"If you want to stop global warming, then tape up Al Gore's mouth! And tape up my mouth And your mouth!! I am an angry four-year-old! Because Scientific American is a LIBRUL INSTYTOOSHUN, so it is biased against Jesus and wants you to abort your babies. So be Pro-Life! Drive an SUV and remember that anything that makes you feel good...is good."

"Also, the Earth is flat. And all my comments got deleted because SALON is a huge conspiracy! My last four comments had information about who shot JFK, but you'll never know because you are all poopy-heads for believing this horrible stuff you call 'science.' I'll have you know, scientists everywhere think the earth is too cold for people to live on currently. So everyone inhale a lot but don't exhale, or exhale but don't inhale, and stop farting (ha ha! farting! hahahaha! farting! it makes methane, which is a GREENHOWSE GAS!)(ha ha! I said "farting" a whole bunch of times!)."

"And furthermore your side only has 600 people on it, but mine has hundreds of millions of thousands of billions! So you lose. AGAIN."

"Now shut up Momocat shut up shut up shutupshutupshutup Ican'thearyou lalalalalalalala okay. whew. Stupid good points. Instead I will be racist about Obama instead. INSTEAD! OBAMA is stupid and I don't hate him because he's black! No. He will just make everyone broke and on welfare. Did you know that a lot of black people grow up on welfare? It's true. But you'll never read about that in Salon."

"YOU ARE ALL DENIERS! YOU DENY AND YOU DENY AND YOU DENY. That's what you are. You want global warming to be real so bad that you deny that we deny that I deny that you deny that it ever even happens."

"Your research is hand-picked by 600 of your friends on Facebook. Well, duh! Stupid Facebook and Myspace computer modeling. Of course your friends will say that global warming is happening right now. That's obvious as a fart in a crowded hot (but not globally-warmed) room! You and your friends are dumb. But my friends are smart. And now there are eleventeen gajillion of us, and not hundreds of millions of thousands of billions. There are one billion googol trillion. So there!"

"Earth has been around for 5000 years before we got here, and it will be around for three dozen more when we Jesus beams us up to heaven. So it doesn't even matter. We are like ants, except I don't like ants. We're like...moles. Only above ground. Or maybe kitties. We're like kitties, but we have thumbs and we can drive cars. That's it."

"Soft. Soft soft kitties. We like milk."

"Wait. Where was I? Oh yeah. If you're so smart and environmentally conscious, WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THE INTERWEBS?! Why do you waste your incredibly inefficient energies on your computer when you could be out pedalling a jumbo jet across the sky, you fascist? Go away and stop trying to refute things! I hate you I hate you I hate you aaaaaaaargh!"

Well, then you should go ahead and officially consider yourself a liberal now.

@rocket999

Why are motorcycles so loud, and why is that legal?

First, a quick lesson. Stock motorcycles do comply with noise and emissions regulations. Aftermarket pipes may drastically alter both of those qualities of a bike, and have other effects, too. So make sure your ire is directed in the right place: it's not the motorcycle manufacturers--for the most part--who make their bikes loud.

I'm not going to create an artificial divide between cruiser riders and sportbike riders in this arena. The issue applies equally to us both, though I suspect there's a measure of "we're not so bad, it's those fools' fault" in both camps.

As a motorcycle rider myself, I can sympathize with your complaint (and I tend to leave my bike in mostly stock form). From our perspective (not mine, but collectively, many motorcycle riders feel this way) loud pipes keep us safe. If you ride a motorcycle for even a day, you're sure to be cut off at least once by some cage-driving, newspaper-reading, mascara-applying, cell-phone yappin' idiot who's not paying attention at all to his or her surroundings.

To my knowledge, there have been no studies about whether loud pipes actually save lives or not. My gut tells me not so much, since another reason to put loud pipes on a street bike is to increase the performance by upping the available torque or horsepower. I'm sure that most riders are their own worst enemies, so any "safety" gained by making car drivers aware of you is no doubt offset by the risks of driving a faster bike.

There's another hidden motivation here, and this one is more globally applicable to the noise-pollution issue at large. That's the fact that one person's noise is another person's music. Take the loud pipes on a motorcycle. Quite a few people (the bike owner and his peers, for starters) think that the sound of their bike is melodious. Ask any Ducati owner about how they feel when they wind up their 1098R. You'll get answers like, "soul-stirring," "awe-inspiring," "sexy as hell." I've heard all those myself personally.

So yeah, they're loud. And motorcyclists probably don't make any friends for themselves by putting aftermarket pipes on their bikes. But this seems to be an area where some study, and also advances in technology, could help everyone. There are soon going to be all-electric motorcycles hitting the market, and hybrid bikes, too. When you factor in the lawsuits by the blind people getting hit by Priuses creeping up on them, this starts to make a little more sense, and helps illustrate how a certain amount of sound is a good thing for the general public.

Interesting times!