a) Not sure how that exactly relates to what I said above, as such. b) Read the article. That's exactly what the article is saying is not the case. Sugar is less bad than HFCS. It's not something you want to suck down, but it's apparently (in this one study, etc.) not as unhealthy for the same calories.
It's pretty much common knowledge that cheaper substitute ingredients are almost always unhealthy.
I distrust "common knowledge, especially this bit. Bear in mind that if you find a case where the cheaper alternative is more healthy, people would pretty much go with it and you'd never think about it as it's a no-brainer. The trouble with that is that it tends to bias your perception, as you've shown and can easily keep you from examining a new option because it is cheaper. (In fact, this has been found to be the case: people won't buy products they think are too low in price even when the quality is as good or better. I wish I had my source handy for that.)
I assume you're aware that even the Supreme Court has ruled that there are limits to those freedoms, especially where sensitive information is concerned, yes? If so, please elaborate on your post explaining why they don't apply here, as the original poster was suggesting that they do. If not, please don't post such nonsense until you do understand that there are limits on freedoms.
I haven't bought a saw recently, but I don't think Saw-Stop is standard. (In fact, the point of the linked article seems to be that it is not, but the creator thinks it should be.)
If you bought a car without an airbag installed and they told you that that model didn't have an airbag, unless it's against the law not to have one, you're SOL. If you bought it and, as you said, they had simply failed to install it, then you you have a case because now we're talking about something that they claimed to have and didn't.
Read the article, or even the summary posted here. It's not a matter of the recipient (or sender) posting the contents, it's a question of the ISP (hence: third party) revealing the information.
Now what's missing from this is that the investigators had a subpoena according to the article. I'm not clear on how this violates the Fourth Amendment, in that case. Isn't that exactly what we want the government to do and to be able to do when investigating an alleged crime?
As someone who was likely to be required to undergo a background check to get a badge (as an external contractor working on the Cassini mission), I have some knowledge of the checks they want to do.
First of all, many, perhaps most employees and contractors don't handle classified data. We're doing scientific work with technology that's 10-20 years old by the time it's in orbit around another planet. So it seems excessive to worry about the security risk.
Second, the form that they wanted us to fill out (the "matrix of risks") dates back several decades, to the 50s as I recall. You can imagine how wonderfully relevant it is. And it seems to rate sexual orientation (for example) as a more important risk than, say, having committed a murder. Seriously. It was comical, or would be if it weren't so serious.
Third, the checks that they seek to do aren't simple "does she have a felony on record or a similar problem in her history?" They wanted us to sign permissions to do some pretty deep snooping: they wanted permission to contact former neighbors, friends, teachers/professors, and even doctors. Which, for non-classified scientific research, is absurdly invasive. Astronomical research just isn't that important to begin with.
In general, JPL seems to have developed an obsession with security theater (ask me for stories there sometime) after 9/11. My suspicion is that it makes them feel more important to "need" extra security all over the place. (As if any terrorist organizations are keen on blowing up JPL anyway. It utterly lacks the profile or significance to just about anyone outside of the geek community.)
there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment,
Yep, something to always remember about any drug you might take or any treatment you might undergo. But it's also worth remembering that there's a non-zero risk to eating food (could be tainted), driving a car, or sticking your face in a fan*. Life is all about balancing the risks, not eliminating them entirely. In some ways, we're victims of our own success at risk mitigation: we've come to view risks as optional rather than a matter of course. (Applies to not just medicine, but also space travel, the way we raise our kids, and pretty much everything else.)
* With a tip of the hat to Frank Drebin, Police Squad.
Even in situations where it is in fact carbon neutral(atmospheric co2 -> plant -> cow -> atmospheric methane) you are turning a less potent, in greenhouse terms, flavor of carbon into a more potent one.
Right, but that methane then oxidizes back to CO2 on a ten-year timescale. So for any moderate to long-term purpose, it's returned to CO2 from whence it came. (If methane gets to be a problem, we can stop producing it and the atmosphere will return to where it was. CO2 sticks around for more like centuries.)
I think you nailed the only real difference with this particular bit of science: the policy side. (Which is, in my experience, separate from the science. The science is damn solid. What to do about it is a much more complex issue than climate modeling and at some level requires some input from our sense of ethics.)
One quibble: I'm not sure I believe
People don't like to be fooled into believing something they don't understand.
People believe all kinds of things they don't understand, often erroneously. How many people wear magnetic bracelets or take homeopathic cures?
I think I do believe that people don't like to believe things they don't want to accept. (That they have to change their lifestyles for health or climate reasons, for example.) That's made a lot worse when they don't understand the science behind the necessity, which is I think where you're coming from, yes?
The oil industry has been found to be funding at least one of the more prominent skeptical scientists, for a start. And even just yesterday, All Things Considered reported a story about how an industry lobbying group for the power industry is lobbying against the EPA's plan to regulate greenhouse gases, claiming that they're not a pollutant as the EPA claims.
We've also seen, in recent years, that the tobacco industry was helping lobby against climate change findings. (The logic being spreading doubt over one kind of science taints it all, apparently.) Link: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/19/1819257
So while I applaud your skepticism on such things, in this case, the data are there.
All I ever see and hear in the media (with exception to Fox 'News') is that climate change is man made, end of story, no room for questions, the end, it's done.
Which ignores the fact that the media widely has carried the counter-claims and stories about the leaked emails and other would-be scandals. One never really does feel that the media gives one's own side a fair shake, do they?
I hate that kind of crap, can anyone here think of a single other scientific theory that is so adamantly fought for by a group of people?
Evolution springs to mind. (I seem to recall at least one person being put on trial for teaching it, don't you?) Which is, as I said, similar in that it is also fought against viciously by another group. Which is why you get the strong support: the science community, under assault, are simply pushing back. And apparently, they're wrong to do so. What would you have them do, when their work and their very honesty is attacked?
There will always be problems with "indepenence" of scientific research when the main (only) funding agency is a political body and an incredibly long validation period.
The funding for climate research comes through many governments across the globe. Even in the US, it has come through several agencies (including the DoD!) and during times with the administrations in power have been decidedly anti-climate change research. The scientists have even been harassed and had their reports meddled with by functionaries who didn't like their research. They kept at it and kept saying the same thing.
(a) There is not such a huge difference in the amount of money scientists receive for one result versus the opposite result; or (b) The field is not as politically charged; or (c) The ultimate accuracy of a theory is seen more decisively in a shorter period of time.
(a) is a pretty bold claim. Got any evidence, any what-so-ever, showing that climate scientists who don't argue for climate change aren't getting funding? That they're systematically being denied grants?
(b) is nonsense, there are many politically charged fields in science. Evolutionary biology? Vaccine research lately (thanks to people like Jenny "Oops, it wasn't autism" McCarthy)?
(c) is always just silly. Quite a lot of science isn't decided on short timescales. Decades is more of than not how long you have to wait to find out how accurate a theory really is. (That's how long it takes for better tests to get developed.) Even medical testing often takes years to decades to pan out. That's why we don't really know what makes for a healthier diet (butter or margarine? how much salt is OK? does wine really help with cholesterol?)
However, with climate scientists, just like with economists, they can always claim their theories are correct throughout their entire lifetimes regardless of the outcomes.
Again, that's the norm for most areas of science. Most of us go a lifetime without seeing most of our work being shown to be wrong, even when it turns out to be way off. (Weak evidence often exists, but the really decisive evidence generally takes decades to emerge. The old joke about science is that new theories aren't so much accepted as the old theories' adherents just die off. That's because science, unlike the simple model you're taught in school, seldom moves forward from single, definitive experiments.
note that "ClimateGate" was the result of hacking rather than systematic review or investigation.
In as much as there was nothing in those emails that was incriminating, all of the innuendo and out of context quoting by FOX and others not withstanding, it's difficult to see what your point is.
Climate research isn't really any different from any other area of science, except that there's a lot of money being thrown against it by various lobbying groups who don't like where it's pointing. (Which makes it a lot more like evolutionary biology than anything.)
A claim made for any place that happens to have liquid water in it.
No, it's a claim made about places with liquid water, necessary materials (CHON elements, mainly), and an energy source of putative life to exploit. Liquid water just tends to be the toughest of those requirements to meet.
Since Enceladus has occasion steam, water jet out pooring doesn't mean it has a steady warm inner ocean
First, the jets are "occasional". They've been on as long as we've looked with Cassini and evidence suggests they've operated for a while. Second, no one is claiming a liquid ocean. In fact, I'm almost certain that's been ruled out for quite a while. What's being suggested is a small reservoir of liquid water just below the south pole.
(Also, it's not technically "steam" coming out. Steam in invisible water gas. These are visible water droplets and ice particles.)
like titan is thought to have.
There's evidence suggesting that there may be liquid 100 km below the surface, but it's hard to read that. In any case, water buried that deep probably inaccessible for spreading itself outside of Titan. How would you get it out?
I believe that current work suggests evidence of life arising withing the first few hundred million years of Earth's existence, not long after life could exist at all. (Prior to a certain point, sterilizing impacts were too frequent to let anything get far.) Probably half a billion years to no more than 1 billion years after the Earth formed we've found evidence of life. (Evidence gets to be isotopic beyond a certain point, but still.)
I'm not saying you can't use the camera to do any good, but how useful would it be as a solo system? Since we haven't heard from the school district that they also installed tracking software in case of theft, we have to rather assume that they didn't.
(Also, your link isn't really very helpful. The anecdotes are "success stories" used to sell a product/service. The website in question is bound to play up their product, and even that seems to rely pretty heavily on tracing software. The camera seems more useful for law enforcement to prosecute than for recovery of the laptop.)
If you wanted an anti-theft system, why not buy LoJack? It has to be at least as reliable as turning on the camera. Look: in order to catch the thief with a camera, you'd either have to recognize them or the location in which they're sitting. What are the odds of that working out for you? (Yes, I know it has happened before. But out of how many attempts?)
I'll bet that the district could even have gotten a bulk, educational discount on such software. They might even have spent less than it would cost to pay a person to troll through the camera images over a few years, even.
Now you've changed your stance completely. Several posts ago, you were questioning the science and claiming people were too biased to be believed. Now it's about the proposed solutions which have zero to do with the science. That's awfully evasive, isn't it?
Like you asked a claim of 'global warming' would require measurements over many decades with steady change measured all over the globe, anything other is not 'global', and you certainly need to account for biased data because of urban heating and various other effects.
You have that data. We have decades of temperature data in hand, that's how we know warming is happening.
After this fact has been established a cause still has to be determined, the solar cycle still has not been discounted as a possible cause,
Actually, yes it has. We have decades of warming data, which is many solar cycles' worth. And it's not like we don't monitor the solar output. The forcing just isn't there. (This has been concluded by a bunch of studies I've seen.)
I'm glad you have patience, that's an admirable trait. Except sometimes patience isn't the answer. If a decision has to be made (and "wait" is a decision), procrastinating and putting it off because you're afraid of looking foolish in a century is beyond idiotic, it's criminal.
Look at it this way: say your doctor told you that you had cancer. The chemo will be expensive and will suck, but she thinks it's your best bet. You see 19 other doctors. Eighteen agree with your PCP, one disagrees, thinks you don't have cancer and chemo would be a waste of money and your health. What do you do? Do you want to see if the cancer gets worse? You can apply the "wait and see" logic pretty much up to the moment you die, after all. Certainly well beyond the point where the chemo would have been effective or would have minimized the suck involved.
Cite one example. You keep making unsubstantiated claims and you're not actually helping your case. You're actually starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist.
Hansen is certainly out-spoken and likes making waves (I definitely have mixed feelings about him), but I can recall no cases of him falsifying data.
Everyone has a lot to gain, so I will in fact call anything anyone claims without backing up those claims with any evidence bullshit...
The scientists have provided copious data and arguments backing up their claims. Yet you and others like you continue to call "bullshit". So I ask you: do you have data and arguments to the contrary?
How's this: what would it take to convince you that AGW is real? What reasonable measurement, achievable in the next few years, would you require to believe that the predictions are accurate?
By the way, so far, I see you using works like "hostage" and "silence opposition", which sounds to me more like you're doing quite a bit of fear-mongering yourself.
Hansen works for NASA and is a professor. If he were caught falsifying data, both employers would fire him for exactly the reasons I stated. And in his capacity at Goddard, if he's like the other NASA scientists I know, he's probably on a lot of "soft" money, meaning grants. So, again, see above.
Got another example of a climate researcher who isn't anti-AGW who has "patronage"? So far, you seem to be slinging mud with very little substance.
Slashdot Mirror
a) Not sure how that exactly relates to what I said above, as such.
b) Read the article. That's exactly what the article is saying is not the case. Sugar is less bad than HFCS. It's not something you want to suck down, but it's apparently (in this one study, etc.) not as unhealthy for the same calories.
Well, would your libertarian streak be OK with just not subsidizing so damn much corn, then?
(The government already is interfering with the system. It's just making us sick thanks to the economic incentives.)
It's pretty much common knowledge that cheaper substitute ingredients are almost always unhealthy.
I distrust "common knowledge, especially this bit. Bear in mind that if you find a case where the cheaper alternative is more healthy, people would pretty much go with it and you'd never think about it as it's a no-brainer. The trouble with that is that it tends to bias your perception, as you've shown and can easily keep you from examining a new option because it is cheaper. (In fact, this has been found to be the case: people won't buy products they think are too low in price even when the quality is as good or better. I wish I had my source handy for that.)
I assume you're aware that even the Supreme Court has ruled that there are limits to those freedoms, especially where sensitive information is concerned, yes? If so, please elaborate on your post explaining why they don't apply here, as the original poster was suggesting that they do. If not, please don't post such nonsense until you do understand that there are limits on freedoms.
I haven't bought a saw recently, but I don't think Saw-Stop is standard. (In fact, the point of the linked article seems to be that it is not, but the creator thinks it should be.)
If you bought a car without an airbag installed and they told you that that model didn't have an airbag, unless it's against the law not to have one, you're SOL. If you bought it and, as you said, they had simply failed to install it, then you you have a case because now we're talking about something that they claimed to have and didn't.
Ack, right. Too early in the morning and my brain isn't functioning well enough yet. Thanks.
I read the article, and I'll quote it in full, here: "Error establishing a database connection".
Seems clear as day to me... No, wait! The other thing: Slashdotted!
Read the article, or even the summary posted here. It's not a matter of the recipient (or sender) posting the contents, it's a question of the ISP (hence: third party) revealing the information.
Now what's missing from this is that the investigators had a subpoena according to the article. I'm not clear on how this violates the Fourth Amendment, in that case. Isn't that exactly what we want the government to do and to be able to do when investigating an alleged crime?
As someone who was likely to be required to undergo a background check to get a badge (as an external contractor working on the Cassini mission), I have some knowledge of the checks they want to do.
First of all, many, perhaps most employees and contractors don't handle classified data. We're doing scientific work with technology that's 10-20 years old by the time it's in orbit around another planet. So it seems excessive to worry about the security risk.
Second, the form that they wanted us to fill out (the "matrix of risks") dates back several decades, to the 50s as I recall. You can imagine how wonderfully relevant it is. And it seems to rate sexual orientation (for example) as a more important risk than, say, having committed a murder. Seriously. It was comical, or would be if it weren't so serious.
Third, the checks that they seek to do aren't simple "does she have a felony on record or a similar problem in her history?" They wanted us to sign permissions to do some pretty deep snooping: they wanted permission to contact former neighbors, friends, teachers/professors, and even doctors. Which, for non-classified scientific research, is absurdly invasive. Astronomical research just isn't that important to begin with.
In general, JPL seems to have developed an obsession with security theater (ask me for stories there sometime) after 9/11. My suspicion is that it makes them feel more important to "need" extra security all over the place. (As if any terrorist organizations are keen on blowing up JPL anyway. It utterly lacks the profile or significance to just about anyone outside of the geek community.)
there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment,
Yep, something to always remember about any drug you might take or any treatment you might undergo. But it's also worth remembering that there's a non-zero risk to eating food (could be tainted), driving a car, or sticking your face in a fan*. Life is all about balancing the risks, not eliminating them entirely. In some ways, we're victims of our own success at risk mitigation: we've come to view risks as optional rather than a matter of course. (Applies to not just medicine, but also space travel, the way we raise our kids, and pretty much everything else.)
* With a tip of the hat to Frank Drebin, Police Squad.
Even in situations where it is in fact carbon neutral(atmospheric co2 -> plant -> cow -> atmospheric methane) you are turning a less potent, in greenhouse terms, flavor of carbon into a more potent one.
Right, but that methane then oxidizes back to CO2 on a ten-year timescale. So for any moderate to long-term purpose, it's returned to CO2 from whence it came. (If methane gets to be a problem, we can stop producing it and the atmosphere will return to where it was. CO2 sticks around for more like centuries.)
I think you nailed the only real difference with this particular bit of science: the policy side. (Which is, in my experience, separate from the science. The science is damn solid. What to do about it is a much more complex issue than climate modeling and at some level requires some input from our sense of ethics.)
One quibble: I'm not sure I believe
People don't like to be fooled into believing something they don't understand.
People believe all kinds of things they don't understand, often erroneously. How many people wear magnetic bracelets or take homeopathic cures?
I think I do believe that people don't like to believe things they don't want to accept. (That they have to change their lifestyles for health or climate reasons, for example.) That's made a lot worse when they don't understand the science behind the necessity, which is I think where you're coming from, yes?
The oil industry has been found to be funding at least one of the more prominent skeptical scientists, for a start. And even just yesterday, All Things Considered reported a story about how an industry lobbying group for the power industry is lobbying against the EPA's plan to regulate greenhouse gases, claiming that they're not a pollutant as the EPA claims.
We've also seen, in recent years, that the tobacco industry was helping lobby against climate change findings. (The logic being spreading doubt over one kind of science taints it all, apparently.) Link: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/19/1819257
So while I applaud your skepticism on such things, in this case, the data are there.
All I ever see and hear in the media (with exception to Fox 'News') is that climate change is man made, end of story, no room for questions, the end, it's done.
Which ignores the fact that the media widely has carried the counter-claims and stories about the leaked emails and other would-be scandals. One never really does feel that the media gives one's own side a fair shake, do they?
I hate that kind of crap, can anyone here think of a single other scientific theory that is so adamantly fought for by a group of people?
Evolution springs to mind. (I seem to recall at least one person being put on trial for teaching it, don't you?) Which is, as I said, similar in that it is also fought against viciously by another group. Which is why you get the strong support: the science community, under assault, are simply pushing back. And apparently, they're wrong to do so. What would you have them do, when their work and their very honesty is attacked?
There will always be problems with "indepenence" of scientific research when the main (only) funding agency is a political body and an incredibly long validation period.
The funding for climate research comes through many governments across the globe. Even in the US, it has come through several agencies (including the DoD!) and during times with the administrations in power have been decidedly anti-climate change research. The scientists have even been harassed and had their reports meddled with by functionaries who didn't like their research. They kept at it and kept saying the same thing.
In short, your claims are flatly false.
(a) There is not such a huge difference in the amount of money scientists receive for one result versus the opposite result; or
(b) The field is not as politically charged; or
(c) The ultimate accuracy of a theory is seen more decisively in a shorter period of time.
(a) is a pretty bold claim. Got any evidence, any what-so-ever, showing that climate scientists who don't argue for climate change aren't getting funding? That they're systematically being denied grants?
(b) is nonsense, there are many politically charged fields in science. Evolutionary biology? Vaccine research lately (thanks to people like Jenny "Oops, it wasn't autism" McCarthy)?
(c) is always just silly. Quite a lot of science isn't decided on short timescales. Decades is more of than not how long you have to wait to find out how accurate a theory really is. (That's how long it takes for better tests to get developed.) Even medical testing often takes years to decades to pan out. That's why we don't really know what makes for a healthier diet (butter or margarine? how much salt is OK? does wine really help with cholesterol?)
However, with climate scientists, just like with economists, they can always claim their theories are correct throughout their entire lifetimes regardless of the outcomes.
Again, that's the norm for most areas of science. Most of us go a lifetime without seeing most of our work being shown to be wrong, even when it turns out to be way off. (Weak evidence often exists, but the really decisive evidence generally takes decades to emerge. The old joke about science is that new theories aren't so much accepted as the old theories' adherents just die off. That's because science, unlike the simple model you're taught in school, seldom moves forward from single, definitive experiments.
note that "ClimateGate" was the result of hacking rather than systematic review or investigation.
In as much as there was nothing in those emails that was incriminating, all of the innuendo and out of context quoting by FOX and others not withstanding, it's difficult to see what your point is.
Climate research isn't really any different from any other area of science, except that there's a lot of money being thrown against it by various lobbying groups who don't like where it's pointing. (Which makes it a lot more like evolutionary biology than anything.)
A claim made for any place that happens to have liquid water in it.
No, it's a claim made about places with liquid water, necessary materials (CHON elements, mainly), and an energy source of putative life to exploit. Liquid water just tends to be the toughest of those requirements to meet.
Since Enceladus has occasion steam, water jet out pooring doesn't mean it has a steady warm inner ocean
First, the jets are "occasional". They've been on as long as we've looked with Cassini and evidence suggests they've operated for a while. Second, no one is claiming a liquid ocean. In fact, I'm almost certain that's been ruled out for quite a while. What's being suggested is a small reservoir of liquid water just below the south pole.
(Also, it's not technically "steam" coming out. Steam in invisible water gas. These are visible water droplets and ice particles.)
like titan is thought to have.
There's evidence suggesting that there may be liquid 100 km below the surface, but it's hard to read that. In any case, water buried that deep probably inaccessible for spreading itself outside of Titan. How would you get it out?
I believe that current work suggests evidence of life arising withing the first few hundred million years of Earth's existence, not long after life could exist at all. (Prior to a certain point, sterilizing impacts were too frequent to let anything get far.) Probably half a billion years to no more than 1 billion years after the Earth formed we've found evidence of life. (Evidence gets to be isotopic beyond a certain point, but still.)
I'm not saying you can't use the camera to do any good, but how useful would it be as a solo system? Since we haven't heard from the school district that they also installed tracking software in case of theft, we have to rather assume that they didn't.
(Also, your link isn't really very helpful. The anecdotes are "success stories" used to sell a product/service. The website in question is bound to play up their product, and even that seems to rely pretty heavily on tracing software. The camera seems more useful for law enforcement to prosecute than for recovery of the laptop.)
If you wanted an anti-theft system, why not buy LoJack? It has to be at least as reliable as turning on the camera. Look: in order to catch the thief with a camera, you'd either have to recognize them or the location in which they're sitting. What are the odds of that working out for you? (Yes, I know it has happened before. But out of how many attempts?)
I'll bet that the district could even have gotten a bulk, educational discount on such software. They might even have spent less than it would cost to pay a person to troll through the camera images over a few years, even.
Now you've changed your stance completely. Several posts ago, you were questioning the science and claiming people were too biased to be believed. Now it's about the proposed solutions which have zero to do with the science. That's awfully evasive, isn't it?
Like you asked a claim of 'global warming' would require measurements over many decades with steady change measured all over the globe, anything other is not 'global', and you certainly need to account for biased data because of urban heating and various other effects.
You have that data. We have decades of temperature data in hand, that's how we know warming is happening.
After this fact has been established a cause still has to be determined, the solar cycle still has not been discounted as a possible cause,
Actually, yes it has. We have decades of warming data, which is many solar cycles' worth. And it's not like we don't monitor the solar output. The forcing just isn't there. (This has been concluded by a bunch of studies I've seen.)
I'm glad you have patience, that's an admirable trait. Except sometimes patience isn't the answer. If a decision has to be made (and "wait" is a decision), procrastinating and putting it off because you're afraid of looking foolish in a century is beyond idiotic, it's criminal.
Look at it this way: say your doctor told you that you had cancer. The chemo will be expensive and will suck, but she thinks it's your best bet. You see 19 other doctors. Eighteen agree with your PCP, one disagrees, thinks you don't have cancer and chemo would be a waste of money and your health. What do you do? Do you want to see if the cancer gets worse? You can apply the "wait and see" logic pretty much up to the moment you die, after all. Certainly well beyond the point where the chemo would have been effective or would have minimized the suck involved.
Cite one example. You keep making unsubstantiated claims and you're not actually helping your case. You're actually starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist.
Hansen is certainly out-spoken and likes making waves (I definitely have mixed feelings about him), but I can recall no cases of him falsifying data.
Everyone has a lot to gain, so I will in fact call anything anyone claims without backing up those claims with any evidence bullshit...
The scientists have provided copious data and arguments backing up their claims. Yet you and others like you continue to call "bullshit". So I ask you: do you have data and arguments to the contrary?
How's this: what would it take to convince you that AGW is real? What reasonable measurement, achievable in the next few years, would you require to believe that the predictions are accurate?
By the way, so far, I see you using works like "hostage" and "silence opposition", which sounds to me more like you're doing quite a bit of fear-mongering yourself.
Hansen works for NASA and is a professor. If he were caught falsifying data, both employers would fire him for exactly the reasons I stated. And in his capacity at Goddard, if he's like the other NASA scientists I know, he's probably on a lot of "soft" money, meaning grants. So, again, see above.
Got another example of a climate researcher who isn't anti-AGW who has "patronage"? So far, you seem to be slinging mud with very little substance.
I suppose it depends on how you read the word "global": is it modifying the researchers or the climate that they study?