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Well, the results of Lenaerts et al. (2012) really aren't that surprising. Plenty of ice melting in other places of the world. Antarctica is huge and benefits from increased precipitation (from warmer oceans) enlarging the entire ice sheet.

Okay, so I don't want to caricature your particular belief in AGW (lesser or greater), but you've got to admit, that the public face of global warming has been talking about "ZOMG, sea levels are gonna get crazy high because ice in Antarctica is all gonna melt!" Nobody said in 1990 "hey, the antarctic is going to melt along the edges, but it's gonna gain just as much ice mass as it loses because of increased precipitation inside". The worry was always that the ice would melt, into the sea, and raise sea levels:

"But according to evidence developed in the 1990s, during a dramatic episode at the end of the last ice age, something had once raised the sea level 16 meters within three centuries. The rate of rise might have reached two feet per decade. Antarctica was the most likely source of all that water."

The caveat that "oh, all that melting ice will be replaced by fresh snow" is nowhere to be found.

You gotta find something on Watts' site that actually /breaks/ the science

"Breaks"? Without a clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement, no matter what I find, you'll claim some other ad hoc special pleading (ice melting in other parts of the world, for example). Watts talks a lot about science, and for the most part, he and his compatriots do a good job of being scientific about it (although certainly some of the comments are just as shrill as realclimate.org or desmog).

Here, try another one, which finds a significantly overlooked negative feedback:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/09/declining-global-average-cloud-height-a-significant-measure-of-negative-feedback-to-global-warming/

Well, nobody is talking about creating poverty.

Any attempt to decarbonize our energy system by its very definition will increase poverty by replacing cheap energy with expensive energy. Economics 101.

1% risk is enough for pretty much everybody to buy fire insurance. How much does your insurance policy cost? (Mine is ~$350 per year.) That is an acceptable amount for 1% risk.

Here, you pay me $350 per year, and I promise I'll pay you for any catastrophic global warming for the next 100 years :) Caveats the same as your fire insurance policy, of course (no "acts of god")...you prove that my CO2 emissions caused your driveway to ice up, or your AC to break, or did *anything* remotely to harm you, I'll be more than happy to insure you :)

Astrology makes predictions and is falsifiable.

Wow. I mean, just, wow. Well, if you believe Astrology is falsifiable, I can understand why you'd believe AGW is falsifiable. Nuff said, friend!

But I should point out that the little ice age and medieval warming periods were not global events.

Although obviously we didn't have a worldwide temperature network during those times, evidence has shown it occurred in every hemisphere and on every major continent - but wait, let me pull on this thread a little, would the MWP and LIA shown as global events (defined as occurring in some region on every continent) be enough to change your mind on the whole AGW thing?

Also, the effects of AGW are more speculative; however, the vast majority of deniers start much lower, at denying that warming is occuring at all -- or even that CO2 levels are rising

Well, I suppose we can caricature each other all day (you'll certainly find warmists who are firm in their believe that the effects are going to be catastrophic and must be stopped at all costs by immediate government intervention, and you'll find bible thumping skeptics who are just along for the ride because it's a republican issue). But let me be clear on what *this* particular skeptic insists:

1) climate changes, always has, always will
2) we were in a warming period from about the 70s to the late 90s, things have gone relatively flat since then
3) CO2 measurements ala Mauna Kea have been steadily increasing, but have a data process that drops a bunch of data and makes me skeptical of their conclusions
4) humans greatly impact regional weather with UHI
5) as many urban areas as we have, we still have a minor effect on the heat content of the entire atmosphere, much less the heat content of the entire ocean mass
6) CO2 is a "greenhouse gas"
7) CO2 has an upper limit of effect as a greenhouse gas (once it blocks all the radiation it can, it can't block anymore)
8) Human CO2 emissions have a barely measurable effect given the background noise of natural climate change
9) A warmer world would be a *better* world

Now, most of these are simply truisms, while I'll admit others are speculation, albeit informed speculation (such as a warmer world being a better world).

Also, global warming currently predicts decreased cyclonic activity, but more violent "big" storms.

There's no rationale to that. From a purely physical standpoint, the GW everybody talks about means poles warm faster than the equator - that means less temperature differential in the atmosphere, which means less cyclonic activity. How you can get more *big* storms with less cyclonic activity (simply on a physical standpoint), is puzzling - do we have any evidence, say, from the Late Eocene when the poles were tropical in climate, that there weren't any small storms, but only *really* big ones?

The key is a consistent argument that explains as much of the available evidence in as simple terms as possible

And a GCM with several dozen hard coded parameters to tweak doesn't seem to simple to me :)

And you do think that? Why? Do you have any specifics? Any evidence?

http://www.nationalcenter.org/2007/05/let-greenpeace-live-up-to-standard-it.html

"I just eye-balled Greenpeace's list, and they appear to list about 800 donors. It looks like about 100 (and 3 of the 14 big gifts) of those are anonymous. "

Really? One document of the bunch was supposedly forged. And who was it that made that claim?

It's been independently verified as a forgery by several sources, but here's a particularly well done one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/

And note, this is by a *believer* in bad human global warming:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/

"I should also probably note that I disagree pretty strenuously with Heartland's position on global warming. I not only believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening, but also support stiff carbon or source fuels taxes in order to combat it."

The problem here is that the documents that are legitimate aren't damning, and the one document that has even the slightest scent of malfeasance was *forged*. Imagine for a moment if with the release of the climategate emails, it was found that "hide the decline" was a forged entry!

The story here is that because bad human global warming believers aren't winning the argument, they're resorting to dirty tricks. Nothing undermines their position more than their need to forge caricatures of their opponents in order to make points.

After Sanderson took over the books have tremendously improved, almost back to the initial volumes.

For the most part, I'd agree with this assessment. While I feel Sanderson has done a decent job with Perrin and Rand, and a fantastic job with Egwene, I found Sanderson's treatment of Mat Cauthon in Towers of Midnight extremely disappointing. Many fans apparently complained that Sanderson's rendering of Mat in The Gathering Storm was inaccurate. So he over-corrected in ToM, styling Mat as more of a caricature of the brash, irreverent youth who was so excited to let loose a badger on the village green in the opening portion of The Eye of the World. To me, Jordan did a fantastic job evolving and maturing Mat's character over the course of the story, and I wasn't at all unhappy with Sanderson's initial effort with the character in TGS. I certainly never had the impression that Mat was the illiterate simpleton Sanderson made him out to be in ToM. Seeing Mat's character regress to the point of playing puerile practical jokes really soured me on Towers of Midnight and certainly dampens anticipation for the final volume.

Instead, the middle books were juggling something like seven or eight characters. It's impossible to make significant advances in a story with so many lines...

While it could certainly be argued that sometimes Jordan did this...less well than might have been desirable, it's not impossible. The most familiar counterexample from the world of epic fantasy is probably George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Game of Thrones) has eight viewpoint characters, and GRRM is up to sixteen viewpoint characters in the series' most recent instalment (not counting two additional minor characters in the prologue and epilogue). The difficulty is in making all of the independent storylines sufficiently engaging and relevant (and interlinked) that the reader doesn't get bored or annoyed waiting for the most 'interesting' plot threads to return. GRRM generally has (so far) done quite well at this; Jordan had some issues.

In my opinion, Jordan was handicapped by his weaknesses in developing and presenting realistic and compelling female characters. (The problem was particularly crippling because Jordan didn't take the usual fantasy-genre out of having a male-dominated world.) There has been ample parody of his sniffing, braid-tugging, dress-smoothing women that I need not further belabor the point. Jordan also had issues with writing believable romance, which was problematic given that all of his main characters end up coupled (or in larger multiples). His interactions between men and women shaded too far towards the relationship caricatures espoused by stand-up comics (If he doesn't know why I'm upset, I'm not going to tell him! sniff!); while occasionally he played it for a successful laugh, the result usually fell flat.

for fuck's sake, put away the Poli-Sci 101 talk.

"...where is the government mandated shift..." "Where are the government demands" "The war here is..."

Socio-political bullshit.

If you have a disagreement with the post's claims, make your argument. If you find the language unclear, ask for clarification. If you think there are unreasonable insinuations being made, call them out. That's what I intend to do with your post.

To me, the above complaint doesn't look like a rational problem with the argument: it looks like an ideological problem with where you think it's coming from. Perhaps you think all academics are out-of-touch elites whose expertise should therefore be disregarded. Perhaps you think poli-sci students are liberty-hating "liberals" (according to the warped American definition of the word). If so, foolish caricaturing and stereotyping only looks good if you're preaching to the choir. It has no bearing on the validity of either argument.

Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. I'm just sick of reasoned debate being jettisoned for ideological reasons of tribal identity and taste.

"Somalia is by no means experiencing any kind of credibly free market"

It's of course true that Somalia is not what Adam Smith had in mind when writting about "the wealth of nations". But I'd say that, as Newton was wrong because of his implicits (no, speed is not an absolute magnitude), so it was Smith with those of him (no, there's no need of "democracy and imperium of law ala occidental way" for the basics of capitalism to apply). Once one understands this, it's obvious that, quite in fact, Somalia is not only an example of "capitalism by the book", in that Mogadishu is a perfect example of "the market town", but the only natural outcome of what capitalism unavoidingly becomes if left alone on the hands of the capitalist actors themselves: the only difference between Mogadishu and Wall Street is that the latter still has a resemblance of government limiting the reach of capitalists.

Yes "the government", so hatred by all those "liberalists of caricature" that will jump "comunism" at the first mention of regulation "for the people, by the people", is the *only* practical deterrent that avoids Wall Street becoming Mogadishu.

The Obama issue was an offensive caricature of the First Lady. It was a completely different issue. It isn't the name "Rick Santorum" that has this definition. It is just the word santorum.

The financial system is less of a tool now and more a hindrance to business efficiency. The bits about moving values sounds like a caricature but reflects ground reality in some finance operations

The world don't need deliberate waste to do useful work. Closing down pointless financial operations may stop some multimillion dollar projects but some multibillion dollar losses and collapses won't happen either.

People and money dont stand still. There would be more worthwhile use of both.

Pink Pistols (http://www.pinkpistols.org/) puts it well:

Some people dislike gays.
Some people dislike guns.
We should not base our laws on personal dislikes.

To bring it back on topic, I think that on the topic of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, you've got *plenty* of people who aren't bible thumping jesus h. capitalists who simply look at the *science* and remain skeptical of sweeping claims, much less sweeping prescriptions of action. Caricaturing skeptics as some sort of unreasonable fundamentalist christians is like assuming all black people are basketball playing rap stars.

The presented old guy may be a caricature for his group, but "inept guy who is obsessed with open source, has no feeling for business or people management etc and is a pain in the ass" describes younger techies pretty well, and Slashdotters perfectly.

The experienced guy knows all the suppliers; knows where to call for what components; knows to check for multiple sources and to avoid single source vulnerabilities if at all possible; has written in programming languages A..M and when presented with N, can learn it in very little time, whereas New EE Guy knows languages L,M and N and is absolutely clueless when it comes to maintaining product X's assembly code written in F, nor has he the depth needed to pick it up, and the product design with all its little foibles, that the experienced guy has.

The experienced guy has tons of product experience and puts that to work for you every time a new design is required. New EE guy will probably get caught asking your techs questions instead of educating them......[more of the same]

Sure, if you want to compared an experienced engineer against someone who is six months out of college and fairly clueless it is easy to make a case. However the real problem is the comparison between an engineer with 10 years real-world experience and an engineer with 30 years. It's not nearly as easy to support the idea that potential hires from the latter group will probably be more productive and justify a significant pay increment over the former.

You are also presenting a portrait of a fairly optimal old EE guy against an inept New EE guy who is obsessed with open source, has no feeling for business or people management etc and is a pain in the ass. But it would be just as easy to present a caricature of an old guy who dismisses any suggestions of new ideas with "we tried that twenty years ago, didn't work", who is uninterested in learning new things, whose people management skills consist of whining about how "generation Y" or "millenials" are self-obsessed and who antagonises people from other departments in the business because they don't have the same background as he does and don't treat him like the oracle of wisdom on every subject.

The industry apparently isn't even *trying* any more to go after any semblance of the mainstream. You're right about the base dwindling....so the response is to raise cover prices and get ever more weird in an effort to target that outlier subculture, the (remaining) fans. I always think of how Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons is such a dead on accurate caricature. That's the only type of fan left. Meanwhile DC figures that, "Hey! If we throw enough turds against the wall sooner or later one of them will stick!"

I'm not sure if the explanation is as much "that's Japan" as "that's Sony."

For the last decade (at the very least) Sony has acted like a bad stereotype of the guy obsessed with not losing face, and always being right. Every single bad decision, PR gaffe or just someone from Sony putting his foot in his mouth in an interview, they've dug themselves deeper and deeper just to not admit "ok, it was dumb." They'd rather put the other foot in their mouth too than admit that the first one was a foot after all.

I'm not even sure it has anything to do with Japan per se. While Asians generally are more careful about not losing respect, I don't think they're anywhere near the bad caricature that Sony has become. Plus, I see lots of us westerners doing the same too. I think it's more about hubris and/or insecurity than anything particularly Japanese.

But, anyway, I can actually see some guys at Sony prefer to promote him than admit that he might have said anything stupid ever.

That is the most angry, neckbeardy dweeb drivel I've ready today. Are you serious, or are you just playing a caricature of "Out of touch Angry dweeb who thinks Operating systems are OMGSuperImportant" things and his pathetic little hobby has made him embarrassingly even to other neckbeard dweebs?

You could say, sure, but this is /. 90% chance its a guy. But then there's the other aspect of those comments - they also assume that his fiancée is not a geek.

No, they assume the fiancee either isn't a geek or into geek attention whoring. Nor is there anything incompatible between her being a geek *and* wanting a traditional wedding. This was the case with my bride... we had a traditional wedding and then spent the first three days of our honeymoon at the beach - the last three days were spent (by design) at an SCA event. At the first opportunity after our 'traditional' wedding, our SCA persona's were wed (in garb) at our Shire's Yule celebration.
 
My niece, a serious comics geek approached it a different way... The wedding was pretty much traditional, but the figures on their cake and the cartoon versions on their napkins were actually the secret identities of her and her husbands favorite superheroes. The geeks in the audience got it. The non geeks just assumed they were idealized and caricature versions (respectively) of the bride and groom.
 

"Don't worry about it, your wife will (thankfully) veto this (stupid) idea."
"Hey Moron, Seek advice from your wife-to-be!"
etc

That being said, I find it pretty sad that you think consulting with his partner is 'odd'.

Really? Like what?

Not following you. Are you referring to this?

Or more specifically, none of the criticisms made by athiests toward Christianity are interpreted as threats by Christians. Why should they? Those same criticisms have been posed by those opposed to Christianity for 2000 years, none of them are new or in any way innovative.

In which case, I would say that Christians are familiar with the following criticisms and attempted proofs/disproofs used by angry atheists (or if you prefer, the more common term: neo-atheists): Disproof by moral objection ("Your God is morally repugnant")

Disproof by pure assertion ("There is no God")

Proof by false analogy (like "Quote: Atheism is a religion the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby. Unquote.")

Proof by Strawman/non-sequitor

Proof by Caricature

I could go on, if that really interests you.

You mean things like keeping creationism out of science? That's not angry atheism that's reacting to fundamental christians.

Again, I think you are projecting.

I don't see the 'Angry Atheism' you talk about

Really? I wonder if you can explain how a topic about a man persecuted by Muslims, in a country with rampant persecution of Christians, turned into a topic for people to spew bile and make sweeping generalisations about other people they've never met? Angry much?

but I do see reactions to fundamentalism and extremism of all stripes - I suppose it's nice to blame 'Angry Atheism' but you should look for the cause, not a symptom.

I'm not sure if there has been a rise in fundamentalism and extremism - I think we are just more sensitive to it and more exposed to it because of greater contact with a wider and more diverse range of people. And notably, amongst the fundamentalists (an ill defined term) I would include some Atheists, as well as Climate Denialists. What marks those people as fundamentalists is a tendency toward moralism , and a tendency to argue using caricature and strawman rather than dealing in fact. So in a sense, the 'rise' of atheism is more akin to a slew toward fundamentalism (driven by the causes I mentioned earlier) than an actual increase in the number of atheists, not a reaction to a rise in fundamentalism, but part of it.

Okay, now I know you're full of shit. I did computer programming for rather large multinationals in college and I have a social sciences degree, ffs. If you were going CS/EE with any level of actual skill at a school of the slightest repute, "Pizza Guy" is the job you'd get to pay for beer while on scholarship or trust fund (I'd even find it eyebrow-raising then), not what you'd get if you were actually paying for school as you went. Apart from only paying enough for living expenses, it would just be a bizzare move as you could get absolute crap IT work paying several times as much, with less stress (that sort of food service is fucking maddening and exhausting) even as dumb-college-kid-#5546778.

As for astroturf, it's perceived because your examples are rife with convenient stereotypes. Community college in precisely two years with precisely the transferable courses to your chosen university in precisely the right order with not a single failed wait-list? You know how I know you've never taken a single course at community college? Because that's NIGH FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.

I actually might suspect you ARE a North Korean spy with the oh-so-humble "Pizza Guy" story and the glorious advantages of our wonderful COMMUNity colleges. It's a caricature that just doesn't add up.

Who are you trying to caricature here?

Stephen Jay Gould

Has anyone actually made that argument

Are you deaf? Stephen Jay Gould, along with numerous slashdorks.

Who are you trying to caricature here? Has anyone actually made that argument, or are you just knocking down straw men?