not scientific consensus, they where untested ideas. Don't be changing the meaning to fit you incorrect world view.
Those ideas were as untested as current ideas that people claim there is a "scientific consensus" on. The error is yours in trying to misrepresent a vaguely defined collection of poorly tested ideas as a "scientific consensus".
A small set of astronomers decide it wasn't worth funding, meanwhile on the west cost they where being built.
And in that case, people who believed in something decided to pay for something. Today, people who believe in something try to justify forcing other people to pay for it because of a supposed "scientific consensus".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on/.
Yes, you should take that to heart because it applies to you, in spades.
Here's the deal on 'scientific consensus' -- it's not always right, but it is the best guess at the time, supported by the majority of the evidence by smart people who know the subject
Even when that is the case, a "best guess at the time" is insufficient as a basis for government or decision making.
If I need treatment for my cancer or degenerative disease, I'm going with the scientific consensus. If I'm designing a bridge or airplane that will carry passengers, I'm going with the scientific consensus. If I'm making a long term investment (in land in Florida as a random example), I'm going the scientific consensus.
Then you're a fool, because you don't even realize that there are many tradeoffs to be made in each of those cases.
The rest of us are talking about actual companies as they really exist, which are generally irrational, poorly run, anti-democratic, and at the whim of some possibly charismatic but out-of-touch business owner
Companies that are poorly run lose to companies that are well run, that's all a free market guarantees.
Your assumption, however that a well run company needs to be run rationally and democratically is likely wrong.
It turns out that the history of astronomy is littered with ideas that once seemed incontrovertibly right and yet later proved to be bizarrely wrong.
Yes. In different words, there was "scientific consensus" on them. Remember that next time people throw that phrase around to convince you of the correctness of some idea.
“Because Jupiter is considerably farther out from the center of the solar system, time allocation committees on major telescopes declined proposals to search for close-in Jupiters for years based on the argument that such systems would deviate dramatically from the architecture of the solar system and hence are unlikely to exist.”
And this is why it takes so long to overturn false scientific consensus. Scientific "conspiracies" aren't conspiracies of evil masterminds, they are merely mobbing using peer reviews and grant committees.
People in education in every country on the planet know what I have written
No, they don't know. Nobody knows how to improve education. People have tried a lot of things with no clear path to success. What you state is unfounded ideology, not knowledge.
Improvement by ignorant brownian motion instead of getting help from domain experience?
Yes, improvement by "Brownian motion", combined with selection: that's the bedrock of modern biology (Darwin) and modern economics (Adam Smith).
Please have at least some respect for the intelligence of people reading what you are writing
I do. I assume that people who claim to understand Darwin also understand Smith because they are talking about pretty much the same thing: how mutation and selection lead to gradual improvement. Only people who for ideological reasons are wedded to intelligent design deny either theory.
We were at war with Afghanistan, and it used to be run by a totalitarian regime. Monitoring their phones for a decade or two as part of attempting to transition them to democracy doesn't seem unreasonable. We did the same in Germany after WWII, and also limited German democracy in some ways.
I read what you wrote. I'm telling you you are jumping to conclusions. You assume that you know how schools would deliver better results.
I'm telling you, I don't know how schools can produce better results. There is little evidence about the effect putting teachers in charge, spending more money, or smaller class sizes accomplish that. And pointing to Europe doesn't help because the Europeans are actually not doing better than we are; the differences we see in PISA are minor, and largely attributable to choice of samples and factors that have nothing to do with education.
And we're certainly not going to produce better schools by picking the academic-fad-du-jour, spending 20 years to implement it, only to discover that it didn't make a lot of difference and cost a lot of money and trying to implement another fad for another 20 years. At that rate, it will take us forever to go through all the things we need to try before we accidentally hit on something that works better.
The way to improve schools is to let many schools try many different things, and let parents decide for themselves what they believe works and doesn't work. In fact, Obama and Democrats even play lip service to this, they simply don't actually do it (like so many of their policies, they say the right thing and then do the wrong thing).
Regulation is incapable of restraining selfishness and corruption, and, more importantly, the regulators and enforcers themselves are also selfish and corrupt. As a practical matter, limited regulations are necessary, but they don't accomplish what you seem to think they do.
Given your defenition of efficient seems to be different from the one found in the dictionary, I'm beginning to believe you.
I'm talking about economic efficiency: how well does a company function and deliver value in the real world and given real employees.
Are they efficient? No. Are they providing a product which others nees? Yes. It quite possibly is because they have plenty of proprietary information which is too hard for others to duplicate. No efficiency required.
Of course, it's proprietary information that makes a company more efficient than others:they know how to do things a bit better than their competitors. What else would it be?
Large companies tolerate quite a bit of inefficiency
They "tolerate inefficiency" in that they don't maximize productivity and value coming out of each worker. But that's not the efficiency that primarily matters. As you observed yourself, companies die because they don't get paid or don't have their logistics nailed down. That's the "efficiency" that matters when scaling up: risk management, cash flow, customer satisfaction and retention.
And with education, it's probably the same thing. It's not teacher quality or class size or money per pupil, it's all that other stuff that really matters, stuff that corporations tend to pay attention to, but that rational, publicly financed educators don't even see.
Blimey, you've put a lot of words in to my mouth and made a lot of assumptions about me. You should stop and think.
I didn't make assumptions, I asked questions. Instead of useless posturing, why don't you answer some?
BTW, did you notice that Finland is number three overall? Not bad for the mediocre European system.
Rankings are irrelevant by themselves; someone is in third place even in remedial math class. And when comparing countries, you'd expect the top ones to be the smaller ones, while all the larger ones are close to the overall average. Notice that several US states are comparable to the best European scores.
But I'll stop here, since so much math and reasoning is likely too taxing for you.
You mean I'm supposed to buy into the fiction propagated about how the magic of free markets somehow manages to make people not act like humans?
Quite to the contrary: free markets are the only economic system that actually takes into account that people are selfish and corrupt.
I'll check wikipedia. Oh looks like earnings, profits and share price are all heading up.
Then obviously your assessment of the company is incorrect: that company is more efficient than alternative companies.
If you ever incidentally bump into a company with more than 5 or so employees you will very rapidly see that they are not "ruthlesly efficient".
I've worked at plenty of them, and they are "ruthlessly efficient". That doesn't mean that they do things as efficiently as an ideal company composed of ideal workers could do things. It means that they manage to do very well even given an imperfect, selfish, and at times dishonest workforce.
By the way, generally I agree that having corporate executives appointed to the boards of public universities is a bad idea and that self-governance by the academics is far preferable. Corporate executives know nothing about either education or management in a public institution.
But that observation has nothing to do with the question of whether real corporate-style management (i.e., for-profit private schools) would function better than publicly financed schools.
In the last 25 years, how many corporate executives have been on the board? 24 (53% of the total)
The fact that politicians hand out board memberships as favors to corporate buddies doesn't give you a "corporate style administrator". These board members couldn't care less about whether the CUNY budget is balanced or whether the institution works for students.
Being a "corporate style administrator" isn't a personality trait, it's a response to fiscal and market pressures. CUNY doesn't have "corporate style administrators" because it doesn't actually have to respond to market pressures or competition.
Pretty much all of your statements are factually false, so I'll just deal with the very first one as an exercise.
Please keep it coming. We can root out your remaining misconceptions too.
Fact is that about 90% of US 1-12 students are attending public schools. Those public schools are modeled on the European system. US PISA scores are the result of that system.
Fact is that we're spending more per pupil than almost any other nation.
Fact is also (that's what the article is about) that this system delivers mediocre results, meaning results around the OECD average (slightly below, actually).
Do you disagree with any of those facts?
Now, given that we have a European-style system, why would you expect it to deliver better results in the US than in Europe?
Now, fact is also that Obama and Democrats want to maintain and spend even more on public K-12 education system; it's their political position that that will improve education.
I think it's reasonable to ask why you would have any expectation that this should work better in the future than it has in the past. Of course I have a "political agenda": I think the Democrats' education policy is wrong. There is no evidence that spending more on the public school system in the US will improve performance one bit. If we want to do better than other nations, we need to do something different from them.
You seem to take it already as a given that public schools are the right solution and will yield better results if only we do... something. Of course, your insistence on that is rather "mindless" since there is no rational reason to believe that that will work.
Now, do you actually have an argument to make, or do you simply like to engage in mindless demagoguery?
Other countries do it the second way and it works. The USA used to do it the second way and it worked.
The data simply don't support your story. If you look on a state-by-state basis, the US has the same diversity than when you look at Europe on a "state-by-state" basis. The fact that the US is average is an artifact of taking all US states and averaging them, while putting each little European enclave onto the list as a separate nation.
If there is a lesson to be learned, it's that we should de-federalize education, just like education in Europe is left to each EU member, and often states/regions within those members. Concluding from the data that we need to create national education standards and systems makes no sense.
It's also a myth that US education used to be better. The US secondary education system has always been mediocre in comparison to other nations, both because of our size, and because our culture doesn't value academics as much as other nations. And there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.
We have a European-style public education system for K-12, and it delivers European-style mediocre results.... http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
If you look at that, you'll see that the US is close to OECD average of 500 on all scores. There simply are no big differences. If you look at TFA and read the report, furthermore, you'll see that on a state-by-state basis, individual US states rank from near the top to near the bottom, making the US as a whole as diverse as Europe as a whole.
Also, you're flat out wrong: much of Europe comes above the US.
When you're comparing rankings of countries that are so close to one another, the rankings become meaningless. Furthermore, statistically, it makes little sense to compare education statistics from a country like Norway to a country like the US.
Oh yeah, you're the chap who seems to come here to randomly hate on Europe for no discernable reasons
I don't give a sh*t about what Europeans do in Europe. But when people advocate European policies as solutions to supposed US problems, I object, because (1) European policies don't even work well in Europe, (2) the US and Europe have different values and many European policies simply are not acceptable in the US, and (3) even if European policies were acceptable and did work in Europe, the US is a very different society and they would likely not work in the US.
That more or less refelcts a recent experience with a Very Large Company. The fact thay you think companies are ruthlessly efficient means you have no idea at all how things in the real world actually work.
Sorry, I thought people generally understood how free markets work. Indeed, there are plenty of lousy companies that are badly managed, have bad employees, and make bad products. But they don't last because their customers go elsewhere. That is, unless those companies are protected by artificial monopolies.
So, it's the companies that survive that are ruthlessly efficient and improve their products. I assume you used to work for one of the bad companies, which is probably why you used to work for them.
The problem with our education system is the same as with cable companies, oil companies, and lots of other corporations like that: they get government guaranteed monopolies and handouts. But the fault there isn't with corporations or free markets, it's with government.
I would submit that the teachers' unions are practically the only thing keeping the U.S. public school system halfway functioning. The more the system has been taken over by non-teaching corporate-style administrators, the more it's gone down the toilet (and the more those administrators have used it as a stick to further beat down the unions).
There are no "corporate-style administrators" in public schools, there are only government administrators. Corporations are ruthless about improving their product and cutting costs, exactly the two things that are not happening in public schools.
It really takes a special kind of stupid to try to blame the failings of US public schools on corporations; US public schools have nothing to do with corporations, corporate governance, free markets, or any of that. The shortcomings of US public education is a joint effort of teachers, unions, government administrators, and politicians.
Foreign countries with stronger unions also have stronger educational outcomes.
Foreign countries who don't speak English also have stronger educational outcomes. Foreign countries where people drive on the other side of the road also have stronger educational outcomes. You can pull coincidences out of a hat, but that doesn't tell you anything about causality.
The choice is effectively between having decisions on how students are taught made by either (a) Dilbert and friends, or (b) their Pointy-Haired Boss. Choose wisely.
You assume that the only two variants of school systems we should consider are public administration-heavy schools and public teacher-and-teacher-union-run schools; both of those are lousy choices.
Education should return to being a state and local matter, and the federal government should get out of it; there is no evidence whatsoever that a single national standard helps rather than hurts. In addition, we should give parents and students more choice via school vouchers. Forcing parents to send their kids to poorly performing schools is a lousy idea.
Actually, I didn't pay that much attention to the hype in the article, I read the actual report. I suggest you do too.
If you actualy read the report, you'll see that PISA performance across US states is as widespread as math performance across European nations, and our national average is little different from averages of other large OECD nations. Therefore, the US isn't actually "failing" or "in denial". We have a European-style public education system for K-12, and it delivers European-style mediocre results.
The US is doing about average for OECD on math (and other areas), which isn't bad given the large number of immigrants and diversity of students and backgrounds. And given that our public school system is not all that different from public school systems in those other countries, we shouldn't expect ours to perform any better. Are there identifiable groups and regions that are below average in the US? Of course there are. That's true for other large countries as well.
The US could do better if we did things differently from other OECD nations; if we reduced our reliance on public K-12 schools and encouraged innovation, self-reliance, and diversity of approaches in education. But as long as people like Obama advocate mediocre European systems as a model, all we will produce is the same kind of mediocrity that Europe produces.
Water under a glacier is liquid at temperatures much colder than 0C. Perhaps you should learn more about chemistry and such before commenting on it.
The dependence of melting point on pressure for ice is slight (I believe around 0.01C every 10m of depth), or around 2C at the very bottom; hardly "much colder". Of course, increases in air temperature don't make it down that far anyway for a long time.
To melt it, maybe. To warm up the glaciers such that they flow faster than they build up,
I.e., you now recognize that melting point has nothing to do with it; it's the properties of the ice itself that change with temperature and cause it to flow faster. But that effect isn't dramatic and it's mostly at the surface.
resulting in large masses of ice flowing into the ocean
Ice speed increases a few percent per degree Celsius increase in air temperature on normal glaciers, not exactly a dramatic change.
I find it very enjoyable, yet irritating, to see people take every single effect/cause independently, somehow analyse them (while actually having no clue at all what they are doing) and come to the conclusion they are too small to be related to a trend, while missing the obvious point that independent effect can be cumulativ
Just as irritating as people who pick out every single thing that might happen when it gets a little warmer, total it all up, ignore the positive effects and negative feedback loops, and predict global disaster.
It's the AGW activists who are thinking like young-earth-creationists, reasoning as if the world has always been like it's today, and that it is man's sinfulness that causes it to change and deteriorate. It's people like you who can't wrap your head around the fact that the Earth is actually a lot older than 6000 years.
"Deniers", on the other hand, know that trying to do anything about climate change is futile, and we know that the relative stability and warmth of the last few thousand years is an aberration. That is, "deniers" are scientifically minded people like me who accept global warming as reality but deny that we should take action.
Slashdot Mirror
Those ideas were as untested as current ideas that people claim there is a "scientific consensus" on. The error is yours in trying to misrepresent a vaguely defined collection of poorly tested ideas as a "scientific consensus".
And in that case, people who believed in something decided to pay for something. Today, people who believe in something try to justify forcing other people to pay for it because of a supposed "scientific consensus".
Yes, you should take that to heart because it applies to you, in spades.
Even when that is the case, a "best guess at the time" is insufficient as a basis for government or decision making.
Then you're a fool, because you don't even realize that there are many tradeoffs to be made in each of those cases.
Companies that are poorly run lose to companies that are well run, that's all a free market guarantees.
Your assumption, however that a well run company needs to be run rationally and democratically is likely wrong.
Yes. In different words, there was "scientific consensus" on them. Remember that next time people throw that phrase around to convince you of the correctness of some idea.
And this is why it takes so long to overturn false scientific consensus. Scientific "conspiracies" aren't conspiracies of evil masterminds, they are merely mobbing using peer reviews and grant committees.
No, they don't know. Nobody knows how to improve education. People have tried a lot of things with no clear path to success. What you state is unfounded ideology, not knowledge.
Yes, improvement by "Brownian motion", combined with selection: that's the bedrock of modern biology (Darwin) and modern economics (Adam Smith).
I do. I assume that people who claim to understand Darwin also understand Smith because they are talking about pretty much the same thing: how mutation and selection lead to gradual improvement. Only people who for ideological reasons are wedded to intelligent design deny either theory.
We were at war with Afghanistan, and it used to be run by a totalitarian regime. Monitoring their phones for a decade or two as part of attempting to transition them to democracy doesn't seem unreasonable. We did the same in Germany after WWII, and also limited German democracy in some ways.
I read what you wrote. I'm telling you you are jumping to conclusions. You assume that you know how schools would deliver better results.
I'm telling you, I don't know how schools can produce better results. There is little evidence about the effect putting teachers in charge, spending more money, or smaller class sizes accomplish that. And pointing to Europe doesn't help because the Europeans are actually not doing better than we are; the differences we see in PISA are minor, and largely attributable to choice of samples and factors that have nothing to do with education.
And we're certainly not going to produce better schools by picking the academic-fad-du-jour, spending 20 years to implement it, only to discover that it didn't make a lot of difference and cost a lot of money and trying to implement another fad for another 20 years. At that rate, it will take us forever to go through all the things we need to try before we accidentally hit on something that works better.
The way to improve schools is to let many schools try many different things, and let parents decide for themselves what they believe works and doesn't work. In fact, Obama and Democrats even play lip service to this, they simply don't actually do it (like so many of their policies, they say the right thing and then do the wrong thing).
Regulation is incapable of restraining selfishness and corruption, and, more importantly, the regulators and enforcers themselves are also selfish and corrupt. As a practical matter, limited regulations are necessary, but they don't accomplish what you seem to think they do.
I'm talking about economic efficiency: how well does a company function and deliver value in the real world and given real employees.
Of course, it's proprietary information that makes a company more efficient than others:they know how to do things a bit better than their competitors. What else would it be?
They "tolerate inefficiency" in that they don't maximize productivity and value coming out of each worker. But that's not the efficiency that primarily matters. As you observed yourself, companies die because they don't get paid or don't have their logistics nailed down. That's the "efficiency" that matters when scaling up: risk management, cash flow, customer satisfaction and retention.
And with education, it's probably the same thing. It's not teacher quality or class size or money per pupil, it's all that other stuff that really matters, stuff that corporations tend to pay attention to, but that rational, publicly financed educators don't even see.
I didn't make assumptions, I asked questions. Instead of useless posturing, why don't you answer some?
Rankings are irrelevant by themselves; someone is in third place even in remedial math class. And when comparing countries, you'd expect the top ones to be the smaller ones, while all the larger ones are close to the overall average. Notice that several US states are comparable to the best European scores.
But I'll stop here, since so much math and reasoning is likely too taxing for you.
Quite to the contrary: free markets are the only economic system that actually takes into account that people are selfish and corrupt.
Then obviously your assessment of the company is incorrect: that company is more efficient than alternative companies.
I've worked at plenty of them, and they are "ruthlessly efficient". That doesn't mean that they do things as efficiently as an ideal company composed of ideal workers could do things. It means that they manage to do very well even given an imperfect, selfish, and at times dishonest workforce.
By the way, generally I agree that having corporate executives appointed to the boards of public universities is a bad idea and that self-governance by the academics is far preferable. Corporate executives know nothing about either education or management in a public institution.
But that observation has nothing to do with the question of whether real corporate-style management (i.e., for-profit private schools) would function better than publicly financed schools.
The fact that politicians hand out board memberships as favors to corporate buddies doesn't give you a "corporate style administrator". These board members couldn't care less about whether the CUNY budget is balanced or whether the institution works for students.
Being a "corporate style administrator" isn't a personality trait, it's a response to fiscal and market pressures. CUNY doesn't have "corporate style administrators" because it doesn't actually have to respond to market pressures or competition.
Please keep it coming. We can root out your remaining misconceptions too.
I don't see where your disagreement exactly is.
Fact is that about 90% of US 1-12 students are attending public schools. Those public schools are modeled on the European system. US PISA scores are the result of that system.
Fact is that we're spending more per pupil than almost any other nation.
Fact is also (that's what the article is about) that this system delivers mediocre results, meaning results around the OECD average (slightly below, actually).
Do you disagree with any of those facts?
Now, given that we have a European-style system, why would you expect it to deliver better results in the US than in Europe?
Now, fact is also that Obama and Democrats want to maintain and spend even more on public K-12 education system; it's their political position that that will improve education.
I think it's reasonable to ask why you would have any expectation that this should work better in the future than it has in the past. Of course I have a "political agenda": I think the Democrats' education policy is wrong. There is no evidence that spending more on the public school system in the US will improve performance one bit. If we want to do better than other nations, we need to do something different from them.
You seem to take it already as a given that public schools are the right solution and will yield better results if only we do ... something. Of course, your insistence on that is rather "mindless" since there is no rational reason to believe that that will work.
Now, do you actually have an argument to make, or do you simply like to engage in mindless demagoguery?
The data simply don't support your story. If you look on a state-by-state basis, the US has the same diversity than when you look at Europe on a "state-by-state" basis. The fact that the US is average is an artifact of taking all US states and averaging them, while putting each little European enclave onto the list as a separate nation.
If there is a lesson to be learned, it's that we should de-federalize education, just like education in Europe is left to each EU member, and often states/regions within those members. Concluding from the data that we need to create national education standards and systems makes no sense.
It's also a myth that US education used to be better. The US secondary education system has always been mediocre in comparison to other nations, both because of our size, and because our culture doesn't value academics as much as other nations. And there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.
If you look at that, you'll see that the US is close to OECD average of 500 on all scores. There simply are no big differences. If you look at TFA and read the report, furthermore, you'll see that on a state-by-state basis, individual US states rank from near the top to near the bottom, making the US as a whole as diverse as Europe as a whole.
When you're comparing rankings of countries that are so close to one another, the rankings become meaningless. Furthermore, statistically, it makes little sense to compare education statistics from a country like Norway to a country like the US.
I don't give a sh*t about what Europeans do in Europe. But when people advocate European policies as solutions to supposed US problems, I object, because (1) European policies don't even work well in Europe, (2) the US and Europe have different values and many European policies simply are not acceptable in the US, and (3) even if European policies were acceptable and did work in Europe, the US is a very different society and they would likely not work in the US.
Sorry, I thought people generally understood how free markets work. Indeed, there are plenty of lousy companies that are badly managed, have bad employees, and make bad products. But they don't last because their customers go elsewhere. That is, unless those companies are protected by artificial monopolies.
So, it's the companies that survive that are ruthlessly efficient and improve their products. I assume you used to work for one of the bad companies, which is probably why you used to work for them.
The problem with our education system is the same as with cable companies, oil companies, and lots of other corporations like that: they get government guaranteed monopolies and handouts. But the fault there isn't with corporations or free markets, it's with government.
There are no "corporate-style administrators" in public schools, there are only government administrators. Corporations are ruthless about improving their product and cutting costs, exactly the two things that are not happening in public schools.
It really takes a special kind of stupid to try to blame the failings of US public schools on corporations; US public schools have nothing to do with corporations, corporate governance, free markets, or any of that. The shortcomings of US public education is a joint effort of teachers, unions, government administrators, and politicians.
Foreign countries who don't speak English also have stronger educational outcomes. Foreign countries where people drive on the other side of the road also have stronger educational outcomes. You can pull coincidences out of a hat, but that doesn't tell you anything about causality.
You assume that the only two variants of school systems we should consider are public administration-heavy schools and public teacher-and-teacher-union-run schools; both of those are lousy choices.
Education should return to being a state and local matter, and the federal government should get out of it; there is no evidence whatsoever that a single national standard helps rather than hurts. In addition, we should give parents and students more choice via school vouchers. Forcing parents to send their kids to poorly performing schools is a lousy idea.
Actually, I didn't pay that much attention to the hype in the article, I read the actual report. I suggest you do too.
If you actualy read the report, you'll see that PISA performance across US states is as widespread as math performance across European nations, and our national average is little different from averages of other large OECD nations. Therefore, the US isn't actually "failing" or "in denial". We have a European-style public education system for K-12, and it delivers European-style mediocre results.
The US is doing about average for OECD on math (and other areas), which isn't bad given the large number of immigrants and diversity of students and backgrounds. And given that our public school system is not all that different from public school systems in those other countries, we shouldn't expect ours to perform any better. Are there identifiable groups and regions that are below average in the US? Of course there are. That's true for other large countries as well.
The US could do better if we did things differently from other OECD nations; if we reduced our reliance on public K-12 schools and encouraged innovation, self-reliance, and diversity of approaches in education. But as long as people like Obama advocate mediocre European systems as a model, all we will produce is the same kind of mediocrity that Europe produces.
No, sorry, they were not.
It's roughly 0.01C melting point decrease per 1 atm of pressure. Please do tell how that somehow results in glaciers melting faster.
The dependence of melting point on pressure for ice is slight (I believe around 0.01C every 10m of depth), or around 2C at the very bottom; hardly "much colder". Of course, increases in air temperature don't make it down that far anyway for a long time.
I.e., you now recognize that melting point has nothing to do with it; it's the properties of the ice itself that change with temperature and cause it to flow faster. But that effect isn't dramatic and it's mostly at the surface.
Ice speed increases a few percent per degree Celsius increase in air temperature on normal glaciers, not exactly a dramatic change.
Oh, please, you're funny!
On this planet, water melts at around 0C. Unless a "small rise in temp" raises temperatures above that, it won't melt.
Furthermore, it takes a long time and a lot of heat to melt the Antarctic and Greenland. We're talking around a millennium even in the worst case.
Just as irritating as people who pick out every single thing that might happen when it gets a little warmer, total it all up, ignore the positive effects and negative feedback loops, and predict global disaster.
It's the AGW activists who are thinking like young-earth-creationists, reasoning as if the world has always been like it's today, and that it is man's sinfulness that causes it to change and deteriorate. It's people like you who can't wrap your head around the fact that the Earth is actually a lot older than 6000 years.
"Deniers", on the other hand, know that trying to do anything about climate change is futile, and we know that the relative stability and warmth of the last few thousand years is an aberration. That is, "deniers" are scientifically minded people like me who accept global warming as reality but deny that we should take action.