In general you are correct, but if you use a nice OTA they'll eat it. Case in point: Tried to take a Cambodia Air flight + hotel package I'd booked through Expedia, and when the plane broke they ... did not move expeditiously to arrange a replacement. So I took the next flight out on my own dime. Complained about that to the airline they said nope booking V class no refunds no credit doesn't matter the plane never took off. Kinda miffed. Whined to Expedia.co.th and they were like OH WHY YES FULL FLIGHT REFUND AND FIRST NIGHT OF HOTEL TOO!

So yeah, if the OTA likes you, it works. However, note they prefixed that with "We don't want to lose you as a customer, so..." That's most likely the trick here.

> - what would Twitter know about improving revenue exactly?

http://www.mopub.com

Pretty much the only noticeable Google competitor left standing up until yesterday. RIP.

> There is plenty of historic evidence of positive feedback - insolation changes alone are not sufficient to account for past changes in climate -

Not necessarily. Could just mean that actual drivers are misunderstood and/or intentionally buried. A particularly good example of the latter would be the Svensmark theories, which the CAGW alarmists refuse to engage with but just keep constantly being corroborated, why here's one that went public just the other day:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682613000862

> Its 'stability' has encompassed a very broad range of conditions, many of which would be very uncomfortable for human civilisation as we know it.

Most notably, Ice Ages. Which only started when C02 dropped below 500ppm or so; so let's get the concentration up that high at least, THEN we can talk about whether pushing it up more might be a good idea or what.

> Let's turn things around. We know that there *are* feedbacks - they are irrefutable from basic physical arguments. Are you saying that it just happens that these all balance each other out?

I don't pretend to that much insight. I'm only interested in climate voodoo^H^H^H^H^H^H science enough to have an opinion whether the state of current knowledge merits me packing my bags for Iqualit and start building beach condos in the Arctic Archipelago, or whether Haida Gwa'ii would be an appropriate choice, or staying here in Vancouver will work out fine. Which looks like the best bet so far.

> Hence, as you know, water vapour can amplify the GH effect of CO2.

An example of how the alarmists seize on every theoretical positive feedback for their models and ignore negative feedbacks which the observable long term stability of the climate demonstrates must exist, otherwise the first really big volcano eruptions would have charbroiled the planet.

For this particular case, the initial feedback is indeed positive but by actual satellite measurements turns out overall to be strongly negative due to cloud albedo effects and release of latent heat at height above the optically thick CO2/H2O layers of the atmosphere, this second of which is strongly marked in the tropics, exactly where the fantastical "tipping point" of the over the top hysterics would occur first if not for this negative feedback; and CAGW alarmism is disproved by the real world observations again.

> Who questions this and are they credible?

Can't find it again with a quick Google, sorry. The argument outline was that if C02 actually had its assumed infinite utilization of radiative capacity, the nighttime temperature profile as C02 rises would be going up faster than the overall temperature which it is not, therefore our current warm period is likelier to be related to declining cloud cover pace the Svensmark theories than it is to C02 rise. Since even the correlation is untestable without at least several more decades of accurate cloud cover measurement than the 1979-present which is actually available, I didn't bother bookmarking it. The point wasn't that this particular argument has any great chance of being correct and of magnitude enough to amount to a complete disproof of CAGW theory, it's that it not being trivially refutable demonstrates that much of this "settled science" is treated as axiomatic in the models but has no actual physical proof underlying it.

Indeed. And the biggest of those is water vapor, by an overwhelming margin.

Some even question whether there's *any* IR left over in the proper bands for C02 to make a difference. Patterns of night warmth are intriguingly suggestive of the contrary.

A good example of what I mean by innumeracy.

For purposes of driving a system response, the change is not the 40% of a particular component. The change is 0.00012, or 1.2% of 1% of the overall composition.

It is intuitively ridiculous to a numerate person that a chaotic system could possibly be so finely balanced that a 0.00012 composition change has positive feedback effects of any observable significance. If that were so, "it would have gone off the rails billions of years ago" is the common sense presumption.

Mind you, some intuitively ridiculous things are in fact true. But it's reasonably evident at this point that CAGW is not going to turn out to be one of them.

Nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic C02 will have a primary warming effect.

In exactly the same fashion that nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic H20 will raise the ocean level when I spit into it.

That the magnitude of this effect is concerning -- or even observable! -- any more in the first case than the second, that is unproven and looking less likely all the time as evidence accumulates that the solely positive feedbacks that IPCC-selected models assume are just not in accord with reality.

Any reconstruction less than Milankovitch cycle scale is cherry-picking. Your link to three decades is not qualitatively superior to the decade and a half of standstill enough to in any way merit "completely false".

For a particularly fascinating recent paper calling the hypothesis of C02 driving into question, check out:

http://www.clim-past.net/9/447/2013/cp-9-447-2013.pdf

Six identified oscillations with NO -- repeat, NO! -- parameter fitting result in an almost spooky close match to instrument records. Not a single model used in any of the IPCC reports can produce backcasting even laughably comparable to that.

And as an extra bonus, unlike the alarmists who appear to consider no actual observation whatsoever a possible falsification, which makes them priests and not scientists, you will note on page 451 that we have a very specific testable prediction of this theory, namely that temperatures have just begun to freefall in a mirror image of the 70s-90s period where why yes the slope of C02 concentration did coincide with temperature rise for a couple decades. If temperatures don't keep plummeting as this paper predicts, I'll cheerfully agree in a year or two they were clearly wrong. If the global anomaly does drop by half a degree over the next decade or so as this model implies and no CAGW supporter I am aware of admits as a possibility currently, will you agree that they've got climate drivers identified substantially correctly and the idea that 400 parts per million of something had any chance of primarily driving any positive feedback process always was as ridiculous as those of us who are numerate figured out at first glance?

Actually, no, that looks like a 9mm round or a .380 ACP. If it was a .22, then the bullet would take up rather more of the cartridge length and you'd notice the larger rim, .22 being rimfire and all.

Hmmmm ... actually, doing a quick SAAMI specs Google, I'll revise that first guess to that round most likely being a .32 S&W Short. They look pretty close to the more common calibers of my first guess, and that cartridge is only rated for 14500 PSI, which makes it a pretty compelling choice of commonly available caliber for a gun whose chamber is plastic. Still consider firing it a "great idea, you go first" kind of experience, mind you...

Yep. There's so many poverty traps in the way benefits are lost that it's basically impossible for anyone with two kids to ever make a financial case for joining the workforce without questionably high valuation of downstream wage increases. And not doing so, of course, absolutely guarantees poverty.

The immediate reaction is well scale this and scale that so that there's always marginal utility to working harder, but the patchwork of eligibilities and overlapping jurisdictions makes that darn near impossible to do adequately, and even attempting it an easily gamed bureaucratic nightmare.

Switzerland is usually a good place to look at how a society manages to reconcile libertarian ideals with communitarian practicality, and if I understand correctly the way they've squared this particular circle is that families are responsible for a person's welfare before the State steps in, and if you can assume a traditional family structure and a sense of shame in not being able to provide for yourself as is still a fairly good assumption in Switzerland, that reduces the problem down to the point where the burden on the public purse is not overly significant.

However, trying to follow that model in America would be rather problematic. If there's any sense of shame at all left in robbing your fellow citizens by means of government, it sure isn't evident anywhere.

Here in Vancouver Safeway pretty routinely has 20% off iTunes card packages, sometimes even with Air Miles 1 per $ to boot.

I've sometimes wondered how the math of $100 - $20 - ~$15 (Air Miles are a roughly 1:1 travel rewards system, so they're about 30 apiece) - $2 (the 2% cash back from the credit card I buy it with) leaves enough to cover costs on the Apple side. Certainly, anybody who thinks that "missing" 30% is all dropping straight into Apple McDuck's Money Vaults is pretty clueless about ... well, everything, really.

And as somebody mentioned above, those of us who were lucky to get 20% of retail for boxed software back in the day, plus we had to make the damn boxes and ship them, really don't have the time of day for any whiny kid bitching how hard dealing with Apple is these days.

"cherry picked parts"

Errrrrrrr .... which part of "longest" is unclear to you?

For an accusation of "cherry picking" to not be nonsensical, there needs to be more than one cherry to pick from, my not so clever friend.

> How about a link to that dataset

Why, yes. Yes, my not so clever friend, I can certainly help you there.

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=CET+temperature+record

Nope; the CET temperature record, our longest instrumental record, shows that the beginning of the 1700s had a steeper slope than the last couple decades. So even that position doesn't hold up soundly. We're somewhat unusually higher than the 350-year trendline right now yes, but that'll have to continue for another 18 years and top the ending in 1730ish warming cycle before unprecedented in magnitude and length is a true statement.

Well, that's it for this exchange.

"Instrumental measurements of the Sun alone already tell us that solar changes don't line up with the recent period of warming."

Anyone who claims this is either

A) Unaware of the Svensmark theories and the support the CLOUD experiments provide, which makes them not worth engaging because of their demonstrated ignorance of the field; or

B) Denying actual, physical, science in favor of unfalsifiable theory; which makes them not worth engaging because they are actively attempting deceit.

For those who wish to follow up and make their own decisions on this or the other issues mentioned, wattsupwiththat.com is a decent source to find discussion of a wide variety of contrarian issues and positions that the government-dependent cliques attempt to deny.

Both reproduce just fine on land as well as ice. That we think of them as ice breeding now is due to mankind's predation. See Farley Mowat's 'Sea of Slaughter' for a good rundown on how it's us that pushed their remnants into the areas we think of as native today.

The correct scale on which to consider the evolution of their Arctic adaptations in general is the 2.58 million years since the current Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation started. Which puts us in the only about 27% or so of geological record in which there's been permanent ice at the poles. Just to put this global warming hysteria over a handful of degrees into a proper context.