http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2003/oct03/noaa03-131.html

The oceans aren't just a major player, they are pretty much the only player you have to worry about.

Maybe I am going in the direction of disputing man made global warming, but as you said, I would find very few people who would bother to argue with me. Most people are just so sure that the debate is over, because Al Gore said it was. Thus negating any reason to even raise questions about the validity of computer generated models that can't account for even a fraction of the actual variables at play, why we can't explain what caused the various global shifts in climate that occurred over the millions of years without dipping into a grab bag of vagaries and probablys, why the "science" behind the theory of AGW is so easily and readily attacked (gasp, could it be that we don't yet fully understand how massive scale atmospheres like the Earth really work at the end of the day??)

The more I read about this the more disgusted I get.
Why do you call these things "carbon credits" in the first place, when really you are asking people to invest in a green friendly infrastructure, one that will surely make a lot of money seeing as these people are donating freely to it?

Why is there no return on this investment, other than getting to feel good about no longer having a "guilty" conscience? Why is giving you money for free any better than giving the homeless and needy people on the streets money? Surely they need it more than you do.

And lastly, the elephant in the room that hasn't been pointed out yet, which is, how can you, or anyone at all, with a basic grasp of science, think that any of these measures is going to have a noticeable effect on the climate? We are infinitesimal in our overall output of CO2, compared to something like the ocean.. Maybe I should start a website to start evaporating the ocean? Send me free money so I can buy expensive equipment to evaporate the ocean people. You can feel good about the "credits" you are saving. All sales are final.

@22: Yes, Alex, what exactly is your overhead, and whats your argument against the idea that this whole venture is misguided and asinine?

Several people have already brought up the seemingly rock solid counter-argument, that such money would be vastly better invested in green friendly transportation. How is an 'offset' a better investment than a carbon friendly change of lifestyle?

Please, oh PLEASE, respond to these questions Alex. I'm so poorly informed and I just can't fathom how it could be a good idea to throw my money into a carbon toilet, I just NEED TO GET INFORMED. FOR THE LOVE OF PETE HELP ME ALEX!

BART, YOU WANNA SEE MY NEW CHAINSAW AND HOCKEY MASK?

Here's another tip that works great! You can use your mouse to highlight things by pressing the left mouse button and dragging it across text!

Man, talk about a buzz kill. "THEY'RE SHOOTING AT USss" Name that movie.

This story is very personal for me because I too rescued a turtle, one who had lost the use of all his legs. We replaced his legs with RC Car tires and mounted a motor to the top of his shell, one that responded to the upwards and downwards movement of his head by a series of wires and levers (for steering left and right). It was quite a sight to see him fly past at 30 mph, chasing the neighborhood kids around. We set up a few ramps after he showed a predilection for jumping off things, and he would spend hours hurtling himself like a little turtle superman into various piles of leaves and whatnot.

Fair play.. I thought it was computer generated. I still hated the look of it, immensely. Funnily enough I don't hate this..

how is that "inside out"? its just a spiral staircase, enclosed..

Its neat to look at.. that one movie Waking Life users the same concept only a worse filter imo. They should have used something more like this for that movie..

The belief that "this statement is false" is paradoxical depends on a false belief about statements, truth and falsity, for example.

Correct. The statement "This statement is false." is really, at heart, a nonsensical statement. It makes no attempt at assigning the value of truthiness of falseness to anything. It would be like saying "All statements are orange." Statements of what? Its not a paradox, or a statement, just a jumble of words. The case in question is even less clever if you think about it because at some point we have to believe that delusion and mental illness are independent of one another, and could not coexist. The whole thing smacks of brain teaser.

"Comments
Romeo Vitelli says:

Was the patient's name Yossarian? Just asking."

Hahaha.. Seriously.

As a friend of elephants, I too have to post something in their defense. I had Binky (a 24 year old Asian male elephant) sit down with me and post his thoughts on the issues of Elephant art, elephant mistreatment, and a few other things. Here's what he wrote:

*&OOKKLJJTTYGT^Y&YHHIGYUTI&^YUIJIKLLKMLKMJUTR^%$%#$$#R%TYYUGGH

Vitamin poisoning is very real and very dangerous. Is anyone interested in evolution? Should it be a surprise that what we need is about what we can get by eating what we have near us every day? Overdosing your body on supplements has various known side effects, not a few of which are lethal if prolonged stressing of whatever metabolic pathways are involved is kept up.

There really isn't definitive science out there that can explain the pathway of a vitamin and how and where it is fully absorbed or used.. how it became popular to overdose the body with these substances is beyond me.

W lv n wrld whr ld ppl sy wrds lk 'wrbrds' whn lvngly rfrrng t plns tht drppd mllns f bmbs n ppl kllng nd mmng thm nd thnk tht jt ngns r 'fncy vccm clnrs'

Srry, tht ws my nnr tngr cmng t. cn't ndrstnd rmntczng wpns ftr th g f, whnvr y stp plyng wth G J. Sm ppl pprntly nvr stp.

I think we are all missing the bigger issue here, which is, holy shit, he actually HIT the damn thing from 75 yards? This guy is the next Tiger Woods if he has that kind of control. Someone sponsor this genius of golf... But seriously, hawks make noise? I know eagles kind of scream or whatever but I grew up in the midwest and I never once heard a hawk cry. This is what it sounds like when hawks get hit by golf balls.

Darth, Luke, Bono is your father. (wtf)

Next thing you know Monster cables will be telling you that CO2 is indisputably the cause of global temperature fluctuations.

Wrong. Nobody can stop them, but there sure as hell is enough first world power going around to slow things down. If you look at Rwanda it was a situation that was arguably a result of Imperialism. Israel and Palestine coexist under a threat of terror, but armed forces prevent all out war. The same level of presence could have been installed in Rwanda to break up the Hutu and Tutsi fighting, and saved lives. Is saving lives ever a bad thing?

"That wasn't chicken"

hehe i love that one, to this day.

Maybe its just me but I'm getting really bored with goatse references. It was funny when it was an inadvertent Time cover but now I'M OVER IT.

This reminds me of hiking in Griffith park in Los Angeles, in the lesser known western part no less, and the explosion of invectives I unleashed at finding that someone had 'tagged' a rock that was a good 2 miles up on a formidable climbing trail. Its hard to put into words just how angry seeing someone's shitty little tag scrawl made me, but it was pretty much the exact opposite of what I wanted to see after hiking the hell away from the noise/pollution of the city.

What I can't grasp is how someone could think that this was a good place for their pathetic little non-statement in the world. As if we'd stop and say, "oh shit, RoSCoX was here?" and then briefly pause to imagine how badass he or she must be, for climbing all the way up the same trail that hundreds of other people do on the weekend.

We have that same duvet cover. Its nice.

Link contains extraneous slash. Also, how is this different from hiding a small shuttle case in the table? Saves you drilling all those holes..

Ace of Cakes anyone? Come on Bravo, thats just sad.

Born, lived, exhaled, recursed, trepidation and?

Meh. It's been done before, and better.

A reduction in the sea ice season does not equal having no land. Case in point the study posted by #27, where the researcher states that the polar bears are adapting and *gasp* coming across humans more often. If the polar bears start eating people as an adaptation to losing their traditional hunting methods, do you then start to make judgments about who is more important? Or does the guilt from the Green doctrine that humans are the unequivocal cause of global warming cancel that out. Taking one for the polar bear team so to speak.

Aside from the fact that global warming is probably independently happening regardless of human influence, as it has in the past and will in the future, and aside from that fact being brushed aside by eco-fascists as if there were zero room for skepticism, don't you at least think that maybe, just maybe, there are bigger problems on the plate of the world?

Poor Michael Griffin (the head of that beloved spouter of tipping point tripe, NASA) dared to raise the same question and was nearly sent to the firing line for it. He nearly lost his job, his credibility, his life, for saying that he's not 100% sold on the idea that humans MUST do something about global warming.

And also, quite noticeably, takes up a HELLUVA lot of space in the middle of the room. I wonder if theres a valve to stop it filling with ice water in the winter?

#22, Right. Show me any reports that say they are in danger of having no land. All the global warming hysteria is based on their natural 'ice bridges' going away and their not being able to adapt, supposedly. Plenty of evidence to the contrary however.

@23,

Putting the worlds problems in a ranked, definitive list is actually a pretty easy task. If one follows the outrageous presumption that people, and I'm assuming you are one, are more important than bears, you've made a good start imHo.

If only we could convince ourselves we were saving the world by buying expensive things that use less resources.

"Boats float, polar bears don't" au contraire, mofraire. Polar bears are quite adept little swimmers. It pains me to see attention given to this guy for wasting time and money on such a pointless non-issue. I want to give him a sign to hold up that reads "Humans of the Earth: DON'T WORRY - WE POLAR BEARS ARE FINE - But your people in Darfur are not, nor even the people sleeping on the street near me. Look after them first!"

Its always amusing to read the comments that invariably pop-up whenever there's a story about scientists who have done something "trivial" in the eyes of the general population. As if all scientists work in one huge laboratory in the Pentagon and occasionally a group will sneak off from the main group working on cancer and AIDS and start messing with onions.

Far less amusing is reading the comments that seem to stem from a profound misunderstanding about what genetic engineering actually entails. These scientists changed the expression of one gene, which means that your final onion is just as "naturally" intact as any other onion, sans one gene. Changing one gene is, in my eyes, a lot safer than breeding the plant over and over hoping to disinherit the gene by mutation.

As a friend of elephants, I too have to post something in their defense. I had Binky (a 24 year old Asian male elephant) sit down with me and post his thoughts on the issues of Elephant art, elephant mistreatment, and a few other things. Here's what he wrote:

*&OOKKLJJTTYGT^Y&YHHIGYUTI&^YUIJIKLLKMLKMJUTR^%$%#$$#R%TYYUGGH