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You forgot to mention that he believes there's something "scientific" about Intelligent Design.

He may technically on paper be qualified to make comments about the climate, but given his willingness to lend credibility to Intelligent Design, it's much more likely that he is deliberately using his reputation & his knowledge of professional jargon to sow doubt on the climate change scientific consensus.

Perhaps he's ideologically-driven, or he's been paid off, or he just likes being a "maverick", but basically the public can't trust anything that he says to be useful information, since he's versed enough in the field & jargon to fake out anyone but an experienced climatologist.

Your source thinks evolution is science and gives interviews to Rush Limbaugh. He also participated in a movie that:

• Misrepresents the views of interviewed scientists.
• Claims that anthropogenic global warming is a giant conspiracy to oppress Africa.
• Relies heavily on the well-debunked theory that solar activity can account for present-day warming and blatantly misrepresents data to support that view.
• Mislabels the axis of a graph, presenting data up to the early 80s as data up to 2000, because showing the actual data going that far would contradict its claims.
• Says that volcanoes produce more CO2 than man.
• Parrots the oft-repeated claim that scientists are just in it for the money. All of them, every single one. It's a giant conspiracy and nobody involved has come out and said anything.
• Is made by an immature, childish asshole.

And is in general laden with half-truths and outright lies.

Forgive me if I'm a tad bit skeptical.

The fallacy here is that the assumption that the government or science has any firm idea of how to force somebody else or even one's self to not be fat. There's just that fascist impulse to raise the hammer of punishment and expect the overweight to find a way.

Here's a set of links on various ties between obesity and infection, to get the pot boiling.

• TCS Daily - Eating Some Crow on Fat
• Discovery Channel :: News - Health :: Study: Gut Bacteria Determine Fat or Thin
• Lipid metabolic changes in experimentally induced ...[Indian J Exp Biol. 2001] - PubMed Result
• Obesity Virus?
• BBC NEWS | Health | Obesity 'may be linked to virus'
• Bacterial-Modulated Signaling Pathways in Gut Homeostasis -- Lee 1 (21): pe24 -- Science Signaling
• An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increase...[Nature. 2006] - PubMed Result
• Obesity alters gut microbial ecology. [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005] - PubMed Result
• Gut microbiota and its possible relationship with ...[Mayo Clin Proc. 2008] - PubMed Result
• Biology News: Fat people harbour 'fat' microbes
• Discovery Channel :: News - Health :: Study: Gut Bacteria Determine Fat or Thin
• Symposium: Emerging Role of Pathogens in Chronic Diseases ... Uses the term 'Infectobesity'.

Here's a nice article on Bubbles, and actually you were getting ahead of yourself mentioning the alt energy bubble. It's probably coming in the next few years.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092507C

Read this.

This article is from 2005, but it clearly states that 724,000 people use ebay as their full time job, and 1.5 million use ebay as a supplement. How many people do you think are "falling" out of the job market, and like a lot of ebay users are finding other better ways to make a living? When I do computer work for people I know I charge $50/hr, and for people I don't know I charge a bit more. I only do it part time, but I could easily "drop out" of the job market. I think that more likely the GAO (or whoever comes up with the statistics) isn't counting the correct numbers due to recent changes in the job market. Never has it been easy to become self employed.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=080305C

I have to ask how Libertarians might hope to do anything about global warming when they systematically oppose any organization with enough power to do anything about it.

I would ask why we should have to when what there is to be done or what the real problem is not certain, even to leading scientists.

The Libertarian answer would be, if you can find a clear solution then convince others and take up collections to pay for the implementation - the way that so many victims of so many events like Katrina or the Tsunami were helped. I would be happy to donate money or labor to something that would be sure to help reduce the effects of global warming, if the answer were that clear. In the meantime I do what I can locally, including caring for my local environment and consuming resources as responsibly as possible (minimizing trips, using fuel efficient cars, supporting the greater expansion of open space within cities, collecting trash from public areas, etc. etc.) and globally (supporting microloan organizations to improve the economy of remote regions which in turn helps promote more responsible use of resources).

I had solar water heating thirty years ago so it feels rather silly to be lectured by someone who probably is just talking about helping or throwing money at the problem. How often do you just go out and pick up trash from greenbelts for example? How involved are you REALLY in helping the environment, locally or globally? If you think emissions are an issue what are you doing locally, and globally to try and reduce them?

I don't know if you can directly measure cosmic rays, but we can measure some of their effects. Here's an article linking plankton production in a certain area to sunspot cycles. The was written by Dr. Tim Patterson, Professor of Geology at Carleton University.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010405M

A good place to go hunting is techcentralstation. It's nothing but paid ads. Check the Energy and Environment page. Articles like this one sound like they have some sponsorship behind them. Interestingly enough, the author is also a proponent of intelligent design.

A good place to go hunting is techcentralstation. It's nothing but paid ads. Check the Energy and Environment page. Articles like this one sound like they have some sponsorship behind them. Interestingly enough, the author is also a proponent of intelligent design.

True, but they also have free health care, education, retirement, child care, and parental leave.

"Free" means a tax rate of about 50% of GDP, including a VAT of 25% on all goods and services, as well as income taxes of 29%-34% for most people, and 40% social insurance tax on income. Sweden even taxes pensions and sickness benefits as income.

So imagine putting aside 25% of everything you spend, and 60-70% of everything you earn...

http://www.sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/03/02/15/740 c9781.pdf

BTW, 46 million low-income Americans receive health benefits from Medicare, so we are on the way to socialized health care in the US already. Plus I think you will see that the U.S. was a more violent country than anywhere in Scandanavia way before their move to greater socialism.

But hey, don't let me stop you from moving to Sweden or Denmark if you prefer! Norway would be better, they've got the oil money.

Here is an article on Danish taxes:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=011107A

Sweden has a lot of immigration. 12% of residents are immigrants

Yeah, but most are of the "Polish plumber" new EU country variety and have some skills. That said, I'm proud of Sweden for keeping the doors open to immigration, unlike Denmark.

The poorest 10% in Sweden have incomes the same as the poorest 10% in the US (even after Swedish income transfers):

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=082806E

That's without Sweden having to deal with 20 million low-skill immigrants operating in the informal labor market.

Unlike the grand parent I'm posting anonymously because people have a habit of reacting in a negative way when they disagree with you when it comes to a discussion on a highly political issue like global warming.

Someone I think you should look into is Bjorn Lomborg who was named one of the 100 globally most influential people by Time magazine in 2004. He was a very well respected statistician until he had his book The Skeptical Environmentalist published at which point he became one of the most controversial names in the Global warming debate; in 2003 the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty reached a decision on complaints that had been filed against Lomborg and ruled that "The Skeptical Environmentalist was scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question" which was later over turned because the DCSD did not provide specific statements on actual errors (which have never been demonstrated) and The Skeptical Environmentalist was not a scientific publication so the DCSD had no right to intervene in the first place.

He is someone you should listen to and try to understand what he is saying regardless on your stance on global warming. Here is an example from an interview he did ( link):

"Perhaps this is most clear when you look at the movie from Al Gore. Everything he says is technically true. He says for instance that if Greenland melts, sea levels will rise about 20 feet. This is technically true. But of course the very evocative imagery of seeing Holland disappear under the waves - or New York, or Shanghai - leaves the impression that this is all going to happen very soon. Where in fact the UN climate panel says that the sea level rise over the next 100 years is going to be 30 cm - about 20 times less than he talks about. So there is a dramatic difference between what we're being told and what we're actually seeing. Which is also why I am writing a new book which comes out next fall on climate change, and I will address some of these issues."

A lot of his discussions tend to be centered around how the science of global warming is distorted by the media, or by people who have a political investment in the debate, and not necessarly about the science itself.

What he says is correct as many news organizations have been associating weather paterns that are normally associated with El Nino with Global Warming this year; being that we are currently under the influence of El Nino it is dishonest to link a mild or warm winter to global warming.

Just watch.

All of the guys who were cheering Newt Gingrich last week when he said we should revisit our first amendment rights are going to be the loudest in screaming, "But I have a RIGHT to bear arms!!!"

It is possible for something to be correlated on short timescales, but not correlated on longer timescales.

Going from a correlation to a causation is not trivial, but Patterson seems very confused about this.

Note that even in his own department, Patterson is controversial.

I don't think you read what I posted. 1996 was the hottest year in the 20th century for the entire earth (the 1930's weren't even close). That the arctic had a warmer year than this does not change that fact.

I don't know much more about polar bears than I do about the dust bowl. However, in doing a little background reading, I researched Polyakov. It seems figure 2 from Polyakov disagrees with the one you posted. So, it seems that someone is misrepresenting Polyakov. So, I went looking around TCS and found the article from which the plot came. If you want more from Polyakov (without the TCS filter telling you what to believe), here's an article he actually wrote: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/research/am plif/amplif_jul02_2.pdf

That's the funny thing about those denying global warming. If you actually read the few scientific articles they say support their position, you usually find out that those articles do NOT support their position.

Sorry but you're talking about an alternate Earth.

Here are the Arctic temps for the 20th Century for everywhere above 70N

Here is Polyakov et al, 2004

Funnily the polar bears didn't go through a big decline in numbers during the 1930s. The great scare about polar bears clinging on to ever dwindling clumps of ice is just that: a great scare. The polar bear populations (there are at least 13 or 14 distinct groups of them in North America) have, if anything, increased over the last 20 years with only one group declining as a result of increased hunting by Inuit.

I'm pretty sure if you google "Global warming" and "polar bears" you'll get a clue that the polar bear scare is recycled with every major report on global warming, without any citation given as to the polar bear populations over time. Since polar bears are predators, they have population growths and crashes as their prey do. It has nothing to do with global warming or anything like it.

The myth is that climate itself, like polar bear populations, is supposed to be stable. It never has been and never will be.

Sorry but you're talking about an alternate Earth.

Here are the Arctic temps for the 20th Century for everywhere above 70N

Here is Polyakov et al, 2004

Funnily the polar bears didn't go through a big decline in numbers during the 1930s. The great scare about polar bears clinging on to ever dwindling clumps of ice is just that: a great scare. The polar bear populations (there are at least 13 or 14 distinct groups of them in North America) have, if anything, increased over the last 20 years with only one group declining as a result of increased hunting by Inuit.

I'm pretty sure if you google "Global warming" and "polar bears" you'll get a clue that the polar bear scare is recycled with every major report on global warming, without any citation given as to the polar bear populations over time. Since polar bears are predators, they have population growths and crashes as their prey do. It has nothing to do with global warming or anything like it.

The myth is that climate itself, like polar bear populations, is supposed to be stable. It never has been and never will be.

You are so gullible ... exactly like these idiots in the 30s who praised Stalin's Russia as the next great thing.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=082206C

DCI also runs Tech Central Station, a website frequently referred to by Slashdot and its readers. DCI's client list includes AT&T, Intel, Microsoft, and many others. According to their own website, they specialize in "Corporate Grassroots Campaigns" and "Internet Communications and Mobilization". They helped the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry and now this astroturf attack on Gore. To TCS' credit its not like they hide who owns them.

The lesson is, be skeptical. Don't trust someone or somebody unless they give you a good reason to do so. Don't trust me - click the links above.

The alternative is even worse, and it ain't bloggers.

The other author, Carter writes for the Tech Central Science Foundation, which is owned by a DC lobbying firm which received $95K from ExxonMobil.

Real scientists publish in scientific journals. Be ashamed that you can't tell the difference between scientists and "scientific pundits" and a corporate agenda from a scientific agenda.

When you can find scientific journal cites for Carter's junk science, I'll listen to you.

Just to amplify what you stated: Bob Carter, the first scientist quoted in the article, is a contributor to Tech Central Station, a right-wing web site that's sponsored by, among others, ExxonMobil. TCS is run by a PR firm and publishes articles tailored to fit the interests of the sponsors. Wikipedia has more. Mr. Carter is currently working on a deep sea drilling project. My guess is that it involves drilling for oil.

Here are the articles he's written for TCS. I do not trust him to have an objective opinion on global warming.

Just to amplify what you stated: Bob Carter, the first scientist quoted in the article, is a contributor to Tech Central Station, a right-wing web site that's sponsored by, among others, ExxonMobil. TCS is run by a PR firm and publishes articles tailored to fit the interests of the sponsors. Wikipedia has more. Mr. Carter is currently working on a deep sea drilling project. My guess is that it involves drilling for oil.

Here are the articles he's written for TCS. I do not trust him to have an objective opinion on global warming.

Exxon pays his salary. Here's another of his gems: Global warming is good for plants!

It's funny how I get a hopeful feeling when I see that there may still be some credible debate on this topic. Sadly the truth really is inconvenient, and depressing.

Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines, and may also refer to political movements that aspire to put these doctrines into practice. These movements generally envisage a system of social organization in which property and the distribution of income are subject to social control. As an economic system, socialism is usually associated with state or collective ownership of the means of production. This control may be either direct, exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils, or it may be indirect, exercised on behalf of the people by the state.

Wikipedia

Of course, public schools have local oversite. But they simply do not have control. And if you want an example of that, I submit to you No Child Left Behind. How many people who don't like the rules imposed have any control to supercede them?

I don't think you have a very good understanding of the words "Personal Responsibility". What they mean is that if you don't like the private school you're sending your kids to, it's your responsibility to either influence change or leave. If you don't like the terms of your employment, it's your responsibility to find a new employer. In general, you are responsible for the condition of your life. If you don't like it, change it.

I love taking shots at public entities because they are

1. expensive
2. ineffective
3. destroyers of freedom

And all in the name of insulating people against the consequences of free choices. I'm glad you think that public institutions provide you excellent service. I submit that they are the highest cost producer and if we sent less of our money to them and didn't allow them to spend as much as they do, we'd all be better off and richer.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=021706G
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/0 1/18/not-as-bad-as-we-thought/#more-134

Of the 15 different findings that were released and covered by the press on December 7, 2005 about global warming, 14 of them were reporting that things were "worse than we thought" and only one of them concluded that things weren't going to be as bad as originally forecast. Given an unbiased prediction, there should be a 50-50 chance that things turned out either worse or better than expected. Under such a scenario, there is only a 1-in-2,000 chance that 14 things out of 15 would be worse. But that's what happened. So, either the original forecasts were not unbiased, a rare event did indeed occur, or, more likely, the interpretation and reporting went a bit over the top--that is, the press (and to some degree the researchers themselves) only like to hype the more extreme results.

You get headlines and grants by claiming San Diego will be underwater by the year 2100. You get ignored and better be paid by NASA or a tenured by a college if you mention increased snow accumulations in the Antarctic.

Really? Not according to this guy:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=032406F

The Earth is getting warmer currently, but the primary cause of increased ocean temperatures in the atlantic is from the fact that we're entering the warm part of the 50 year cycle. If you want a very good write up of the study check out this:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=031606F

If we assume that the number of people who "can't afford" the procedure are the ones without health insurance, then it's about 15%, which is better than Sweden's number and WAAAY better than both Canada and the UK's number. In other words, the percentage of people who don't get coronary bypass in the US as a result of our strange capitalist leaning, but not capitalist health care system is better than all of the socialist systems. Capitalism is still the least bad option.

NOTE: I put "can't afford" in quotes. The number of people without health insurance is NOT the same as the number of people who can't afford it. The annual cost of health insurance is approximately the same as the annual cost of eating. There are certainly some people who can't afford to pay the cost of health insurance. But many (I'd like to say most) simply choose to spend their money on other things. In other words, the assumption I make above to get to 15% is extremely pessimistic to my claim and yet it still validates my claim. If I could find an accurate way of deliniating those who choose not to purchase health insurance from those who truly can not pay for health insurance, AND then if I could find a reliable statistic for the latter group, it would make my claim even stronger. How much stronger, I'm not sure, but I suspect it would cut the number in half (at least).

If you then instead substituted a real market based health insurance program instead of the strange one that we have, it'd be even better. A real health insurance program would drive down the costs of procedures, instead of what we have driving up the costs.

Aye, I've yet to see exhaust gases of a coal plant actually benefit the health of anyone as opposed to exposure to low-level radiation and cancer.

"WHAT? Radioactive is always harmful!"

Infact the LNT (linear-no-threshold) theory of radiation for humans is based on quantities vastly exceeding 'normal' amounts - on effects of atomic warfare - and there exists no study of the effects of radiation of lower intensity on humans.

However there is substantial evidence that indicates the risk from low-level contamination is currently blown utterly out of proportion - For example: Chernobyl. Instead of projected casualties of 20,000 direct and 500,000 indirect "only" 47 direct and 4,000 indirect were realized. Furthermore the environment around Chernobyl is infact thriving with many large mammals living in the 'protected zone'.

More:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=091905D

http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller12.html

http://ranprieur.com/crash/naturechernobyl.html

The interesting part of this study is the gravity variant method they are using. The actual study is meaningless in terms of the global warming debate, because of the timeline and the localized effects. See this TCS story for all the details and graphs.

Essentially, the study used gravity variation measurements from space to do their estimates. The Western part showed some melting in the 3 year time period they studied, but the 3x as large Eastern part didn't. Of course, if you look at a larger time period (a similar study was done for 82-03), the 3 years worth of data these guys chose just happens to start at a high period for the ice thickness and actually, the Eastern part has been getting thicker over the longer time period.

So the study just used a cool application of observations of gravitational variations, rather than bearing any relevance to the issue of global climate change and its implications.

So don't let your misunderstanding of the study blow up into some sort of big global warming scare. It's unscientific conclusions like that which give non-climatologists a bad name when it comes to these kinds of FUD political tactics.

Why let things get that far? Demand access to what we've already paid for. Build your own infrastructure regardless. The more you have the more robust the country is. Centralization is obsolete and dangerous.

Those Bell assholes and the cable companies are sitting on a public network built by monopoly protection grants. They are in that position again because they made a bunch of promisses they never kept. If they want to get cute, drop the monopoly protection and let companies like Google have access to the public servitude and bandwith needed to route around their damage. That would show them who's boss and make them compete for customers. The telco monopolies stopped working decades ago, if indeed they ever did work.

I think Gates had a case in the document. He advocated a licesing model against what is today commonly known as 'software piracy'. Nothing wrong about that.

What is of greater concern for me is that Gates/MS supported unsound lobbyists like DCI / TechCentralStation which advocate radical views on Intellectual Property and insult people, including EU muslims.

And he supported a bunch of other lobbyists in favour of software patenting in the EU although Gates must know it better. He has a right to write and sell his code, but he has no right to deprieve other developers from doing the same.

I think Gates had a case in the document. He advocated a licesing model against what is today commonly known as 'software piracy'. Nothing wrong about that.

What is of greater concern for me is that Gates/MS supported unsound lobbyists like DCI / TechCentralStation which advocate radical views on Intellectual Property and insult people, including EU muslims.

And he supported a bunch of other lobbyists in favour of software patenting in the EU although Gates must know it better. He has a right to write and sell his code, but he has no right to deprieve other developers from doing the same.

If it was about oil then how come we aren't taking it? Why was it turned over to Iraq again and very quickly? We purchase oil from there before and after the war and in roughly the same amounts. Face it, your believing a lie. Do you deny the French were taking money from the OIL for food program? Take a look here - http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocusRel.asp?infocus ID=97&Body=Oil-for-Food&Body1=inquiry . Maybe you haven't heard of Bosnia - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1469896.st m . It was a UN action in the 1990s and the US participated. The justification was mainly genocide. Maybe you are in denial about Saddam? Here, get to know him - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein . Here is a short list of resolutions that he has violated - http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect 2.html . Every one of them you can look up for yourself at the UN site if you don't believe it. Perhaps it is that you don't believe the world has been at war for many millenia - that would be ignorance of history that is inexcuseable.

More like it, you think you know more than you really do and by the way I'm probably old enough to be at least your father if not your grandfather. I keep telling young people about stuff like this, they don't believe me and then they make the mistake I told them about. Happens over and over again. Amusing when they admit I was right when caught. The truly stupid (stupid as in a stupor, not as in dumb) continue to deny that I'm right, especially in the face of facts like I have shown you above. Up to now I wouldn't say that you're stupid or even dumb, you're learning. The choice is yours now that I have shown you the undeniable facts. You can't even say I'm deluded because I used sources that can't even be disputed. some people call this "those stubborn facts again."

Maybe it would also help to mention that Iraq was a haven for terrorists. Dozens of them were arrested right after we captured Baghdad including this guy wanted for over a decade - http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/15/sprj.irq .abbas.arrested/ . Here is yet another article on others - http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092503F

Even today Hilary Clinton won't say it was a mistake for her to vote to go to war. It took a lot to get Sen. Kerry to say it was, he voted to go to war too. Both know it was the right thing to do and yes - had nothing to do with oil or even bad intelligence. Kerry simply thought he could get elected by being anti-war so he went for the propaganda. He had nothing else to offer (don't believe that? What else was he about then? Without looking or googling). I remember people like you when Carter and then Clinton came to power. They said we would never be at war with them in power and both took military action. I can remember Kennedy too, however that is another discussion. Take the red pill and read what I sent you or take the blue pill and continue to be ignorant. Hopefully you will take the red pill and wake up.

We are hugely off topic here. Sorry /. Please forgive us.
I'll leave you with this thought. Regardless of if you think I'm right, deluded, whatever, please keep your mind open and consider both sides. Both sides tell you the truth sometimes and both sides tell yo

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121505E
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_(film_d irector)
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?typ e=topNews&storyID=2005-12-18T102039Z_01_FLE836834_ RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAN-ISRAEL.xml

Anyone who can still deny the threat that Islam presents to the freedoms we hold dear in the West is just not paying attention, or they're just afraid of ending up like Theo Van Gogh.