Slashdot Mirror

Nope. All cases are The Crown (Court of England and Wales Prosecution Service) vs X. The laws of the UK dictate that X can be anyone - including the Monarch and Members of Parliament. The queen has no authority over judicial law (laws decided by the people) or the prosecution services.

The queen is head of the military to provide the ability to exercise her only power - the ability to disband parliament and force a general election.

I'd suggest reading up on Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War....

Or maybe you could step back and realize that no GCM predicts monotonic warming, that there's a difference between local weather and the global climate, and that reading crackpot websites isn't a substitute for a graduate education in climate physics?

So when you say local weather, do you mean like, the northern hemisphere? I ask because that's the half that's in winter now and is what I was referring to. You don't need a graduate education in geology to know that.

Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA...
Britain braced for heaviest snowfall in 50-years...
Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal'...
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years...

He was in the country lawfully. He did not run, he stood from his seat when a plain clothes cop yelled 'He's here!' to 2 of his colleagues. The police did not identify themselves before shooting.. Oh, and the police lied about it aftewards.

bring on the blue alien sex

You're going to get your wish on that one ;)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/6931166/Avatar-fans-promised-alien-sex-scene-on-DVD.html

Both U2 and the Stones evade their respective taxes through the Netherlands, making Bono quite the hypocrite. Details on the tax changes that motivated the switch out of Ireland.

second goat!

That's easy for you to say not to pay the disgusting BBC tax, but recent developments will most likely mean that all phone lines will get a new BBC tax (eventually).... because you "could" get the BBC by clicking a link.

If the government can come up with a fake reason to slap a 50pence/month (plus VAT tax on this 50p tax) on all phone lines (even VoIP lines line SkypeIn), then they could put another tax on phone lines "just in case" you want to visit the BBC / view online content.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6770899/Pre-Budget-report-2009-50p-broadband-tax.html

BBC shows via Video on demand (different to their iPlayer service), another reason to tax phone lines, whether you use the BBC or not.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6964461.ece

after Copenhagen. A few fools will still cling blindly to their religion, even after it has become clear to all that the game was rigged from the start, but intelligent people who take breathless hyperbole with a grain of salt are now making AlGore and his worshipers objects of mockery.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100020279/copenhagen-climate-summit-most-important-paper-in-the-world-is-a-glorified-un-press-release/

The second-to-last line is not to be missed:

"There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies."

I couldn't have said it better myself. Begone, smellies!

Okay, how's this for credibility: the Russians are believed to have been the ones who hacked into the servers and then selectively released out-of-context quotes to try to discredit the CRU scientists. So gee, should I act shocked that they're continuing their assault? Russia is being the number one impediment these days to a global climate change accord, and it seems to go to the top. For example, they've been one of the main forces holding up a Copenhagen accord.

Back on the initial topic: 100 to 1 odds says that any data exclusions are due to bad data and incomplete records. This is the standard sort of mistake made by people who either don't know how the analyses are done or who deliberately want to mislead. The meteorological station calculations are NOT done by simply taking all data and averaging it. If you did that, the way that the amateur deniers think that contaminated data would enter the record -- such as stations becoming urbanized, being tampered with, etc -- would actually be true. But the data is first analyzed, problem stations detected (in an automated method), and eliminated from the record or normalized. And the preprocessing is itself studied to verify that it's valid -- for example, comparing individual regions to other climate analysis methods, comparing windy days with calm days to make sure the heat island effect has been properly eliminated, etc.

In short, claiming that many stations are being eliminated is complete nonsense because that's *supposed* to happen, and if you didn't do that, the record would be readily thrown off by human development and equipment faults. I'd bet dollars to donuts that this is all that this comes down to. And that quite a few people at the agency putting this out know this, but are deliberately using it for manufactured doubt nonetheless.

And let's all not forget that the CRU dataset is just one dataset using one particular type of datasource and one particular analysis. There are many datasources and many analyses, and of equal prominence to CRU's datasets are NOAA's and NASA's. No, the different datasets don't match up perfectly (for example, whether 1998 or 2005 was the hottest year -- they were close), but the datasets all yield similar results.

Rage Against The Machine - "Killing In The Name" for UK Christmas No.1!

From the Facebook group: "Fed up of Simon Cowell's latest karaoke act being Christmas No. 1? Me too ... So who's up for a mass-purchase of the track 'KILLING IN THE NAME' from December 13th ... as a protest to the X Factor monotony?"

I've bought it from iTunes, Amazon, and re-bought the album in my local HMV. Get it done, people.

Also, as the whole story happened in a country were medical assistance is available

It is available in theory. In practice, multiple reports suggest, the availability is shoddy... And not just for maternity...

That's National Health Service (a.k.a. "single-payer")...

There was an incident where an octopus didn't like a light shining on him, and started shorting it out by climbing out of the tank and squirting it with water. I definitely wouldn't be surprised if one figured out how to get a little extra food.

Paypal in the EU is a regulated bank, registered as such in Luxembourg: Daily Telegraph article

Then we shouldn't trust them, period. This isn't some little debate that is only gonna affect the scientific community, if we do what the AGW groups want it will cost trillions of dollars, taken from just about every man, woman, and child on this planet, it will cost millions of jobs in the USA alone, at a time when we can least afford those losses, and it will set up the perfect conditions for parasites like Goldman Sachs to blow a bubble with carbon credits and cause untold misery.

So I'm sorry, but if they can't even bother to share the data then we can not trust a single word they say. Too much money is at stake, too many parties with interests are involved, too much politics are already in play. And if they didn't want to be bothered by FOI requests they could have simply dropped the raw data on a public server and said "YOU sort it" and that would have been the end of that, so that excuse doesn't fly.

If this debate was over something that ultimately wouldn't impact most folks daily lives, like whether there is living bacteria on Mars, then I'd say you have a point. But this is going to affect the course of our entire society for decades, perhaps centuries. It will make those on the inside richer than God and cause great misery to the working poor. With so many lives and so much money at stake it would be truly foolish to trust ANYBODY without seeing the raw data.

After all the spokesman for AGW, AL Gore, is set to become the first Carbon billionaire from the trade of carbon credits. If that isn't a conflict of interest I honestly don't know what is. There is too much money, power, and lives at stake not to see the raw data, and hiding from FOI requests and destroying the original data just makes them look like liars or criminals.

ITV told to turn down the volume on adverts

I usually hit "mute" as soon as the adverts start.

They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.

I don't think you've captured the true flavor of their hijinks.

Rigging a Climate 'Consensus' - About those emails and 'peer review.'

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!"

Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature,...... Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.

When it comes to climate, there seems to be two groups - skeptics, and believers. It is amazingly difficult to get believers to reevaluate new data (and perhaps endanger millions in grants?).

Climate of Fear - Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
Physics Group Splinters Over Global Warming Review
Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

Can most scientists afford to be skeptics?

To which Paul Vaughan responded as follows:

Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW.
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money -- perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.

Opposing toxic pollution is not synonymous with supporting AGW.

After all, there is huge money to be made and transferred due to "Climate change", even if it all turns out to b

Ray Kurzweil thinks that if you can hang on for another 20 years or so you should be able to live indefinitely.

As for CO2, you still seem to miss the point. Is CO2 the cause or a symptom? That's the question. If it's a symptom then eliminating it does absolutely no good. If you look at the UN report of 1992, it talks about global warming. No mention of man. Next year suddenly without any proof whatsoever, man is to blame. HUH? That WTH is this is what concerns anyone that has a scientific background. They have been trying to hammer in some "proof" ever since. They should do it right or shut up. The other case in point are these e-mails that show proof they can't make their case and they know it. I remember Hanson of Goddard Space Flight Center testified the 1990s were the hottest decade on record. Then a researcher found out he was wrong. The 1930s were. Hansen said it was a year 2000 bug. Was it a bug or did he lie? Seems hard to believe such a "scientist" would make such a mistake. He received a Nobel prize by the way. Just like Algore did. See a pattern here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen Sounds like a great guy, eh? Ok, look here - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3563532/The-world-has-never-seen-such-freezing-heat.html How embarrassing.

The question is are you a religious member of the "man causing global warming" church or not. Open mind or not. My mind is open, if you say man is causing GW, prove it. Use data that we can look at and models we can look at. Taking someone's word for it has never been acceptable scientifically. Only for religions do we have to do that. Like a religion, if you believe in it, a few make a lot of money off of your belief. Algore wants to be the pope of that religion. Like a religion you expect everyone else to just accept it and if we don't we're dumb, heretics, etc.

Seems CO2 as a heating agent is no more scientifically based than the fact plants need it to survive and a greenhouse is hot. Plants put out a lot of water vapour, trapping the heat. Nothing to do with CO2. This misconception is at the heart of their argument. I could bring up more stuff, however you will either see my point by now or you'll never see it.

The herbal version tastes better (I'd rather drink a mug of tea than take a pill).

You'd place taste over effectiveness and safety? Really? If so then I suppose you can get child versions of some medicines with flavours added. However since you swallow pills you generally don't taste them.

For mild conditions, the exact dosage is not particularly important.

I think most people would regard a stomach upset as minor so you might want to read this.

The processed version is more expensive

Probably true but I tend to regard my health and safety as actually worth something, don't you?

First, it isn't clear how Al Gore would instantly become a billionaire if cap and trade becomes law. Second, you really think one man is more influential than several, already, multi-billion dollar industries?

It's quite clear how he would become a multibillionaire. He started a company that does nothing but buy and sell carbon credits. He'd be the founder and owner of the biggest company on the carbon credit version of Wall Street. I also never said he was more influential than multi-billion dollar industries. However he is one of the most influential people in the world in terms of environmental policy.

While this may be true, they already are the completely dominant force in commerce and so they'll make even more money if they don't have to retool anything.

Incorrect. The cost of doing business in the developed world is more expensive than in the undeveloped world. The western factories are steadily losing ground to the Daewoos and Tatas of the world. Their profits (adjusted for inflation) are shrinking. They have a few choices: compete from a position that is inferior in the long term, level the playing field by getting rid of wealth destroying laws like western income taxes and minimum wages (which the economically ignorant would never let happen), or use the fear of the scientifically ignorant to pressure the developing nations to level the playing field the other way. These are the same mega-corps that promote ideas like mandatory worker health benefits, minimum wage, and complicated tax accounting rules. Sure it costs them money, but it costs their small scale competitors a greater amount (in relative terms), so they win. If the American corporations didn't want greater regulation and global environmental treaties, why did they give record amounts of money to the Obama campaign? It certainly wasn't because he wanted to make the US a capitalist country again.

What? Are you counting yourself and all the other posters on slashdot?

No I'm counting world renowned scientists:
Astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas
Statistician Stephen McIntyre
Professor Habibullo Abdussamatov
Geologist Astrid Lyså
Prof. Roy Spencer, NASA scientist
Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT
a few dozen here...including an IPCC member.
and these 32 000 guys.
That should be enough people to show there is no "consensus" on global warming.

What cooling? The temperatures may be slightly cooler than the absolute peak, but to say there is a cooling trend is simply not true.

The "trend", as you call it, is a decade long...so far, and it's projected to last another few decades. How long was the warming that proceeded it? Twenty five years? I find it interesting that you quote a man (James Hansen of GISS) who was forced to retract falsified evidence that had claimed that the 2000s were the hottest decade in recorded history. And whose revised (i.e. more truthful) report showed that the world has cooled since the 1940s, while at the same time CO2 production skyrocketed. Additionally, wasn't he implicated in the CRU data manipulation? Yeah, he was. He's a trustwo

Too fucking right! Those big money scientists are faking the whole global warming thing so they can rake in the big bucks.

Phil Jones, the man who just stepped down has received $22.6 million in grants since 1990.

Research has shown that when the Sahara was grassland it was due to a warmer global climate (including more CO2 in the atmosphere).

You're reaction is hilarious because you refuse to look at any facts or allegations. These e-mails show that only a few scientists were corrupt, but they happened to be the ones most influencing policy at the IPCC. The rest of the scientists just flock to grant money and worry about peer pressure.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

I know that you're trolling, but for the record it's here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/6692584/Switzerland-faces-backlash-over-minaret-ban.html

CERN's not at the top of the average Swiss Muslim's "things to worry about" list right now.

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

Comments 870 | Comment on this article

CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

Comments 870 | Comment on this article

CO2 emissions will be on top of the agenda at the Copenhagen summit in December Photo: Getty

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS

I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in
one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this
case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case
for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.

Problem is, some of the other sources aren't looking so good, either.

c) New Zealand average temperature graphs - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations

Ignoring the obvious warming trend since the 1930s in your own graph, that's what it is.

The claims of evolution skeptics and round-earth skeptics is not backed up by observation and evidence. On the other hand, the more extreme claims of anthropogenic global warming _proponents_ are not backed up with sufficient observation and are extrapolated from very small datasets.

Given all of this, to say the "science is settled" is a travesty, and all those who said so fully deserve what's come so far and is undoubtedly coming as there's greater public and scientific scrutiny of their methods:

a) the Yamal tree-ring data - data from 10 trees is extrpolated into a 'trend' and finds its way into a number of papers
b) CRU emails - won't say much more, too much said about this already.
c) New Zealand average temperature graphs - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations

At this point, climate scientists who don't open up their raw data, modelling code and assumptions/decision-making are going to look as sleazy as PHB managers who forecast self-serving weird shit to make themselves look good to their bosses.

Why would this be moded as flamebait? I'm sure I don't know, but we'll give it another hearing....

The claims of evolution skeptics and round-earth skeptics is not backed up by observation and evidence. On the other hand, the more extreme claims of anthropogenic global warming _proponents_ are not backed up with sufficient observation and are extrapolated from very small datasets.

Given all of this, to say the "science is settled" is a travesty, and all those who said so fully deserve what's come so far and is undoubtedly coming as there's greater public and scientific scrutiny of their methods:

a) the Yamal tree-ring data - data from 10 trees is extrpolated into a 'trend' and finds its way into a number of papers
b) CRU emails - won't say much more, too much said about this already.
c) New Zealand average temperature graphs - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations

At this point, climate scientists who don't open up their raw data, modelling code and assumptions/decision-making are going to look as sleazy as PHB managers who forecast self-serving weird shit to make themselves look good to their bosses.

Why would this be moded as flamebait? I'm sure I don't know, but we'll give it another hearing....

Why was this guy moded as a troll? What he's saying is all over the news in Europe.

The claims of evolution skeptics and round-earth skeptics is not backed up by observation and evidence. On the other hand, the more extreme claims of anthropogenic global warming _proponents_ are not backed up with sufficient observation and are extrapolated from very small datasets.

Given all of this, to say the "science is settled" is a travesty, and all those who said so fully deserve what's come so far and is undoubtedly coming as there's greater public and scientific scrutiny of their methods:

a) the Yamal tree-ring data - data from 10 trees is extrpolated into a 'trend' and finds its way into a number of papers
b) CRU emails - won't say much more, too much said about this already.
c) New Zealand average temperature graphs - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations

At this point, climate scientists who don't open up their raw data, modelling code and assumptions/decision-making are going to look as sleazy as PHB managers who forecast self-serving weird shit to make themselves look good to their bosses.

The claims of evolution skeptics and round-earth skeptics is not backed up by observation and evidence. On the other hand, the more extreme claims of anthropogenic global warming _proponents_ are not backed up with sufficient observation and are extrapolated from very small datasets.

Given all of this, to say the "science is settled" is a travesty, and all those who said so fully deserve what's come so far and is undoubtedly coming as there's greater public and scientific scrutiny of their methods:

a) the Yamal tree-ring data - data from 10 trees is extrpolated into a 'trend' and finds its way into a number of papers
b) CRU emails - won't say much more, too much said about this already.
c) New Zealand average temperature graphs - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations

At this point, climate scientists who don't open up their raw data, modelling code and assumptions/decision-making are going to look as sleazy as PHB managers who forecast self-serving weird shit to make themselves look good to their bosses.

Since I think the Polar Bear thing is particularly funny (I think a lot of teen girls think they are so cute, in spite of the fact that they are apparently some of the most aggressive and violent bears), this is certainly not Fox News. nor are these folks. But with proof like simply SEEING them so far off shore and presuming global warming is the reason, it's so obvious that any criticism must be wrong! I guess since the food that Polar Bears eat - like seals - are remaining completely stationary while the snow/ice presumably recedes. I've seen reports that polar bears can swim anywhere from 60 to 100s of miles, so apparently they aren't completely sure....

Incidentally, from here [reason.com]:

All the articles you link to follow from the same exact flaw which renders them rather meaningless - they claim that polar bears are not threatened because present numbers are stable or increasing (polar bears are lucky animals, living far as far away from human settlement as they do); yet they miss the point that it is the future that matters - what will happen in 50-100 years time when the arctic is ice-free? This style of nonsense reasoning is typical of the obfuscation performed by denialist pundits.

The Daily Telegraph by the way is the FOX News of the UK. If you think the CRU team are bending the truth, they can't hold a candle to the Daily Telegraph.

Ask Sally Anne Bowman's parents if they think the system is being used to generate false positives.

See here (Wikipedia) or here (Telegraph) or here (BBC) for reasons why DNA collection can be a good thing.

Unfortunately we don't hang scum anymore, but at least Mark Dixie is inside where hopefully he's having long unpleasant showers. That wouldn't have been the case if Dixie's DNA had not been on the database.

London is good for all the fancy museums, but get out of town - go to the Midlands and see some old stonework, like Kenilworth or Warwick castle. Have a wander round the tourist trail in Stratford or the Tolkein Trail, or just anywhere in the midlands

One very big advantage of having a laptop is that you can upload you days photos to the internet (either a web service or NAS box at home) far far away from the risks of theft and prying customs inspection. Upload can take some time if your even a mild shutterbug so doing it overnight on the hotel wifi is very handy

On the matter of places to go I'll say again Oxford is worth a day trip just for the Pitt Rivers Museum (t the small but perfectly formed Oxford natural history museum located on the same site is a nice bonus and the nearby Museum of the History of Science. has great geek appeal. (.I suppose you could also go to the Ashmolean if you have some spare time)

Also not that the Pitt rivers website does not do justice to the sheer random strangeness of the place here is an article about it.

How exactly do you indoctrinate children and violate their parents' religious beliefs by exposing their children to scientific facts? Moreover, even the vatican claims that evolution does not violate Christian doctrine. So what exactly is being taught in school that you believe is violating anyone's religious beliefs? Complex numbers? The law of gravity?

It appears that the problem with those kids' parents isn't religiousness but arrogant idiocy thinly disguised as religious fervour.

Downloading music off the interwebs doesn't deprive someone the ability to sell something. If I steal a car, the person from whom I stole that car can no longer sell the car. He no longer has it, so selling it would be tricky. On the other hand, if I design a machine that makes instant copies of cars, then use it to copy a car from a dealership, the dealership can still sell the car I copied, because they still possess it. Now, you might say, "But they can't sell it to you! You already have that car!" Which is correct: copyright infringement theoretically lowers demand. But then, what if I wasn't going to buy that car anyway, and so my demand was already zero? In fact, maybe driving that car has made me desire a car from the same manufacturer! Maybe I like it so much, I'll pay for the next car I obtain from them. And perhaps if I designed this wondrous machine, it would not be so morally outrageous if I used it to copy cars that the dealership no longer had any prospect of selling in large numbers.

Of course, I'm not just speculating. Research shows that people who download music illegally also spend more on music purchases.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5519313/US-porn-industry-hit-by-Aids-fears-as-16-cases-of-HIV-revealed.html Unfortunately raising calls for regulations requiring condoms, since unusual occurrences stimulate lawmakers

an 0.1% increase will only increase temperatures by 0.07K. That is negligible compared to the 6K/100 yrs being talked about by climatologists. It seems your alternative theory just doesn't account for the facts

You are calling that 6K/100 years fact? Don't be silly. It is just a figment of a highly politicized set of models. The IPPC is claiming a trend of 0.2K per decade. However the actual temperature measurements only support something like 0.11K per decade for the rise between the 70s and 90s. The solar flux changes we have been discussing happen on a timescale of roughly half a decade...

The more relevant aspects of the debate are actually what biological and ecological consequences can be expected from global mean temperature rise and its rate of acceleration.

Not relevant at all because in the last few years the global temperature has been dropping markedly. The reason that that does not show up in the official data sets being foisted on us is because they have been busy hiding the decline.

occupy lots of space and valuable real estate

You know, you're talking Pittsburgh here - if the universities were to close tomorrow, property values would drop like a rock. Pittsburgh is second only after the places hit by hurricane Katrina in terms of population decline - and it's continued since that article was written in 2007. Pittsburgh - it IS the pits - armpits that is.

The worst part? It's not salvageable. Puts it right at the top, along with Detroit, as one of the 50 cities most likely to disappear over the next 2 decades.

Wow, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Way to completely miss the point of my post there pal! Guess you couldn't let actual content get in the way of a good rant, huh?

Now if you would have actually bothered to read my post, which why you replied without reading I have no clue, I said I have no problem with more efficient designs. What I DO have a problem with is the biggest pushers of the "green" revolution are ones like Goldman Sachs and Al Gore, who have set themselves up to reap billions, if not trillions, out of the pockets of you, me, and every one else on the planet. doesn't that bother you? At least a little bit?

Now as for the science, I work with the local college who does a bunch of grant work and have seen how that stuff works. You put out stuff going against the "prevailing wisdom" and your grant money tends to go "poof"! Now to a point this is understandable, as nobody wants to pay for crackpot science, now do they?

The problem as I see it is "carbon credits", which will turn out to be the biggest scam since the Catholic church sold "get out of hell free" cards, mark my words. Instead of putting their money where their mouth is and actually cutting down on pollution they will be able to "sin" all they want, as long as they buy their "carbon credits" which a good 70%+ of that money will end up in some speculators like Goldman Sachs pocket. Don't get me wrong, if you think carbon is the root of all evil, then please go right ahead and cut emissions. But carbon credits are a scam, which will only make parasites rich while helping nobody. And I just find it strange that those that will reap massive profits are the ones the MSM is listening to.

If I said I could cure global warming, but you and everyone else on the planet would have to cut a check for $1000 to "hairyfeet.inc" every month, which I was the sole owner of, would you believe me? Yet Al Gore is set to become a billionaire off of carbon credits, and nobody thinks to bring up his conflict of interest? Don't that strike you as just a LITTLE odd? If you want to be a zealot, please sell your car and live in a cave. It is a free country after all. But don't turn a blind eye to the fact that the ones screaming about "the sky is falling!" have a lock on the umbrella market. I just find it strange that these obvious conflicts of interest almost never are even mentioned by the MSM. Don't you find that even a LITTLE strange?

And here are the opposing viewpoints from people not on a biased website:

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Another good writeup on the leaked emails can be found here. Summary: manipulation of evidence, private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, suppression of evidence, fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists, attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period , and communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.

You sound like you're arguing from information given to you by Al Gore. I'm not sure he's a trustworth source.

Since I think the Polar Bear thing is particularly funny (I think a lot of teen girls think they are so cute, in spite of the fact that they are apparently some of the most aggressive and violent bears), this is certainly not Fox News. nor are these folks. But with proof like simply SEEING them so far off shore and presuming global warming is the reason, it's so obvious that any criticism must be wrong! I guess since the food that Polar Bears eat - like seals - are remaining completely stationary while the snow/ice presumably recedes. I've seen reports that polar bears can swim anywhere from 60 to 100s of miles, so apparently they aren't completely sure.

To me, the Polar Bear thing is a good example of someone seeing something and it getting blown completely out of proportion and people like Al Gore picking up on it and trying to use it for their own gain. Al Gore does not appear to be struggling financially.

Incidentally, from here:

Gore shows an animation of a polar bear (very reminiscent of the Coca Cola bears) swimming pitifully in the sea trying to haul itself up onto the last piece of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. In 2002, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report warning that global warming was endangering polar bears. Arctic sea ice is thawing sooner and this means that the bears who hunt seals on the ice have fewer opportunities to feed themselves. This week saw an alarming report that hungry polar bears are turning cannibal. Yet, the WWF report itself found that most bear populations are either stable or increasing (see page 9 of the report). And remember, polar bears evidently survived when Arctic temperatures were warmer 6000 years ago. Of course, if predictions that the entire Arctic Ocean will be ice free in 100 year turn out to be right, then the polar bears will have a problem.

(emphasis mine)

That "ice free" bit was a link to "sciencedaily.com."

h ah aha ah ah haaaaaa ha aha aha aha aah ah ahahha aha ahaa h aha aha ahaaaa h aha aha aha cough cough...ha ah aha aha aha aha aha aha aha hh haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

Is there any reason they can't just give it to both of them?

They might be insulted: Gorbachev, Arafat and the scientists of the IPCC are not very good company.

Admitted by the London police in this article: the extensive monitoring (each person can expect to be filmed ~300 times during a normal day) helps solve less than one crime/(1000 cameras*year).
It's not worth giving up your privacy, and spending the money that could be spent on putting more policemen on the street, for such an ineffective program.

The band was The Get Out Clause, that's a link to an article about it. And the music video in question.

Both the BBC and aussie ABC have been accused of bias. BBC even admitted to being biased in a self-generated report - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1942948.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1554749/BBC-report-finds-bias-within-corporation.html

I fail to see how it the schools responsibility to become the parent when the actual parent has failed. The schools task is to educate children about reading, writing, mathematics, history, etc, not to raise a respectful child. If you make the punishment for a childs misbehavior or poor performance have a direct impact on the parent and their life, it can be effective. How would you feel if you were given a fine for your child skipping school or misbehaving? It would probably make you more involved in your childs life because it directly impacts your life. A parents job is to parents a raise a respectful member of society. A schools job is to teach.