When you have a stupid pie-in-the-sky story promoted by an eco-loon uber-troll like Greg Laden and posted by Samzenpus you know you'll get #cuethedeniers and a lot of hippy tree-hugging shit from people who can't math.

That's why Slashdot is dying, because the people who could have argued and actually known what the engineering and economics of solar power and renewables only happens because of massive Government subsidies which are paid for by taxes on the poor, have left never to return.

Slashdot banned the diversity of its audience and now has only an echo-chamber left who don't know about Greg Laden's reputation as an troll and his support for any whackjob sciencey-fictional non-technology is well known and solidly debunked in the hard scientific literature (by which I don't mean Science Mag).

It is rumoured that when an African country changed the road rules from driving on the left to driving on the right, the Minister for Transport was asked when this change was going to take place, he replied "Gradually"

Now with IPv6 being around (I believe that Facebook has gone completely IPv6 internally) why are we still on IPv4? Because we can get everything on the Internet by staying on IPv4.

If that wasn't the case, people would demand IPv6 and countries would transition virtually overnight.

The predictions are bunk. Already climate models have no predictive power whatsoever.

"Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century"

Untrue. It was hypothesized by Arrhenius but then Robert Wood showed that greenhouses do not warm because of the "greenhouse effect"

"If it is, and we know it is, then it means that increasing CO2 levels = less energy leaving the earth."

Bunk. Even if CO2 worked the way you think, the effect would be logarithmic, not linear. In any case, studies of ice cores have shown consistently that CO2 enrichment is a centuries delayed response to climate warming, never preceding that warming.

"Well there you go - either prove that the ENTIRETY of chemistry is bunk, or disprove thermodynamics and conservation of energy"

Untrue. Your poor grasp of science is not an excuse for anyone else to believe it. Despite CO2 rising during the 20th and early 21st Century, temperatures have risen, fallen, risen and now stabilized for more than 18 years.

"And besides - all that stuff you said are lies, told to you by professional liars - the SAME professional liars who spent years telling you smoking was healthy and lead in the air was both natural and harmless"

Again, hyperbolic nonsense. But why let facts get in the way of your millenarian beliefs?

Unfortunately they use the altered versions which turn cooling trends into warming trends. So no, they don't.

Dear AC,

Thank you for posting your concerns.

But perhaps you'd like to tell us what a "harasser" is, because at the moment this appears to be "anyone who doesn't agree with me, mocks me or quotes facts which contradict my beliefs"

Yours sincerely

The rest of the Internet

Highlander 2 Highlander 2 Highlander 2

That's all I'm saying

Highlander 2

Now that's out of my Highlander 2 system I can look Highlander 2 forward to this new movie.

Highlander 2

If the US wants pharma to develop new classes of antibiotics then the simplest method is to extend the patent from 20 to 30 years **providing that the drug qualifies as an antibiotic**.

This has the effect of a) incentivising pharma to spend on research in these classes of drugs and b) discouraging widespread abuse by disallowing generic implementations for at least a generation.

Job done! Next?

I always thought that it was because of his skin color.

But I always regarded the Nobel Peace Prize as an expensive joke anyway.

Reasons.

Sadly not true. The fashion for some scientists to make names for themselves by producing misleading headlines for their supposed evidence has yet to fizzle.

Was 2014 the warmest it has ever been globally? No.

The satellite records (either one) show no special warmth for 2014 and the BEST record shows no statistical significance to the claim that 2014 was the hottest. Why? Because the tiny increase was well within the error bars of the mean temperature statistic

Has the global warming hiatus ended? No. Do the climate models reflect this? No.

That said, should Congress be making such a determination? No it shouldn't. But what this Congress is certain to do is cut the funding of climate change to the bone. Then we'll see how much was real and how much was money-powered hype.

Malaria is not a warm weather dependent disease. England in the 16th Century had malarial marshes (in the middle of the Little Ice Age) and the largest malarial outbreak of the 20th Century occurred in Arctic circle Russia.

The real vector of malaria is poor sanitation, which in turn is a function of poverty and lack of economic development.

Crap. The fact is that Wikipedia has demonstrated conclusively that trolls can get organized and can swamp legitimate scholarship in order to promote bullshit theories and rewrite history.

This is how evolution by natural selection actually works. Yes 'out-thinking' is too strong a word.

When civilization collapses, everyone who has a typewriter will be looked on with awe and envy.