"wiped out a decade of global warming" is scientifically preposterous. I'll let NASA explain why the putatively devastating chart (even the Hadley Center says it was misused) circulating in the clogged Turkish Toilet of the blogosphere does not erase "a decade of global warming."

The past year (2007) witnessed a transition from a weak El Nino to a strong La Nina (the latter is perhaps beginning to moderate already, as the ocean waters near Peru are beginning to warm). January 2007 was the warmest January in the period of instrumental data in the GISS analysis, while, as shown in Figure 1, October 2007 was # 5 warmest, November 2007 was #8 warmest, December 2007 was #8 warmest, and January 2008 was #40 warmest. Undoubtedly, the cooling trend through the year was due to the strengthening La Nina, and the unusual coolness in January was aided by a winter weather fluctuation.

See the review of Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494

Dyson reviews, "A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies" by William Nordhaus, an economist who compares several climate change policies using a model called DICE (Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy). The optimal policy "...judged by Nordhaus to be the most cost-effective, with a worldwide tax on carbon emissions adjusted each year to give the maximum aggregate economic gain [3 trillion USD by 2100]."

The optimal policy, according to the DICE model, is contrasted with doing nothing, with a cost in environmental damage of $23 trillion; following the Kyoto Protocol will net $1 trillion with US participation and $0 otherwise; the Gore policy has a cost of $21 trillion. See the article for the rest.

You don't have to be a climate change naysayer to take issue with some of the economic proposals being offered.

Jesus would have the internet do unto conservatives as they do unto others: repeat lies until they stick. It's good to see fellow hackers at work. The Internet is an arena where the conservative invincible ignorance of science and technology is a severe liability. I hope that hackers will be inspired by the use of click-bots to highlight the Conservapedia user obsession with homosexuality, which we must take as fact, as it will be repeated indefinitely,

Speaking of conservatives, McCain's supporters are not as sophisticated--the number of talented hackers among them must be vanishingly small. The McCain campaign surely merits a response from the hacker community--in whatever form that might take. They know what to do.

Reading the exchange between Shafly and Lenski was almost unbearable: Shafly doesn't possess the merest fraction of Lenski's intellectual horsepower. How awful for Shafly to limp along with such contempt for a natural world he cannot hope to understand, and for the kind of research that might one day release him and others like him from lives of stunted cognitive ability and obdurate ignorance.

The name Schlafly, indelibly associated with incoherent nonsense is on that account forgettable--remembering dead ends serves little value. The name Lenski does not suffer from this burden.

I attempted to provide an example of one federally funded high-performance computing facility, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, which is undertaking climate research. Some of it is classified: you need government clearance to work on it. And the facility is under the operational control of Raytheon, a defense contractor. The glaring evidence of the ongoing investment of millions of tax dollars on the science of global warming, a matter of strategic interest to the United States, was passed over without comment. But what do you possibly say if you're a conservative global warming naysayer. Not supporting the Pentagon would be unpatriotic.

The conservatives who don't believe that C02 levels are rising wouldn't be satisfied even if the sun were to engulf the earth, which it will, eventually. It's a waste of increasingly expensive energy to argue with them. Let them argue with the weather.

My technique for handing controversial questions like dual loyalty is to abide by the following principle: if the rhetoric surrounding an issue is ugly and partisan, I will refuse to consider it for the purpose of casting a vote. Right or wrong, if there is confusing or threatening rhetoric surrounding an issue, it WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED: IT WILL BE IGNORED. I hope that others will adopt the same policy.

In October 2007, Bush threatened, "If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it'd be a dangerous threat to world peace. So I told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested" in ensuring Iran not gain the capacity to develop such weapons." Speaking as if World War III were winnable is insane.

Agitators for military intervention in Iran, should they succeed, will likely precipitate a terminal nuclear war. Avoiding this ought to take precedence of any question of dual loyalty, which, as I mentioned previously, is so fraught with malignantly unaesthetic rhetoric that it should not enter into any decision to act one way or the other, except to avoid the subject altogether.