It's one of the few things that really "just works" across all browsers, regardless of the underlying O/S. Perhaps that is why the web as a whole has adopted Flash so readily, (for better or worse), and why I feel we'll never be rid of it even when html5 is "live".
Now it's proprietary, which means the owner gets the control over what the user can see or not see (source), but let's face it, it doesn't take Adobe 5 years to bang out an even better version, what are we on now, version 11 or 12 ?
If, and I know it will never happen (just hypothetical ponderings), Adobe open-sourced it tomorrow and released the complete data format specs, so that the underlying instructions and objects could be expressed in say XML, do you think we'd need html5, or indeed html markup at all, ever again ?
Just trying to think what you could do with html5 that you couldn't already do with flash where the applet / player read from an XML "data" file that anyone could edit without the need for proprietary IDE's and design software etc.
The more I see of html5, the video, canvas and drawing support we've been missing for so long, the more it looks like a SWF object animation format.
I don't care what it contains... you asked for a list of peer reviewed papers, I gave you a list of 450 with the general theme of skepticism. If it contains some non-skeptical papers, fine, unlike you I am open to accept I am wrong on the merits of the material, not by trying to impugn the messenger.
I took a cursory look at the very first paper, which contains not only 4 pages of citations to referenced works, but also a correction addendum at the bottom. Now please tell me, if the author was neither accepting criticism nor addressing those criticisms, then why would he issue a correction to his own work ?
You know, this is *exactly* what a skeptic in any field has to deal with.
Your initial statement some posts ago was
"Nobody has made a scientific refutation of AGW, and that is what is important to me."
Then when someone challenges that statement you add in extra conditions about what *you* consider to be a valid paper, and then make that a pre-condition (well, 3 preconditions actually) of success for the skeptic to retain a valid point.
Then on supply of a list of 450 with a pretty unambiguous title describing the contents of the list, you spiel off two names as if they were college buddies in an attempt to sound more knowledgeable than the common plebs, and manage to debunk the whole list as 450 skeptic rantings without further ado.
Now I could go through each of the 450 papers, crossreferencing the 40 odd citations in each one, then checking on Citeseer or some such academic repository to see if any were *still* valid or if all 16000 were nothing more than a product of the "big oil companies" PR departments, but I shall gracefully decline.
There will be no convincing you as you have decided you are right, the science is irrefutable when done by "the right kind of scientists", and everyone else is either wrong or a crank.
I'll try to respect your handy punchlist of debating etiquette, and just focus on one aspect of your reply.
That has not been the case with the proprietary draft-N implementations. Each vendor has their own version of draft-N. It's very similar to Microsoft's practice of embrace-and-extend. Interoperability with another vendor's implementation is not guaranteed. If you can't get Vendor X's equipment to operate with Vendor Y's equipment, or suffer reduced performance, neither vendor will file that as a bug and fix it. Instead, both will tell you "we recommend you use our products for all your networking needs". You think this is just like HTML5, that you're really comparing an apple to an apple here?
It is *exactly* like html5, because the individual proprietary vendors will all use their own fallback techniques where they can't or haven't been able to implement the correct standard method yet (of course, as it's still a draft, they have no choice).
To take a quick example, the <video> tag.
So we will have the situation where you see additional tags inside the video start / end tags to allow graceful fallback to a default method, such as Windows Media Player applet for MSIE, VLC Player applet for Firefox etc.
Even IF they fully implement the video tag correctly, who exactly will reformat all their existing video collections in AVI / FLV into open source format (.OGG ?), and what benefit will it give them. Absolutely none.
And for sure, even if and when the standard *is* finalized, that won't be before all the big players have bartered with the comittee for concessions on alternative allowable formats, and we'll end up with a video tag that needs to play not just open source formats but also AVI, WMV, FLV and all the popular formats of the day.
Provided of course in the next N years, an even better video compression format comes along and despite the agreed upon video tag, we'll end up with an <ms-video> tag, an <flv-video> tag etc etc.
In an ideal world a lot of things would be great... unfortunately we live in the real world where innovators cannot wait 5 years for technology to be debated, formalized, bartered, compromised and generally muddied into yet another worthless piece of documentation that is out of date before it's ever released.
Jay: Hey, wait a second! Aren't you the guy who fucked the pie!
Jason Biggs: You see! It's never "Hey! You're that guy from Loser" or "Hey you rocked in Boys and Girls." No, it always comes back to that fucking pie! I'm HAUNTED by it!
Aren't cease and desist takedowns usually a precursor to a libel or similar type of action.
In this case, the webmaster is not publishing anything libellous or falsehoods, simply a documented fact about something that really happenned in this person's past.
Just because you don't want it online doesn't give you any legal authority to demand it be removed. Unless of course you are the RIAA and the judge is Swedish.
Oh ffs, I could go and research a list in 5 minutes.
But what would be the point really ?
You'd simply list why each name / reference I'd supplied was "not valid" because:-
1. he hasn't had a paper published in 5 years (wonder why, when the peer review process cripples dissenters) 2. he once smoked hash in college therefore he must be an anarchist or some such type. 3. because "everyone knows" that he is a skeptic and therefore can be discounted as having a valid counter-claim. 4. Google is not in your list of "credible" sources.
An exercise in futility that I'm not wasting any time on, especially at 05:34 when I should be asleep.
You have your agenda, that is clear, and anything else I say to the contrary will make no difference whatsoever to your "religion", much like asking a priest if Adam and Eve were really the first two humans, who exactly did their son Abel procreate with ?
So I guess you'll not be using any of that "not-yet-finalized" html5 stuff, or any beta software from Google ?
After all, no one should invent anything until it's been discussed in committee for a minimum of 10 years, until the technology it is attempting to standardize has already been superseded by something better !
Thank [deity-of-your-choice] they didnt invent the wheel using open standards. It probably would have had 6 sides, none of which are equal in length, a 100 page operating manual, a concession to Pantone that it should only be made in RGB color 255,147,97, and an alternative implementation involving Microsoft's.innerHTML
Anything that takes longer to describe than it does to make is probably better not describing. Just use the bloody thing and be done with it.
Basically, tree ring temperature proxies started diverging from instrumental temperatures in the early 1960's, with the tree ring proxy data showing declining temperatures in spite of the fact that the temperatures as measured by thermometers was rising.
That is so scary I'm not sure how to make a good analogy.
Hmm, let's see.
The temperature gauge on your refrigerator says it's 0 degrees, and when you look in the ice box, you see ice. Ice means it's 0 degrees, so everything is working correctly right ?
However, a week later, the temperature gauge is still reading 0 degrees, but inside the ice box, your Frozen Pizza is now distinctly soggy and covered in a warm fungus.
What do you do ? Common sense dictates you say "I need to fix the thermostat, it's broken". What the scientists seem to have done is said "The thermostat is fine, we'll just correct the numbers and pretend it's still 0 degrees".
If one thing no longer correlates with another, you should stop using it as a basis for your estimate. Not just correct the data to continue the "desired" direction of the trend.
A model that used the NASA data from 1935 to 1945 (a 2 degree increase on 10 years), would have predicted a massive increase in temperature for the following 10 years...
In reality, between 1945 and 1985, a while 40 year period, the average temperature dropped by 1 degree.
A model that is inaccurate is just an inaccurate model. You can't put data into a bad model, and then say "see, I told you so, it was even worse than the model". If it doesn't predict ACCURATELY the actual facts then it is broken, and there is obviously some other factors that the model doesn't consider correctly.
I argued this point in another post, but I think it's worth repeating.
The population has risen from 2.5 billion to almost 7 billion in the last 50 years, i.e. almost tripled. So has the temperature tripled in the same period ? Of course not, that would be nonsensical. So if we can agree that man in fact plays a very small influence on the temperature, why is he being blamed for *all* the ills of the world in terms of too much CO2 emmissons ?
There has to be other factors that the model is not accounting for, and to trivialize it as "more CO2 == more warming" does not do justice to science, or common sense.
You tried to be amusing, but failed, so I'll not keep you long...
In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?
Oh, this is the inverse Flying Spaghetti Monster pirates vs global warming theory.
No, it's the same bullshit numbers out of the hat that the GW crowd want us to believe !!
We almost tripled our population in 50 years, so why hasn't the temperature tripled ? Of course, this is nonsensical, you'd argue, the temperature of the earth is not effected SOLELY by humans, there are any number of much larger, more important effects.
But yet, according to the GW crowd, humans have caused this disaster by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere ? Forget water vapour, forget methane, forget solar flares and the solar cycles, forget everything else, yes for sure it's those bloody humans and their CO2 !
So which is it ? Either human output of CO2 is a major factor in global climate, in which case my "population tripling" assertion above should be correct ?
Or human output of CO2 is NOT a major factor in global climate, and any trivial adjustments we make won't make a damn of difference.
Nobody has made a scientific refutation of AGW, and that is what is important to me
Plenty of scientists are making refutations of AGW every day, and after the East Anglia debacle, we all know what happens to dissenters.
Science is about postulating a theory, and then using scientific method to demonstrate that theory as FACT.
It is not about "hushing up" the opposition, or saying the right things in case your grant money gets suspended for going against the academe.
The thing is, any scientist critical of AGW is automatically labelled not reputable, because unfortunately it seems the only "test for reputability" is being cited on a paper by a more recognized scientist. And if you hold a different opinion you are shunned and the whole peer review process ensures your ideas never see the light of day.
I guess that depends which subset of the numbers you choose to work with, and how "accurate" a model based on ice cores from 100,000 years ago can actually be, considering all their other models can't tell you if it will rain tomorrow.
Face it, any numbers older than about 50 years ago are based on best-guess, nothing more. So for them to declare what will happen in 20 years from now, based on a regression of 50 data points in the past is hardly valid statistics.
If, just if, next year's average is actually colder, will that make a difference ? No, they'll simply declare "localized variation" as always. Funny how when the data agrees with their guesstimate, it's "valid", but when it disagrees, it's "localized variation".
Now I'm not a PhD, hell I didn't even finish college, but common sense, gut instinct and 41 years in the school of life tells me something smells bad about the whole AGW agenda. And if the 75% or whatever percentage of "common schmucks" feel this way, how successful do you think any emission reduction efforts will be ?
I always placed my belief that the scientists knew a hell of a lot more than me, and I could trust what they said. But recently, perhaps with age, has come the same cynicism I now feel for corporations, pharmaceuticals, politicians etc... they ALL have another agenda behind their ideas, be it money, grant funding or plain old power.
For a bloody good read, try Tom Clancy's "State of Fear". It puts an awful lot of these issues into the perspective of the common man.
Kudos for putting a bit of perspective on things. I'd mod you +1 Informative, but I'd rather add to the discussion.
Have you noticed how these days, any law or protocol or recommendation has to be of the form "You must do X otherwise Y will happen" ?
You must endure them stealing your water at the airport because of Homeland Security concerns.
You must endure ISP privacy violations because the RIAA needs to make money
You must endure carbon credits because of global warming (no don't call it that, it's colder) climate change.
etc etc
Why do we need to be "blackmailed" into doing anything.
Every point you raised above, recycling, saving energy etc all come under the heading "good fucking common sense". You should do them because it makes sense, at a very base level. Waste not, want not, as my Grandmother used to lecture into me.
Not because "if you don't do this, the sky will fall". The government sounds more like Chicken Little every day.
If all ideas are NOT equally valid, then I challenge them to even predict what the weather will be over my house, in exactly 7 days from now !
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
And don't talk to me about localised effects being difficult to predict... when it comes to floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons etc, they *are* localised effects. They ARE important to the survival of the human race. So it's 0.6 oC warmer in the Antarctic... who gives a fuck ? When there's 8 foot of water in your living room, THATS IMPORTANT !!
Averaging out the whole planet and then declaring "yes it it getting warmer" is hardly a PhD conclusion... any fool with a college electrical certificate can tell you the more light bulbs are turned on, the bighter the room will be.
In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?
Try correlating temperature against population, and guess what kind of slope the line has ?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and we could present it as a music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, entitled "Two Tribes 2009".
It's funny you mention Flash.
It's one of the few things that really "just works" across all browsers, regardless of the underlying O/S. Perhaps that is why the web as a whole has adopted Flash so readily, (for better or worse), and why I feel we'll never be rid of it even when html5 is "live".
Now it's proprietary, which means the owner gets the control over what the user can see or not see (source), but let's face it, it doesn't take Adobe 5 years to bang out an even better version, what are we on now, version 11 or 12 ?
If, and I know it will never happen (just hypothetical ponderings), Adobe open-sourced it tomorrow and released the complete data format specs, so that the underlying instructions and objects could be expressed in say XML, do you think we'd need html5, or indeed html markup at all, ever again ?
Just trying to think what you could do with html5 that you couldn't already do with flash where the applet / player read from an XML "data" file that anyone could edit without the need for proprietary IDE's and design software etc.
The more I see of html5, the video, canvas and drawing support we've been missing for so long, the more it looks like a SWF object animation format.
I don't care what it contains ... you asked for a list of peer reviewed papers, I gave you a list of 450 with the general theme of skepticism. If it contains some non-skeptical papers, fine, unlike you I am open to accept I am wrong on the merits of the material, not by trying to impugn the messenger.
I took a cursory look at the very first paper, which contains not only 4 pages of citations to referenced works, but also a correction addendum at the bottom. Now please tell me, if the author was neither accepting criticism nor addressing those criticisms, then why would he issue a correction to his own work ?
You know, this is *exactly* what a skeptic in any field has to deal with.
Your initial statement some posts ago was
"Nobody has made a scientific refutation of AGW, and that is what is important to me."
Then when someone challenges that statement you add in extra conditions about what *you* consider to be a valid paper, and then make that a pre-condition (well, 3 preconditions actually) of success for the skeptic to retain a valid point.
Then on supply of a list of 450 with a pretty unambiguous title describing the contents of the list, you spiel off two names as if they were college buddies in an attempt to sound more knowledgeable than the common plebs, and manage to debunk the whole list as 450 skeptic rantings without further ado.
Now I could go through each of the 450 papers, crossreferencing the 40 odd citations in each one, then checking on Citeseer or some such academic repository to see if any were *still* valid or if all 16000 were nothing more than a product of the "big oil companies" PR departments, but I shall gracefully decline.
There will be no convincing you as you have decided you are right, the science is irrefutable when done by "the right kind of scientists", and everyone else is either wrong or a crank.
Goodnight (or should that be good morning).
I'll try to respect your handy punchlist of debating etiquette, and just focus on one aspect of your reply.
That has not been the case with the proprietary draft-N implementations. Each vendor has their own version of draft-N. It's very similar to Microsoft's practice of embrace-and-extend. Interoperability with another vendor's implementation is not guaranteed. If you can't get Vendor X's equipment to operate with Vendor Y's equipment, or suffer reduced performance, neither vendor will file that as a bug and fix it. Instead, both will tell you "we recommend you use our products for all your networking needs". You think this is just like HTML5, that you're really comparing an apple to an apple here?
It is *exactly* like html5, because the individual proprietary vendors will all use their own fallback techniques where they can't or haven't been able to implement the correct standard method yet (of course, as it's still a draft, they have no choice).
To take a quick example, the <video> tag.
So we will have the situation where you see additional tags inside the video start / end tags to allow graceful fallback to a default method, such as Windows Media Player applet for MSIE, VLC Player applet for Firefox etc.
Even IF they fully implement the video tag correctly, who exactly will reformat all their existing video collections in AVI / FLV into open source format (.OGG ?), and what benefit will it give them. Absolutely none.
And for sure, even if and when the standard *is* finalized, that won't be before all the big players have bartered with the comittee for concessions on alternative allowable formats, and we'll end up with a video tag that needs to play not just open source formats but also AVI, WMV, FLV and all the popular formats of the day.
Provided of course in the next N years, an even better video compression format comes along and despite the agreed upon video tag, we'll end up with an <ms-video> tag, an <flv-video> tag etc etc.
In an ideal world a lot of things would be great ... unfortunately we live in the real world where innovators cannot wait 5 years for technology to be debated, formalized, bartered, compromised and generally muddied into yet another worthless piece of documentation that is out of date before it's ever released.
Here's a list of 450. Now please STFU. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/450_peer_reviewed_papers.html
That was the best +10 Funny of the evening. Coffee out of nose, tears in eyes, and sides aching.
Well played, sir.
Pope Benedict XVI, is that you ?
I think Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger might all disagree with you there.
Depends what it is that he did, and despite my curiosity, I can't be bothered reading the whole of textfiles to find out.
Jay: Hey, wait a second! Aren't you the guy who fucked the pie!
Jason Biggs: You see! It's never "Hey! You're that guy from Loser" or "Hey you rocked in Boys and Girls." No, it always comes back to that fucking pie! I'm HAUNTED by it!
James Van Der Beek: You put your dick in a pie!
My father's name is NOT Walter, and I've never been to Spain, you insensitive clod.
Aren't cease and desist takedowns usually a precursor to a libel or similar type of action.
In this case, the webmaster is not publishing anything libellous or falsehoods, simply a documented fact about something that really happenned in this person's past.
Just because you don't want it online doesn't give you any legal authority to demand it be removed. Unless of course you are the RIAA and the judge is Swedish.
Oh ffs, I could go and research a list in 5 minutes.
But what would be the point really ?
You'd simply list why each name / reference I'd supplied was "not valid" because :-
1. he hasn't had a paper published in 5 years (wonder why, when the peer review process cripples dissenters)
2. he once smoked hash in college therefore he must be an anarchist or some such type.
3. because "everyone knows" that he is a skeptic and therefore can be discounted as having a valid counter-claim.
4. Google is not in your list of "credible" sources.
An exercise in futility that I'm not wasting any time on, especially at 05:34 when I should be asleep.
You have your agenda, that is clear, and anything else I say to the contrary will make no difference whatsoever to your "religion", much like asking a priest if Adam and Eve were really the first two humans, who exactly did their son Abel procreate with ?
So I guess you'll not be using any of that "not-yet-finalized" html5 stuff, or any beta software from Google ?
After all, no one should invent anything until it's been discussed in committee for a minimum of 10 years, until the technology it is attempting to standardize has already been superseded by something better !
Thank [deity-of-your-choice] they didnt invent the wheel using open standards. It probably would have had 6 sides, none of which are equal in length, a 100 page operating manual, a concession to Pantone that it should only be made in RGB color 255,147,97, and an alternative implementation involving Microsoft's .innerHTML
Anything that takes longer to describe than it does to make is probably better not describing. Just use the bloody thing and be done with it.
It was supposed to be Frozen Herring damn it. See above for analysis.
And how is the Las Vegas dishwashing job working out for you ?
Sounds like someone just got their Gallente Battleships salvaged out from under them. My ninja salvager runs on your tears. ROFLMAO OMGWTFBBQ KTHXBAI.
But seriously, that game is so addictive, even for 41 year old kids like me ;-)
I have no idea "who", all the data seems to have been "lost" when they changed buildings.
Ok, I'll choose the simplest explanation: you are a troll or a moron
Probably both, but ad-hominems = prizes, this is /. after all.
Basically, tree ring temperature proxies started diverging from instrumental temperatures in the early 1960's, with the tree ring proxy data showing declining temperatures in spite of the fact that the temperatures as measured by thermometers was rising.
That is so scary I'm not sure how to make a good analogy.
Hmm, let's see.
The temperature gauge on your refrigerator says it's 0 degrees, and when you look in the ice box, you see ice. Ice means it's 0 degrees, so everything is working correctly right ?
However, a week later, the temperature gauge is still reading 0 degrees, but inside the ice box, your Frozen Pizza is now distinctly soggy and covered in a warm fungus.
What do you do ? Common sense dictates you say "I need to fix the thermostat, it's broken". What the scientists seem to have done is said "The thermostat is fine, we'll just correct the numbers and pretend it's still 0 degrees".
If one thing no longer correlates with another, you should stop using it as a basis for your estimate. Not just correct the data to continue the "desired" direction of the trend.
Bad science seems to abound in GW circles.
A model that used the NASA data from 1935 to 1945 (a 2 degree increase on 10 years), would have predicted a massive increase in temperature for the following 10 years ...
In reality, between 1945 and 1985, a while 40 year period, the average temperature dropped by 1 degree.
A model that is inaccurate is just an inaccurate model. You can't put data into a bad model, and then say "see, I told you so, it was even worse than the model". If it doesn't predict ACCURATELY the actual facts then it is broken, and there is obviously some other factors that the model doesn't consider correctly.
I argued this point in another post, but I think it's worth repeating.
The population has risen from 2.5 billion to almost 7 billion in the last 50 years, i.e. almost tripled. So has the temperature tripled in the same period ? Of course not, that would be nonsensical. So if we can agree that man in fact plays a very small influence on the temperature, why is he being blamed for *all* the ills of the world in terms of too much CO2 emmissons ?
There has to be other factors that the model is not accounting for, and to trivialize it as "more CO2 == more warming" does not do justice to science, or common sense.
You tried to be amusing, but failed, so I'll not keep you long ...
In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion ... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?
Oh, this is the inverse Flying Spaghetti Monster pirates vs global warming theory.
No, it's the same bullshit numbers out of the hat that the GW crowd want us to believe !!
We almost tripled our population in 50 years, so why hasn't the temperature tripled ? Of course, this is nonsensical, you'd argue, the temperature of the earth is not effected SOLELY by humans, there are any number of much larger, more important effects.
But yet, according to the GW crowd, humans have caused this disaster by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere ? Forget water vapour, forget methane, forget solar flares and the solar cycles, forget everything else, yes for sure it's those bloody humans and their CO2 !
So which is it ? Either human output of CO2 is a major factor in global climate, in which case my "population tripling" assertion above should be correct ?
Or human output of CO2 is NOT a major factor in global climate, and any trivial adjustments we make won't make a damn of difference.
You cannot have it both ways, you choose, okay ?
Nobody has made a scientific refutation of AGW, and that is what is important to me
Plenty of scientists are making refutations of AGW every day, and after the East Anglia debacle, we all know what happens to dissenters.
Science is about postulating a theory, and then using scientific method to demonstrate that theory as FACT.
It is not about "hushing up" the opposition, or saying the right things in case your grant money gets suspended for going against the academe.
The thing is, any scientist critical of AGW is automatically labelled not reputable, because unfortunately it seems the only "test for reputability" is being cited on a paper by a more recognized scientist. And if you hold a different opinion you are shunned and the whole peer review process ensures your ideas never see the light of day.
I guess that depends which subset of the numbers you choose to work with, and how "accurate" a model based on ice cores from 100,000 years ago can actually be, considering all their other models can't tell you if it will rain tomorrow.
Face it, any numbers older than about 50 years ago are based on best-guess, nothing more. So for them to declare what will happen in 20 years from now, based on a regression of 50 data points in the past is hardly valid statistics.
If, just if, next year's average is actually colder, will that make a difference ? No, they'll simply declare "localized variation" as always. Funny how when the data agrees with their guesstimate, it's "valid", but when it disagrees, it's "localized variation".
Now I'm not a PhD, hell I didn't even finish college, but common sense, gut instinct and 41 years in the school of life tells me something smells bad about the whole AGW agenda. And if the 75% or whatever percentage of "common schmucks" feel this way, how successful do you think any emission reduction efforts will be ?
I always placed my belief that the scientists knew a hell of a lot more than me, and I could trust what they said. But recently, perhaps with age, has come the same cynicism I now feel for corporations, pharmaceuticals, politicians etc ... they ALL have another agenda behind their ideas, be it money, grant funding or plain old power.
For a bloody good read, try Tom Clancy's "State of Fear". It puts an awful lot of these issues into the perspective of the common man.
Kudos for putting a bit of perspective on things. I'd mod you +1 Informative, but I'd rather add to the discussion.
Have you noticed how these days, any law or protocol or recommendation has to be of the form "You must do X otherwise Y will happen" ?
You must endure them stealing your water at the airport because of Homeland Security concerns.
You must endure ISP privacy violations because the RIAA needs to make money
You must endure carbon credits because of global warming (no don't call it that, it's colder) climate change.
etc etc
Why do we need to be "blackmailed" into doing anything.
Every point you raised above, recycling, saving energy etc all come under the heading "good fucking common sense". You should do them because it makes sense, at a very base level. Waste not, want not, as my Grandmother used to lecture into me.
Not because "if you don't do this, the sky will fall". The government sounds more like Chicken Little every day.
If all ideas are NOT equally valid, then I challenge them to even predict what the weather will be over my house, in exactly 7 days from now !
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
And don't talk to me about localised effects being difficult to predict ... when it comes to floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons etc, they *are* localised effects. They ARE important to the survival of the human race. So it's 0.6 oC warmer in the Antarctic ... who gives a fuck ? When there's 8 foot of water in your living room, THATS IMPORTANT !!
Averaging out the whole planet and then declaring "yes it it getting warmer" is hardly a PhD conclusion ... any fool with a college electrical certificate can tell you the more light bulbs are turned on, the bighter the room will be.
In the period 1950 till 2009, we've gone from 2.5 billion people to almost 7 billion ... what did you EXPECT to happen to global average temperature ?
Try correlating temperature against population, and guess what kind of slope the line has ?