This is a video of a person driving into some other people. The car was not "trying to park itself" nor under any other sort of autonomous control. It is speculated in TFA that the driver mistakenly thought the car would automatically stop him from ramming the people he was intentionally accelerating towards. There is further speculation about why it didn't work, including that the car may not have had that functionality installed, and that maybe it did, but even if so the way he was driving (i.e. significant acceleration) would override the pedestrian-avoidance function. Sometimes it seems like there is a faction with an agenda against self-driving cars spreading as much misinformation as possible.
2 out of 48 were under computer control when the accident occurred. That does not mean the computer systems were at fault. That just means the other two cases shouldn't even be included in the tally. It's not a self-driving car accident if a human is driving.
Right. And while I'm sure that depends in part on the operational definitions being used for "rampant," "disrespect," and "cheating," I find it plausible that the professor was the main problem. Maybe the only problem.
No, the 350m mentioned in TFA is the depth limit of the detection system they were using, not the depth of the briny aquifer. For the depth of the brine, they say it's deeper than 100 meters: "Deep (>100m) low-resistivity zones that we interpret to represent brine-bearing materials were detected throughout the lower Taylor Valley subsurface."
The "coming entitlement generation" has been on its way since at least the late 1980s when it was supposedly my cohort...and probably much, much longer. Although you can always find a few examples of entitled brats--and that's nothing new, of course--the whole "kids these days" thing appears to me to still be as much of a myth as it always has been. From https://www.insidehighered.com... : "Asked if the decision to fail every one of the 30-plus enrollees was fair to every student, Horwitz said that "a few" students had not engaged in misbehavior, and he said that those students were also the best academic performers. Horwitz said he offered to the university that he would continue to teach just those students, but was told that wasn't possible, so he felt he had no choice but to fail everyone and leave the course." "A spokesman for the university said via email that 'all accusations made by the professor about the students' behavior in class are also being investigated and disciplinary action will be taken' against students found to have behaved inappropriately. The spokesman said that one cheating allegation referenced by Horwitz has already been investigated and that a student committee cleared the student of cheating." It looks to me like the instructor had a melt-down and attempted to combine rage quitting and collective punishment. I'm sure some of the kids were a-holes, but not all of them were, by the instructor's own admission.
Germany actually pays its neighbors to take it when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining as the price of electricity between utility companies goes negative.
What constitutes an image of Muhammad? I mean, no one really knows what he looked like, right? And even if they did know, people have look-alikes...so it seems for something to be an "image of the Prophet" requires it to be labeled as such. But how far does that go? If I drew a stick figure, and wrote "Muhammad" under it, would that count? What if I drew a very detailed and accurate sketch of someone presently alive, let's say my friend Bill, but labelled it "the Prophet Muhammad," would that count? How are these things decided?
scientists might find more traction for their beliefs if they could get away from the folks who are peddling 'solutions' for AGW. You know, the activists who want to make energy so expensive that poor people will have to live in dark, cold homes, and gasoline so expensive that they have to stay in those cold, dark homes.
Find me one of these activists for cold, dark homes and hyper-expensive energy. One that's not made out of straw.
As mentioned in the article and elsewhere, in climate science like any other science, genuine skepticism is *welcome*! Strongly encouraged, even! There is no parallel here to calling someone who does not share your beliefs a "heretic." This is more a case of looking at someone who *claims* to share your beliefs (skepticism, evidence-based decision making, etc.), noticing that they're behaving in the opposite way (repeating information that has been demonstrated to be wrong, ignoring evidence, and showing extreme credulity towards ideas consistent with their preconceived notions), and suggesting that we stop calling them "one of us" (i.e., someone acting in good faith to follow the evidence wherever it leads).
Oh I see, when person A observes that person B is not making evidence-based arguments, and suggests that they not be labelled with a term that implies they are making evidence-based arguments, that's similar to person A suggesting that person B be murdered with fire, is it?
Climate models (i.e., formal models used by climate scientists) have done pretty well, actually. Better than any other means of predicting how the climate will evolve. OTOH, I've heard about how "Global Warming is BS" and that we're entering a cooling phase that's going to prove it for about a decade now; a decade that has seen the record for hottest year broken at least twice, and it looks like 2014 is going to be number three. So yeah, the models continue to need improvement, but they are the best game in town. I challenge you to find a better way to anticipate the changes in the climate over time.
For example, have we excluded the possibility of rising temperature changes are not affected by:
Yes! FFS! Yes, we have excluded those possibilities, or at least found the boundaries of the plausible effect sizes, and determined that they are not where the action is! Stop assuming that climate scientists haven't been thinking about the forces that might plausibly affect climate! That is what climate scientists do!
If CO2 had any significant effect, it would show up in the temperature record.
Which of course it does. Google "temperature CO2 graph." It's glaringly obvious, if you don't truncate the graphs to only show a few years. Or does the AC believe that if the CO2 in the atmosphere disappeared, there would be no impact? (without the greenhouse effect of CO2, the current surface temperature would be about 30C lower)
"Trend for more than a decade" = statistical and signal detection illiteracy, or attempted deception. At all time scales at which a *statistically significant trend is detectable*, the trend is exactly as would be expected given the scientific consensus as expressed by, for example, the IPCC. Which means warming at the surface, warming in the upper and middle layers of the oceans, warming in the lower atmosphere, and cooling in the stratosphere. On shorter time scales, the signal is too noisy to say anything meaningful. Also, as you either don't know or don't want others to know, there are lags of differing intervals in the temperature response to CO2, determined by the efficiency of various climate components (like the oceans) as heat-sinks. Your suggestion that you should be able to see an instantaneous and simple effect, obvious to your naked eye in the 3 charts you generated at wood for trees would suggest that you are deeply ignorant of how climate works and what climate scientists are saying is happening. However, I don't think that's the whole story. The fact that you chose the specific start dates that you did..2001 for hadcrut, 2002 for UAH, 1998 (!) for RSS...suggests that you are deliberately cherry-picking start dates to give a visual impression that your (statistically meaningless) statements are accurate. Make the plots again with the whole available data sets, and it becomes obvious that we are looking at a noisy system trending upward on a multi-decadal scale.
Hear, hear. This is exciting stuff in my book. I'm very happy Kepler is gathering data again, though still slightly frustrated that it didn't last longer with its full capabilities.
John Christy by no means represents the consensus among scientists studying climate. By all means, read his stuff. But also read Richard Muller, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf, Eric Stieg, etc. etc. etc. And also read the copious critiques of Christy's interpretations of the data. He's like a doctor promoting the idea that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Yes, you can find those people, and yes, they're actual doctors, but no, they don't represent the medical profession as a whole, and even though I'm not medically trained, I'm fairly comfortable dismissing them and going with the medical consensus. I submit that the only reason such an analogy feels exaggerated or unfair to Christy is that there's no gigantically wealthy vested interest trying to convince people that HIV is unrelated to AIDS. People like Christy get a bigger megaphone than the quality of their work and thought merits because they're saying something that some very wealthy people desperately want you to believe.
Evaluating model output is not a binary right/wrong, good/bad. No model is going to be perfect. As I have often read, and don't know to whom to attribute the quote: "all models are wrong; some are useful."
Scientific climate models have done a much better job of predicting the changes of the last couple of decades than anyone or anything else has. So you can snipe, but unless you can do better, they're still our best means of predicting what happens next.
1. Who told you the world was going to end? I call BS
2. All models are wrong, some are useful. The climate models used by climate scientists have done a much better job of predicting how the climate would evolve than anyone else's models--and any prediction or guess is based on some sort of model...usually a mental one. Saying that a given model is wrong is not useful. Developing a model that performs better is useful. Go for it. Also, I think you underestimate how well some of the models have done, and you definitely overestimate the evidence for a "hiatus." There is no statistically significant evidence that the accumulation of energy in the climate has slowed down at all.
3. BS, BS, BS. The inclusion of "that would kill us" makes your comment senseless. But even if replaced by "that would eventually cause significant problems," you're still wrong. In the 70s, a prediction about very long-term cooling got into the popular press and got some play. Virtually no-one currently working in climate science is on record as ever predicting a problem from cooling at all, and certainly not in the next few hundred years.
4. OK. Yes, it did have a lot to do with the recession. But to the extent that we can sustain it while the economy improves...great! I'm not sure how this one fits in with the point you seemed to be trying to make.
5. The "hockey stick" analysis is public, and can be reproduced with a variety of methods. It's a very robust finding. MacIntyre and McKittrick had to cherry pick a few examples from an enormous set of simulated data to imply that Mann's analysis was a statistical artifact, and subsequent studies have demonstrated over and over again, using different source material to reconstruct the temperature record, that Mann was right. Also, you clearly misunderstood what was being said in those emails, which at this point has to be considered willful ignorance since the full context has been discussed ad nauseam. And even with the original spin that the denial camp tried to put on the emails out-of-context, wtf are you talking about with the "tendency to silence any other scientists who question their findings?" I think you're inventing a narrative consistent with your pre-existing beliefs.
6. It's not clear here what you're talking about. Do you mean the climate sensitivity, usually expressed as a change in global average temperature per doubling of CO2? Because the temperature is always going to change as the inputs change, it's not like there's a cap, whether at 1-2C or any other value. And yes, even at that sensitivity (which is on the low end of the estimates I've seen, 2-4C seems more standard), we are likely to see significant problems. Not "we're all gonna die" problems, more like "there's not a Bangladesh anymore and all those people have to go somewhere" problems. Or, here in the states, "a lot of our coastal cities don't have a reliable fresh water supply anymore" problems. Not good. Also, increased drought in some areas that are already strained, increased flooding in other areas, etc.
7. No climate scientist has ever told you any of those things, so that's just a straw man. The closest you get is with the hurricane thing, but you're still completely misrepresenting anything that a climate scientist would actually say. Go look up what actual climate scientists have actually said regarding hurricanes, and if you still have a problem with it, bring that back.
Your conclusion is what needs more work. Climate scientists are constantly working to improve their models, and they already work a lot better than you seem to think. And unless you've got something that works better, they're the best information about the future of the climate we have. What would you propose basing our plans on, if not on the best source of information about the future we currently have available? And no one is trying to silence anyone, stop repeating that ridiculous crap. Saying "denial =/ skepticism" is not big brother shutting anyone up. It is countering inaccurate speech with accurate speech, which is exactly how free speech is supposed to work.
The NIPCC reports have not been ignored, they have been considered repeatedly and in detail, and thoroughly discredited. A little bit of Googling will prove my point. Even if you disagree with my assessment that these things have been "thoroughly discredited," I think you will have to admit that to claim they have been ignored is flatly false. These arguments have been taken up, and answered, repeatedly. When you ignore that fact, it's not skepticism, it's denial.
Of course science is never settled--not exactly--but the leading explanation for observed facts tends to have *earned its position*. And even when supplanted, it usually remains reasonably accurate as an approximation. Think Newtonian mechanics versus relativity. Relativity theory didn't make Newtonian mechanics stop working on the stuff for which it had already shown itself to be useful. The current mainstream scientific conceptualizations about climate response to various forcings and feedbacks is certainly open to, and in need of, further challenges and refinements. But it's extremely unlikely that any new information is going to make the big picture change very much. The new information will fill in details, shrink error bars, etc.
People modded this up and called it "insightful"?!?
The science is firmly on the side of the current and ongoing several decades-long (so far) warming trend being attributable entirely or very nearly entirely to human activity, mostly the burning of fossil fuels. Arguing that "skeptic" is the wrong term for someone who flatly denies science is not an emotional plea. I don't recall ever seeing anyone announce themselves to be "true believers." The use of "sheeple" makes me wonder if the parent comment is trolling, but either way the comment is wrong in almost every way, and anything but "insightful."
"Reported on all over the place" may be a slight exaggeration. I hadn't heard of it before the hacks either.
To be fair, I do live under a rock. (but I have internet access at work, so I think my point stands)
You think those things make Swedish (or Norwegian) law weird? It's the same in the US! Well, I don't know about the power differential thing, but the drunkenness thing is effectively the same...if you're drunk, you can't legally consent. The difficulty (or impossibility) of proving such things post-hoc, combined with lots of other good and bad reasons people often don't try to pursue rape charges, means this doesn't come up much...in practice, pretty much only when the aggressor was sober and foisting the drinks or other drugs on the victim in a rather obvious attempt to make them vulnerable. But it's still the way the law reads, at least in Florida when I was working in educational outreach at a large state university whose football team has disappointed me this year.
the first complainant, Miss A, said she was victim of "unlawful coercion" on the night of August 14 in Stockholm.
The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.
The second charge alleged Assange "sexually molested" Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used.
The third charge claimed Assange "deliberately molested" Miss A on August 18 "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity". The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on August 17 without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.
The first two could either be clear rape or nothing at all. Being held down in a sexual manner can be physical coercion, or it can be completely normal consensual sex. Not using a condom despite it being her "express wish" could be rape if consent was withdrawn, but if she said "maybe we should use a condom," but then she willingly proceeded as normal, then it was her "express wish" to use a condom, but clearly not rape if they then didn't.
I don't know what the third means, honestly.
The fourth sounds like rape unless they had some sort of prearranged agreement that it was okay for him to begin while she was asleep.
I have no idea about the validity of these charges, but count me among those who suspect the charges are being used as a political tool.
Your sig contains a malapropism - the expression is "for all intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes." Perhaps it's part of the anti-grammar joke? If so, sorry for being humorless.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a video of a person driving into some other people. The car was not "trying to park itself" nor under any other sort of autonomous control. It is speculated in TFA that the driver mistakenly thought the car would automatically stop him from ramming the people he was intentionally accelerating towards. There is further speculation about why it didn't work, including that the car may not have had that functionality installed, and that maybe it did, but even if so the way he was driving (i.e. significant acceleration) would override the pedestrian-avoidance function. Sometimes it seems like there is a faction with an agenda against self-driving cars spreading as much misinformation as possible.
2 out of 48 were under computer control when the accident occurred. That does not mean the computer systems were at fault. That just means the other two cases shouldn't even be included in the tally. It's not a self-driving car accident if a human is driving.
Right. And while I'm sure that depends in part on the operational definitions being used for "rampant," "disrespect," and "cheating," I find it plausible that the professor was the main problem. Maybe the only problem.
No, the 350m mentioned in TFA is the depth limit of the detection system they were using, not the depth of the briny aquifer. For the depth of the brine, they say it's deeper than 100 meters: "Deep (>100m) low-resistivity zones that we interpret to represent brine-bearing materials were detected throughout the lower Taylor Valley subsurface."
The "coming entitlement generation" has been on its way since at least the late 1980s when it was supposedly my cohort...and probably much, much longer. Although you can always find a few examples of entitled brats--and that's nothing new, of course--the whole "kids these days" thing appears to me to still be as much of a myth as it always has been. From https://www.insidehighered.com... : "Asked if the decision to fail every one of the 30-plus enrollees was fair to every student, Horwitz said that "a few" students had not engaged in misbehavior, and he said that those students were also the best academic performers. Horwitz said he offered to the university that he would continue to teach just those students, but was told that wasn't possible, so he felt he had no choice but to fail everyone and leave the course." "A spokesman for the university said via email that 'all accusations made by the professor about the students' behavior in class are also being investigated and disciplinary action will be taken' against students found to have behaved inappropriately. The spokesman said that one cheating allegation referenced by Horwitz has already been investigated and that a student committee cleared the student of cheating." It looks to me like the instructor had a melt-down and attempted to combine rage quitting and collective punishment. I'm sure some of the kids were a-holes, but not all of them were, by the instructor's own admission.
Germany actually pays its neighbors to take it when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining as the price of electricity between utility companies goes negative.
citation?
What constitutes an image of Muhammad? I mean, no one really knows what he looked like, right? And even if they did know, people have look-alikes...so it seems for something to be an "image of the Prophet" requires it to be labeled as such. But how far does that go? If I drew a stick figure, and wrote "Muhammad" under it, would that count? What if I drew a very detailed and accurate sketch of someone presently alive, let's say my friend Bill, but labelled it "the Prophet Muhammad," would that count? How are these things decided?
scientists might find more traction for their beliefs if they could get away from the folks who are peddling 'solutions' for AGW. You know, the activists who want to make energy so expensive that poor people will have to live in dark, cold homes, and gasoline so expensive that they have to stay in those cold, dark homes.
Find me one of these activists for cold, dark homes and hyper-expensive energy. One that's not made out of straw.
As mentioned in the article and elsewhere, in climate science like any other science, genuine skepticism is *welcome*! Strongly encouraged, even! There is no parallel here to calling someone who does not share your beliefs a "heretic." This is more a case of looking at someone who *claims* to share your beliefs (skepticism, evidence-based decision making, etc.), noticing that they're behaving in the opposite way (repeating information that has been demonstrated to be wrong, ignoring evidence, and showing extreme credulity towards ideas consistent with their preconceived notions), and suggesting that we stop calling them "one of us" (i.e., someone acting in good faith to follow the evidence wherever it leads).
Oh I see, when person A observes that person B is not making evidence-based arguments, and suggests that they not be labelled with a term that implies they are making evidence-based arguments, that's similar to person A suggesting that person B be murdered with fire, is it?
Climate models (i.e., formal models used by climate scientists) have done pretty well, actually. Better than any other means of predicting how the climate will evolve. OTOH, I've heard about how "Global Warming is BS" and that we're entering a cooling phase that's going to prove it for about a decade now; a decade that has seen the record for hottest year broken at least twice, and it looks like 2014 is going to be number three. So yeah, the models continue to need improvement, but they are the best game in town. I challenge you to find a better way to anticipate the changes in the climate over time.
For example, have we excluded the possibility of rising temperature changes are not affected by:
Yes! FFS! Yes, we have excluded those possibilities, or at least found the boundaries of the plausible effect sizes, and determined that they are not where the action is! Stop assuming that climate scientists haven't been thinking about the forces that might plausibly affect climate! That is what climate scientists do!
If CO2 had any significant effect, it would show up in the temperature record.
Which of course it does. Google "temperature CO2 graph." It's glaringly obvious, if you don't truncate the graphs to only show a few years. Or does the AC believe that if the CO2 in the atmosphere disappeared, there would be no impact? (without the greenhouse effect of CO2, the current surface temperature would be about 30C lower)
"Trend for more than a decade" = statistical and signal detection illiteracy, or attempted deception. At all time scales at which a *statistically significant trend is detectable*, the trend is exactly as would be expected given the scientific consensus as expressed by, for example, the IPCC. Which means warming at the surface, warming in the upper and middle layers of the oceans, warming in the lower atmosphere, and cooling in the stratosphere. On shorter time scales, the signal is too noisy to say anything meaningful. Also, as you either don't know or don't want others to know, there are lags of differing intervals in the temperature response to CO2, determined by the efficiency of various climate components (like the oceans) as heat-sinks. Your suggestion that you should be able to see an instantaneous and simple effect, obvious to your naked eye in the 3 charts you generated at wood for trees would suggest that you are deeply ignorant of how climate works and what climate scientists are saying is happening. However, I don't think that's the whole story. The fact that you chose the specific start dates that you did..2001 for hadcrut, 2002 for UAH, 1998 (!) for RSS...suggests that you are deliberately cherry-picking start dates to give a visual impression that your (statistically meaningless) statements are accurate. Make the plots again with the whole available data sets, and it becomes obvious that we are looking at a noisy system trending upward on a multi-decadal scale.
Hear, hear. This is exciting stuff in my book. I'm very happy Kepler is gathering data again, though still slightly frustrated that it didn't last longer with its full capabilities.
John Christy by no means represents the consensus among scientists studying climate. By all means, read his stuff. But also read Richard Muller, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf, Eric Stieg, etc. etc. etc. And also read the copious critiques of Christy's interpretations of the data. He's like a doctor promoting the idea that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Yes, you can find those people, and yes, they're actual doctors, but no, they don't represent the medical profession as a whole, and even though I'm not medically trained, I'm fairly comfortable dismissing them and going with the medical consensus. I submit that the only reason such an analogy feels exaggerated or unfair to Christy is that there's no gigantically wealthy vested interest trying to convince people that HIV is unrelated to AIDS. People like Christy get a bigger megaphone than the quality of their work and thought merits because they're saying something that some very wealthy people desperately want you to believe.
Evaluating model output is not a binary right/wrong, good/bad. No model is going to be perfect. As I have often read, and don't know to whom to attribute the quote: "all models are wrong; some are useful." Scientific climate models have done a much better job of predicting the changes of the last couple of decades than anyone or anything else has. So you can snipe, but unless you can do better, they're still our best means of predicting what happens next.
1. Who told you the world was going to end? I call BS 2. All models are wrong, some are useful. The climate models used by climate scientists have done a much better job of predicting how the climate would evolve than anyone else's models--and any prediction or guess is based on some sort of model...usually a mental one. Saying that a given model is wrong is not useful. Developing a model that performs better is useful. Go for it. Also, I think you underestimate how well some of the models have done, and you definitely overestimate the evidence for a "hiatus." There is no statistically significant evidence that the accumulation of energy in the climate has slowed down at all. 3. BS, BS, BS. The inclusion of "that would kill us" makes your comment senseless. But even if replaced by "that would eventually cause significant problems," you're still wrong. In the 70s, a prediction about very long-term cooling got into the popular press and got some play. Virtually no-one currently working in climate science is on record as ever predicting a problem from cooling at all, and certainly not in the next few hundred years. 4. OK. Yes, it did have a lot to do with the recession. But to the extent that we can sustain it while the economy improves...great! I'm not sure how this one fits in with the point you seemed to be trying to make. 5. The "hockey stick" analysis is public, and can be reproduced with a variety of methods. It's a very robust finding. MacIntyre and McKittrick had to cherry pick a few examples from an enormous set of simulated data to imply that Mann's analysis was a statistical artifact, and subsequent studies have demonstrated over and over again, using different source material to reconstruct the temperature record, that Mann was right. Also, you clearly misunderstood what was being said in those emails, which at this point has to be considered willful ignorance since the full context has been discussed ad nauseam. And even with the original spin that the denial camp tried to put on the emails out-of-context, wtf are you talking about with the "tendency to silence any other scientists who question their findings?" I think you're inventing a narrative consistent with your pre-existing beliefs. 6. It's not clear here what you're talking about. Do you mean the climate sensitivity, usually expressed as a change in global average temperature per doubling of CO2? Because the temperature is always going to change as the inputs change, it's not like there's a cap, whether at 1-2C or any other value. And yes, even at that sensitivity (which is on the low end of the estimates I've seen, 2-4C seems more standard), we are likely to see significant problems. Not "we're all gonna die" problems, more like "there's not a Bangladesh anymore and all those people have to go somewhere" problems. Or, here in the states, "a lot of our coastal cities don't have a reliable fresh water supply anymore" problems. Not good. Also, increased drought in some areas that are already strained, increased flooding in other areas, etc. 7. No climate scientist has ever told you any of those things, so that's just a straw man. The closest you get is with the hurricane thing, but you're still completely misrepresenting anything that a climate scientist would actually say. Go look up what actual climate scientists have actually said regarding hurricanes, and if you still have a problem with it, bring that back. Your conclusion is what needs more work. Climate scientists are constantly working to improve their models, and they already work a lot better than you seem to think. And unless you've got something that works better, they're the best information about the future of the climate we have. What would you propose basing our plans on, if not on the best source of information about the future we currently have available? And no one is trying to silence anyone, stop repeating that ridiculous crap. Saying "denial =/ skepticism" is not big brother shutting anyone up. It is countering inaccurate speech with accurate speech, which is exactly how free speech is supposed to work.
The NIPCC reports have not been ignored, they have been considered repeatedly and in detail, and thoroughly discredited. A little bit of Googling will prove my point. Even if you disagree with my assessment that these things have been "thoroughly discredited," I think you will have to admit that to claim they have been ignored is flatly false. These arguments have been taken up, and answered, repeatedly. When you ignore that fact, it's not skepticism, it's denial.
Of course science is never settled--not exactly--but the leading explanation for observed facts tends to have *earned its position*. And even when supplanted, it usually remains reasonably accurate as an approximation. Think Newtonian mechanics versus relativity. Relativity theory didn't make Newtonian mechanics stop working on the stuff for which it had already shown itself to be useful. The current mainstream scientific conceptualizations about climate response to various forcings and feedbacks is certainly open to, and in need of, further challenges and refinements. But it's extremely unlikely that any new information is going to make the big picture change very much. The new information will fill in details, shrink error bars, etc.
People modded this up and called it "insightful"?!? The science is firmly on the side of the current and ongoing several decades-long (so far) warming trend being attributable entirely or very nearly entirely to human activity, mostly the burning of fossil fuels. Arguing that "skeptic" is the wrong term for someone who flatly denies science is not an emotional plea. I don't recall ever seeing anyone announce themselves to be "true believers." The use of "sheeple" makes me wonder if the parent comment is trolling, but either way the comment is wrong in almost every way, and anything but "insightful."
"Reported on all over the place" may be a slight exaggeration. I hadn't heard of it before the hacks either. To be fair, I do live under a rock. (but I have internet access at work, so I think my point stands)
You think those things make Swedish (or Norwegian) law weird? It's the same in the US! Well, I don't know about the power differential thing, but the drunkenness thing is effectively the same...if you're drunk, you can't legally consent. The difficulty (or impossibility) of proving such things post-hoc, combined with lots of other good and bad reasons people often don't try to pursue rape charges, means this doesn't come up much...in practice, pretty much only when the aggressor was sober and foisting the drinks or other drugs on the victim in a rather obvious attempt to make them vulnerable. But it's still the way the law reads, at least in Florida when I was working in educational outreach at a large state university whose football team has disappointed me this year.
The first two could either be clear rape or nothing at all. Being held down in a sexual manner can be physical coercion, or it can be completely normal consensual sex. Not using a condom despite it being her "express wish" could be rape if consent was withdrawn, but if she said "maybe we should use a condom," but then she willingly proceeded as normal, then it was her "express wish" to use a condom, but clearly not rape if they then didn't. I don't know what the third means, honestly. The fourth sounds like rape unless they had some sort of prearranged agreement that it was okay for him to begin while she was asleep. I have no idea about the validity of these charges, but count me among those who suspect the charges are being used as a political tool.
Your sig contains a malapropism - the expression is "for all intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes." Perhaps it's part of the anti-grammar joke? If so, sorry for being humorless.