mail. While private delivery companies flourished during the 19th century, the Parcel Post dramatically expanded the reach of mail-order companies to America’s many rural communities, as well as the demand for their products. When the Post Office’s Parcel Post officially began on January 1, 1913, the new service suddenly allowed millions of Americans great access to all kinds of goods and services. But almost immediately, it had some unintended consequences as some parents tried to send their children through the mail.

“It got some headlines when it happened, probably because it was so cute,” United States Postal Service historian Jenny Lynch tells Smithsonian.com.

Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia. According to Lynch, Baby James was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post, and his “delivery” cost his parents only 15 cents in postage (although they did insure him for $50). The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit.

SMARTNEWS Keeping you current A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail In the early days of the parcel post, some parents took advantage of the mail in unexpected ways image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com... Baby bag banner Uniformed Letter Carrier with Child in Mailbag (Smithsonian Institution) By Danny Lewis SMITHSONIAN.COM JUNE 14, 2016 | UPDATED: DECEMBER 21, 2016 40.9K183516543.3K Editor's Note, December 21, 2016 Listen to the Smithsonian perspective on this story from the Smithsonian’s new podcast, Sidedoor. Listen to the episode “Gaming the System” below and subscribe here for future episodes. One of the most overlooked, yet most significant innovations of the early 20th century might be the Post Office’s decision to start shipping large parcels and packages through the mail. While private delivery companies flourished during the 19th century, the Parcel Post dramatically expanded the reach of mail-order companies to America’s many rural communities, as well as the demand for their products. When the Post Office’s Parcel Post officially began on January 1, 1913, the new service suddenly allowed millions of Americans great access to all kinds of goods and services. But almost immediately, it had some unintended consequences as some parents tried to send their children through the mail. RELATED CONTENT A Brief History of American Dead Letter Offices Mail Delivery By Rocket Never Took Off A Brief History of Post Office Cats “It got some headlines when it happened, probably because it was so cute,” United States Postal Service historian Jenny Lynch tells Smithsonian.com. Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia. According to Lynch, Baby James was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post, and his “delivery” cost his parents only 15 cents in postage (although they did insure him for $50). The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit. image:

Or biology makes genders more attracted to different roles.

Oh great, you've circled around to the original unsupported premise. Circular proof for the fail.

BTW, there was a time when computer programming was "women's work."
That was the result of social conditioning, its just that the social conditioning is now flipped.

You're denying that the cheap solar panels you mentioned are being subsidized by the chinese government in order to control the market.

Chinese solar panels face anti-dumping tarriffs upon import to the US to combat this, in some cases as high as 239%, due to the low-interest loans the Chinese government gives solar manufacturers. And they've faced these tarriffs since 2012. China, for its part, denies that its dumping, and says that the loans are simply an investment in clean power and an attempt to improve the environment. Of the top 10 manufacturers, 4 are from China, 2 from the USA, 2 from Taiwan, one from Canada and one from South Korea.

China not only produces extensively to export, but also has a huge domestic solar consumption as well. For example, China just completed the world's largest floating solar farm. China is the world's largest market for photovoltaics and is the world's largest producer of solar power. They're on track to have over 100 GW installed solar power by 2018 (up from 77GW in 2016). They also use 70% of the world's total installed solar water heating.

Actually, this is one of the major reasons for the problems in Syria. The drought that started in 2006 caused many farmers to migrate into the city, which then helped kick-start their ongoing civil war. It's only going to get worse.

But everytime I see them complain, I remember this:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Stop bringing climate change into stories where it doesn't belong. Blaming things on climate change that have nothing to do with it only serves to make the climate change deniers case seem stronger.

You are right that the other AC should have taken much more care to post evidence because by posting like that he's opening up for criticism, however there's fair reason to believe climate change is bad for bees and a fair amount of supporting evidence. What you should remember is that scientists are very much intimidated away from giving climate change explanations with threats to leak mail and attacks in the media. At the same time there's a huge amount of money available from oil and coal companies for scientists who will support their (climate-change denial) agenda. This means that there can very easily be claims that this has nothing to do with climate change even when it does.

I'm inclined to cut Snowden some slack for two reasons.

Yes, I too am willing to cut him slack — no capital punishment. 10-20 years in federal prison.

First, he took pains to release the information in as responsible a way as possible

This is simply evidence, he was well aware of the harm his releases will do to his country. And did it anyway. He may well have been sincere, but so were the Rosenbergs. It is still treason.

Well expressed. I recently looked into the price of rattlesnake antivenin in the US and was astounded to see it costing up to $10000 per vial. A little searching revealed the cost of production was estimated to be about $14.
Link to an article discussing the costs:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Link to a research paper by the person responsible for creating the antivenin:
https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Because departments run by LGBTQ and similarly "disadvantaged" people produce such high levels of scholarship:

http://www.skeptic.com/reading...

That white men should just quit- just get out of the way of people of color, whom they are repressing :

http://www.dailywire.com/news/...

Look in a money and resource limited environment, we have to make hard decisions about what and who is important and what and who is not:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Because feminists have sooo much to offer science, so much keen insight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That it would be a pity to let the entire social justice left be excluded merely on the basis of their inability, their differently abledness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Like the Revivvalism of the turn of the century and Scientology today, social justice is a literal cult. Unfortunately it's a cult that threatens the rational and scientific basis of Western civilization and if left unchecked, which it largely has been, will reduce the West to Feminist Lysenkoism and a and ethnic and gender-based totalitarianism.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/L...

The time for passivity and tolerance in the face of civilization-deconstructing psychosis is past. It's civilization or it's the race hatred, gender-cidal cult of social justice. It won't be both. I know I have re-engineered my career to effect the total, permanent and irreversible extermination of this disease and I enjoin anyone of good will- man woman white black brown gay or straight- to join me.

Ancient texts show that people have brewed up useful concoctions that may be of incredible value today. Always have an open mind.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Two quick things. There are some improvements to lithium ion batteries that are coming which should reduce or eliminate the loss of capacity over time. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... Second is that the cost of Lithium Ion batteries goes down over time. Its going down a bit faster because of the Gigafactory. The battery in my LEAF would cost $5K to replace today, but I'm betting that it will cost $3K to replace by the time I need to replace it.

How do we know we're not here because some other race should have been more careful with their probes?

We don't. Hella unlikely though. Given the interconnected biology of life on esrth, it would have had to happen very early on.

Besides, as far as they know there's nothing there anyway and then we can study how these things do on which ever moon.

A colonization experiment would need to be more well thought out than "let's crash this doodad into this possibly life supporting place and see what happens!"

The biggest impediment to that idea is that it is no where near as interesting as finding that there is life on an another body in the universe.

We already know that the little critters named in the article - the tardigrades - are little champions of survival in ridiculous conditions, such as in space http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Now, imagine if a properly sterilized probe were to find tardigrades on a non terran body that we could prove did not come from earth.

Very interesting:
The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath

4. Thomas Jefferson, the most-oft cited slave-owning Founder, never bought nor sold a single slave.

False, Jefferson actually bought and sold several slaves in his lifetime.

You may not think the numbers considerable, but it does show you lie. Or perhaps you're the victim of the censorship and lying of others.

Sure, they'll survive the weather, but won't they just get eaten by dinosaurs? :)

We have been here before. Late in the Prohibition era, people were getting prescriptions written for "medical beer."
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

don't make a right. Speaking of our right (wing) we mostly meddled in those countries to keep Socialism from taking root. Hell, there was just a lovely little story on the Smithsonian (yeah, I know, liberal rag and all that) about how the media covered Mussolini & Hitler. It was almost exclusively favorable until the war started. They were pleased at Mussolini's "economic miracle" and how he reigned in the Socialists and called Hitler the German Mussolini.

St. Bernard dogs are often seen with a flask strapped to its neck because It's a therapy dog for rummies.

Nice snark, but consider the following quote:

Although in legend casks of liquor were strapped around the dogs' collars to warm up travelers, no historical records exist that document this practice.

> The electric vehicle has been recognized as central to the future of mobility,
> and GM has been a leader, making EVs accessible to the broader market.

GM? Leader? EVs? Accessible? I can't believe he said that with a straight face.

Talk about having a short memory about GM and Electric Vehicles. He's never seen Who Killed Electric Car.

As noted by this respected institution....

Behind a white hearse circling the cemetery and to the sounds of a bagpiper rolled a line of EV1s, their devoted drivers taking a literal last ride in the cars they had leased from GM. Many extinct cars continue to exist as collectors’ treasures; in rust-free California, for example, such evolutionary casualties as Edsels, Corvairs and Studebaker Avantis tool down freeways. But the EV1, an innovatively engineered attempt to jump-start GM’s 21st century, will never again be driven by loyal fans. Although some 1,100 of the vehicles were produced since 1996 and leased to drivers in California and Arizona, almost all were destroyed once the leases ran out. For many of the lessees, this was a tragedy. As one owner wrote in an open letter to GM CEO Rick Wagoner, “...the EV1 is more than a car, it’s a path to national salvation.”

If I had to guess, I'd assume that UK kids are probably somewhat better off in terms of "book material" than their forebears, though independent assessments of reasoning skills (i.e., non-curricular tests similar to IQ tests), etc. seem to show mild declines.

I thought that IQ tests showed marked improvements in abstract/conceptual reasoning skills, and moderate increase in vocabulary skills (4 point increase in vocab skills amongst schoolchildren from 1953 to 2006).
http://www.apa.org/monitor/201...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

I never trust Malcom Gladwell, but he's quoted in that second article saying the exact opposite of OP: "And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average IQs of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded."

I always get a kick out of people who have no clue what they're talking about.

That article you linked is written by someone who claims yoga can heal the body of illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Here's some reading material:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/C...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

http://contrailscience.com/

Now to my point:

Why in the hell would we deplete California's forestry? What's the endgame, buddy? Even if it was true(which it isn't), there's no reasonable explanation as to why we would want to destroy an entire ecosystem. If anything we'd want to bio-engineer MORE rain so we have MORE trees because that would make us MORE money! It's completely asinine that people would think that it's some grand global conspiracy to destroy millions upon millions of acres of trees in the most populous state in the US. It doesn't benefit anybody!

But please... continue with your wackjob conspiracies.. What's next.. the Illuminati are out to destroy the Almond industry?

The AOL CD were junk. You couldn't reuse them.

There are some hobbyists that collect AOL CDs. There were more than 4000 different AOL CDs sent out over the years, and some people have collected them all. If you have some rare specimens, they might be worth more than their weight in gold. Alas, I just tossed all of mine in the trash as soon as they arrived in the mail, unaware of the potential treasure I was holding in my hand.

Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years

Yeah, this point is exactly like TFA :
also paraphraseable as "if nothing ever changes and absolutely everything keeps as it is now, we will be doomed".
Except that things change anyway, no matter what people want.

(And same with today's prediction. By 2100, there are probably going to be tons of other factors changing.
Maybe people's energy requirement will be lower simply because it's cheaper overall.
(lower consumption electric/electronic gizmos == cheaper electricity bill)
Maybe electric car will get more popular which even factoring battery/solar pannels manufacturing, could have some impact : by incite people to burn less fossils and because some regions like europe are trying to move fast away from fossil electricity generation)
Maybe a huge social collapse will cause society to regress to a hunter/gatherer state which has a lot less environmental impact by the sheer reason that they are much smaller societies
etc.).

* Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make
* Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World Will Be In Famine
* 100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years

...and as you note: this came as a surprise - population actually tend to slow their growth spontaneously.
(This was even discussed here on /. )
Suddenly in modern societies, having more children became a burden, not an economic advantage.
And thus, the catastrophic scenario evoked by demographers didn't happen.

In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution

Actually, spot-on, in some more polluted area of the world. Mostly in developing economies.
(Industrial areas in China come in mind as an exemple. But happens also in South America)
With one minor difference :
- The people didn't *actually* start wearing the predicted gaz masks, and thus we are seeing increases in health issue in those smoggy areas
(whereas the prediction was that people *will do* wear the gaz masks and business as usual will continue).

Meanwhile, there has been some effort in the occident to put a dent in pollution (several European countries come in mind)

Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License

Completely spot-on.
Say hello to China and its "Single Child" policy.

And turned out to be not that useful, as mentioned above, other countries without such policy also curbed their population growth all the same (big surprise to 1970s demographers).

By The Year 2000 There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil

By the 1970 definition, yes all the 1970-era wells are getting dangerously low, and price of gaz and other fossils have exploded as a consequence of demande/offer market laws...

(so the 1970-era prediction were right when thinking that their well will dry up in the near future) ...except that increased price and advances in technology made other extraction methods viable.

so instead of the drying wells leading to a collaps of gaz-based technologies,
the drying wells got simply replaced by fraking and co.

There's an interesting article on why most of these dire predictions didn't come to pass, noting some positive outcomes of the increased environmental awareness, like the Clean Water, Clean Air, Endangered Species acts, and other environmental protection laws.

And who knows, maybe due to tons of small modifications in habits and lifestyles everywhere, the "business continues as usual and southern europe turns into

It's important to note that this is a worst-case scenario, which typically means its somewhat improbable. Of course, the worst-case scenario also just so happens to make the best headlines.

I'm not arguing that the climate isn't changing, or that's it's not worthwhile to curb pollutants and emissions. But I fear this constant fear-mongering is damaging climate science credibility as much as it's helping to push forward good environmental policies. This is highly reminiscent of the now laughable doomsday predictions around the time of our first Earth Day in 1970. Among these:

* Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years
* 100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years
* Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make
* Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World Will Be In Famine
* In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution
* Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License
* By The Year 2000 There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil

There's an interesting article on why most of these dire predictions didn't come to pass, noting some positive outcomes of the increased environmental awareness, like the Clean Water, Clean Air, Endangered Species acts, and other environmental protection laws.

When the experts have been consistently wrong with these constant doomsday predictions for 45 years, is it any wonder that people start to become skeptical of ALL climate and environmental sciences? That's not a good thing.

Talk about a left wing canard. Nixon didn't do that. He said he didn't, others said he didn't. I believe him. Clifford was a paranoid and your source is a
freelance science writer with no credentials.

Now, the truth.

During the election of 1968, Johnson was trying to bring an end to the Vietnam war. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign, so he contacted Hanoi and told them, essentially, "if you delay the peace talks, you'll get a better deal once I'm elected".

This was known to Johnson and the FBI at the time, who chose to do nothing.

From the article: “Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968,”

You probably aren't old enough to remember that era, but a lot of us are. The peace talks were constantly delayed by demands that, for instance, the table be round or square. This seemed odd at the time, but now we know why.

Nixon committed treason in the literal sense of the word, interfered with the US operations of state, and extended a war for 5 years just to get elected.

We only recently found this out because the records were sealed for 50 years, and recently unsealed.

I'm told that other, previous elections were worse. This one is just more heavily televised.

Be grateful for the bread and circus, because it's not actually killing people.

haha.. Given cows aren't stacked, squared km would be more relevant..but then factor in that each one needs a certain amount of space to graze, etc..and then a LOT more space for their primary feed...as I already posted, livestock consumes about half the land used in the US. Here's another article highlighting many of the concerns.

I'm a fiscally conservative, social moderate who hates Obama, has multiple openly gay friends, and generally votes libertarian when possible. Good luck categorizing that!

It is possible to predict political preferences beyond looking at what you say about some of the defining issues. Your biology has been shown to be linked to your affiliations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Also this study http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

And then there is what you eat. http://www.livescience.com/143...

Or how smart you are. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...

Having said that, in the end, they are probably just counting how many Trump photos have been posted by the account.

So you gotta tell us - where is that 800 Terawatts of radiative forcing going? Or do you find that a trivial number with no need to go any further? Or do you dispute the number?

Dingbat, I answered that question in the very quote that you quoted.

No, you didn't If you gave me some facts and figures, you could claim as refutation I will accept that. I am asking for facts and figures, and science.

I do not find the scientific prowess of the people who brought us the economic meltdown in the early years of this century very comforting. Regardless, not many economic systems are ever designed to help poor people, so that's a real non-starter.

You're a moron and this is a logical fallacy, ad homenim. I can only assume that you don't actually understand AGW.

I understand much, and if all you can do is calll me names, that appears to be your best argument. The idea that we will somehow help poor people by ignoring the greenhouse effect is quite simply, ludicrous.

After all, falling off a cliff can be pretty pleasant at first. No point worrying until you hit the sudden stop.

This is another logical fallacy, a false analogy, from which again I can only conclude that you didn't understand what you read.

Oh dear. My point is that there might be some point that we would want to worry about it. When and where is that point? The Carteret Islands are now uninhabitble due to saltwater incursion. At the present rate, the island will be totally submerged by 2020 - athough some have said 2015. In 2005, the Papua New Guinea Government funded total evacuation of the island because of the incursions, and storm surges flooding the island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While mistakenly calling it the first climate change refugees, New Zealand has granted residency to residents of Tuvalu in 2014. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/... The confusion over the "first" moniker was probably coming from being the first time refugee status was from a different country.

Then there is Bangladesh. http://www.worldwatch.org/clim...

Just ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away, and it is mainly poor people who are affected by some of the effects. So the concept of ignoring AGW to help the poor as econmic wisdom is simply bizarre.

Seriously, you must be drunk or something because your normal posts are much better than this one which looks like you didn't read anything.

It was in the morning, I haven't had a drink since my son's wedding in June, and that was 1 IPA. You really didn't do a good job reacting to my post, finding it an excuse to unload on me. You are falling victim to "bullying guy on the internet" tactics. Nah - homie don't play that.

It's a little weird, your response to my pointing out the fallacies of the scientific skeptics as if I were making an unforgivable personal insult to you. Is that some way of saying you hold every single scientific skeptic outlook that you pointed out personally, and at the same time?

I'm not drunk, not on any drugs stronger than Aspirin, but you dear phantomfive, have some really severe anger issues. Perhaps there are some stressors going on in your life that make you need to lash out at people and it makes you feel better. I'm most sorry for arousing your indignant anger.

But I'm certainly not going to have a rational conversation with you about this, so you can go spout your anger elsewhere.

Good for you. 2.5 billion people aren't so lucky.

Climate change just makes this worse, and we've already seen the results.

The Supreme Court has explicitly included non-firearms and there have been court cases over knife regulations related to it. Unless they're non-fighting knives (i.e. made only for cooking, like a paring knife), they're arms.

Do you just make up your "facts" out of thin air, without even a quick google search to confirm them?

In 1968, the Paris Peace talks, intended to put an end to the 13-year-long Vietnam War, failed because an aide working for then-Presidential candidate Richard Nixon convinced the South Vietnamese to walk away from the dealings.

An American, a presidential candidate, called up the head of a country we were trying to make peace with, and said "if you don't broker the peace, I'll give you a better deal when I'm in office".

Eventually, Nixon won by just 1 percent of the popular vote. “Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968,” says the BBC.

Derailing a peace talk, extending a brutal and pointless war costing tens of thousands of American lives, for political gain.

That's really, *really* bad... even by today's standards.

Worked for Shackleton: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.co...

Back in the Sputnik-era, people thought of programmers as a priesthood in lab coats: the sole keepers of knowledge that ran these exotic, and mysterious room-sized machines. Today the priesthood is a little hipper -- lab coats have long given way to a countercultural vibe -- but it's still a priesthood, perhaps more druidic than Jesuitic, but a priesthood nonetheless, largely comprised of white men."

Somewhat recently NPR featured a story about women programmers, and a graph showing women in CS climbing until the 1980s. In another article at Smithsonianmag.com on how programming used to be "women's work" a commenter states:

In the 1960s, some vocational profiling studies came out that coloured computer programmers as "disinterested in people", and this personality profiling was added into the aptitude tests by which companies decided who to train for programming positions, despite evidence that psychometric profiling is inaccurate. This, in addition to the increased requirement for formal mathematical training (which not many women had), the changing view programmers were skilled professionals (traditionally men) and not people who just calibrated machines, and women's lack of access to personal computers, contributed to the decline of women in computing.

Fast forward a decad: the Personal Computer revolution of the 90s and increasing accessibility, falling prices, there has never been a time where computing is so accessible. YouTube, and plenty of other sites including MOOC courses, which in no way discriminate, what gives? Apparently the vast majority of people don't want to program either. If you're interested in it, you will seek it out. What next, forcing people to study topics based on their sex?

Some corals tolerate heat much better than others. We should identify the genes that make that possible, and clone them into other coral species. Some research is being done.

Apparently the corals which tolerate heat better are already there, in 50 to 65% of the corals in that region.

Some corals tolerate heat much better than others. We should identify the genes that make that possible, and clone them into other coral species. Some research is being done.

You make an assertion with no proof whatsoever

There are many studies of bird deaths from windmills, including this meta-study. Windmills kill a few hundred thousand birds a year. Very few of those are from endangered species. By comparison, several BILLION are killed by domestic cats, and many millions die from collisions with buildings.

Objecting to windmills because they "kill birds" is idiotic, and even the people that raise that issue don't really believe it is valid. They just aren't bright enough to think of a more rational objection.

I keep thinking how the US will drone strike wedding receptions on flimsy evidence, even assassinating our own citizens and their children for even *meeting* with an alleged terrorist

...and a single drone strike in NK could solve much of the world's conflict.

Take one of the Chinese ambassadors aside, have a quiet word, get a secret "OK" from the leadership, and *BANG!*. No more fear, uncertainty, and doubt in South Korea or Japan.

We could even disavow all knowledge. Classify the relevant documents for 50 years, like we did with Nixon extending the Vietnam war for political gain (by taking actions which were probably treasonous).

*Sigh*.

But we're a step closer to having Bison be our national mammal, and Harriet Tubman will be on the $20.

USA, the leader of the free world.

Some Alaskans have a very different opinion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Alaska and Northern Canada will be some of the very first places to see the more extreme effects of warming. In fact already the ice roads are less stable than they used to be, which will eventually have a huge impact on the ability to operate mines and other economic activities in the far North. To say nothing of the natives who are finding the drastic changes very damaging their their livelihoods.

Keeping scores of people on payroll to advance your propaganda worked — and continues to work — for Putin (with whom Secretary Clinton has "an interesting" relationship).

No surprise, she is among the first to adopt his methods, and even the more prudent politicians will soon have to do it just to remain competitive. It already happened to TV make-up, robo-callers, and teleprompters...

Maybe, there will be a silver-lining in this for the perpetually-struggling "established" journalists — their having been bought may be harder to conceal/easier to prove than the same for tens and hundreds of anonymous nobodies.

these poor folks?

People who deliberately promote agnotology for commercial or selfish gain are causing great harm to our civilization, economically, socially, and morally. They cause our society to make incorrect decisions that will make all of us worse off. Let's consider some other people who cause harm in our society.

Drug dealers lure vulnerable people onto a path that usually leads to ruin. But their damage is limited to a relatively small number of people. Pimps also lure vulnerable young people onto a path of abuse and degradation. They often purposely addict their victims to drugs so that they will be more controllable. They in essence destroy the lives of these young people for profit. Although the damage done by pimps and drug dealers is obvious and clear, their impact is relatively small on society, since they impact so few people.

Contrast the above examples of unambiguous evil with those who worked to confuse society over the dangers of smoking. Even today, smoking kills millions of people each year worldwide. Anyone who worked confuse smokers and potential smokers about the potential dangers of smoking is complicit in the deaths of those who succumb. Dying of lung cancer is pretty much like dying of suffocation over a period of weeks or months. It is an excruciating way to die.

Thus, I see equivalence between consciously trying to confuse people about smoking, and being a drug dealer and/or a pimp. Except that those who try to sow confusion about the dangers of smoking are far worse, because in the end they will be associated with the deaths of far more people.

As for global warming, I think that consciously sowing confusion about the science is morally far worse than any of the above examples I mentioned. The near term consequences of global warming have been/will be higher food prices. For us in the western world, we will find ways of dealing with this, even though it will cause economic harm. But for those of live in North Africa, the consequences are far worse. Political unrest, for example during the "Arab Spring" can be tightly associated with the price of wheat. For those who spend most of their income on food, having the price of wheat go up even by 30% can be devastating. And if high wheat prices were associated with the Arab Spring, they are also indirectly associated with the Syrian war (as is an ongoing water shortage). These conflicts have resulted in many deaths, and have created countless homeless refugees.

To summarize, I believe that those who deliberately sow confusion about important issues are morally complicit in the deaths that will result from the agnotology they helped induce. I hold such people beneath drug dealers and pimps. If you are too stupid to understand science, well I guess it really isn't your fault. But those who know what they are doing, or worse are paid to sow ignorance and confusion are in my opinion amongst the worst scum of humanity.