Is global warming real?

[bdk]

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb


U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007

Senate Report Debunks "Consensus"

Complete U.S. Senate Report Now Available: (LINK)
Complete Report w/out Intro: (LINK)

INTRODUCTION:

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

[tom d. friedman]

they say that flatulence (tooting, farting, letting it rip, etc,) contributes to global warming as well as as other fumes & exhaust. i say we all stop farting

[T2 Ernie]

There are, approximately, six billion (six followed by nine zeros) people in the world.

The smallest state in the USA is Rhode Island - with 1212 square miles according to my American Map road atlas.

With 640 acres per square mile, R.I. contains 775,680 acres (1212 x 640)

Multiply the 775,680 acres times the 43,560 square feet in each acre, and you come up with a total of 33,788,620,800 square feet of land in the State of Rhode Island.

Divide the square footage in the State of Rhode Island by the world population of 6,000,000,000 and you come up with 5.63 square feet - a little over 5.5 square feet-per-person.


So.....

.....if you were to place every single man, woman and child in the world on a 5.5 square foot piece of land (2-by-2.75 feet) the entire world population would fit within the borders of Rhode Island.

The tree-huggers would have you believe that a footprint the size of Rhode Island is, somehow, causing the entire earth to warm.

They also seem to believe that the warming process following the ice age - that eliminated the glaciers that covered what is now the USA - was, somehow, programmed to stop at a certain point.....

[Canberra Man]

Yes, Global Warming? a very big query. Gordon Brown, the follow on from Bliar, has slapped surcharges on long flights. More money for his coffers. Lets look at the facts. I think the last throws of the Ice Age were still receding in the middle ages, 14th to 17th centuries, I say this because the River Thames was still freezing over and fairs were held on it, also the coastal seas were freezing in the hard winters of those days. The last real hard winter in the UK was 1947, a few short hard winter now and then but few and far between. In the 18th Century we were getting warmer and what is happening, is that we are heading into a weather situation where in a few hundred years time, the world will heading into a situation where the North and South temperate zones will become semi tropical. This will last, as it has done for the last fifty million or so years. Then whole system will reverse and we will be heading into the next ice age. We ourselves are not, repeat not causing Global Warming. It is a situation that has been going on ever since the Earth matured.

[bdk]

The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."

But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.

http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.asp ... 9412587175

[bdk]

A Bad Week for Alt-Vehicles: Plug-In Hybrids Could Pollute More, Ethanol Fires Harder to Put Out

http://www.thecarconnection.com/blog/?p=845&srccd=de20080229

It’s not been a great week for alternative fuels and plug-in hybrids.

While the world pretty much knows the consequences of Big Oil–stagflation, geopolitical instability, and a yet-to-be-determined effect on the environment–the world of ethanol and plug-in electric power could be worse in some ways, dueling reports suggest.

Our Cargirl already discussed how the state of the art in E85, corn-based fuel, is an ecological problem. Ethanol, it turns out, is also problematic when it comes to vehicle fires. FoxNews reports that water can’t be used to put out ethanol flames, and that the foaming agent used to put out gasoline fires is ineffective for ethanol fires. Fire departments don’t always stock the ethanol foam, and it’s more expensive to boot. Cars and trucks, though, aren’t the major concern here–it’s the trucks that transport the fuel around the country that could be the problem.

When it comes to plug-in hybrids, it’s worse news. Plug-ins might actually boost air pollution over gas-powered cars, USA Today reports, just as automakers are pushing forward with plans for plug-ins like the Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius. Two reports suggest that tailpipe emissions could be more than offset by the higher emissions from power plants generating the electricity required to recharge the plug-in hybrids, particularly in areas where coal-burning plants are the norm. Plug-ins could boost the levels of sulfur dioxide in the air; SO2 isn’t produced as much by cars as it is by power plants.

Alternative fuels have a role to play, experts say, but none is an ideal choice. Other choices for plug-in power–such as wind–depend on somewhat unpredictable natural effects. Nuclear power could resolve some of the problem - but the newest nuclear reactor built in America was finished in 1996. As for E85, the future seems to lie in switchgrass and biomass waste as the source of fuel, but no company’s been able to execute on them yet.

We’re in an era of experiments, and likely will be for a couple of decades. The questions around E85 and plug-ins likely won’t be resolved without major technological leaps-which makes it as uncertain as ever that plug-ins and alternative-fuel vehicles are the next big thing.

[CH2Tdriver]

"AND UP NEXT...YOUR LOCAL FORECAST"...

Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'
TWC founder and global warming skeptic advocates suing Al Gore to expose 'the fraud of global warming.'

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/5/2008 9:00:18 AM
The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.
Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”

The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the “scare” of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.

[bdk]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,337710,00.html

The founder of the Weather Channel wants to sue Al Gore for fraud, hoping a legal debate will settle the global-warming debate once and for all.

[rwdfresno]

It looks like the scientists are scrambling to find out why their data doesn't support their hypothesis. It is always interesting when groups set out on discoveries with a predetermined answer already in their mind. It is obvious that these studies didn't give them the information they are looking for so they come up with reasons why the data isn't accurate or they bend the hypothesis to fit the data.

NPR - Morning Edition, March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

[muddyboots]

I notice you're using hypothesis. you're using it incorrectly, I'm afraid.

A hypothesis (from Greek ὑðüèåóéò) consists either of a suggested explanation for a phenomenon or of a reasoned proposal suggesting a possible correlation between multiple phenomena. The term derives from the Greek, hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose." The scientific method requires that one can test a scientific hypothesis. Scientists generally base such hypotheses on previous observations or on extensions of scientific theories. Even though the words "hypothesis" and "theory" are often used synonymously in common and informal usage, a scientific hypothesis is not the same as a scientific theory.

Global Warming is being and has been tested and in many cases that testing has proved posotive. That there are oddities to the THEORY of Global Warming doesn't make it any less a theory. It just means the THEORY is not yet a law.

Just nitpicking, but the differe4nce is vast, and anti Global Warming folks often use the word hypothesis to denegrate what is in fact, far higher on the scale of credibility. Using the word theory gives the theory a validity they don't want to "give up" if you see what I mean.

I tend to go with the crowd, when it comes to science. Call me simple minded but I'm like that.

These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.[

wikipedia

BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER:
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes*
Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

References and Notes


A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June 2003, A1.
S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies, Climate Policy 2 (1), 3 (2003).
See www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm.
J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001).
American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 508 (2003).
American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
See www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/atmos02.html.
The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put "climate change" in their key words, the paper was not about climate change.
This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton Memorial Lecture, "Consensus in science: How do we know we're not wrong," presented at the AAAS meeting on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and the History of Science Society for their support of this lectureship; to my research assistants S. Luis and G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming, M. T. Greene, H. Leifert, and R. C. J. Somerville for helpful discussions.
10.1126/science.1103618

[T2 Ernie]

I notice you're using hypothesis. you're using it incorrectly, I'm afraid.

I don't think so.

As mentioned, a hypothesis is lower on the credibility scale than a theory. I put global warming in the category of alarmist tosh, so view it more as a hypothesis than a theory.

'twould seem a bit subjective as to which category you place it, but the emotion of the words tends to dictate who uses which word when.

Semantics aside, there is voluminous data on the global climate (notice I did not add the word 'change'). We all know statistics can be manipulated to show darn near anything.

There are record highs every year, just as there are record lows. The existence of record lows no more proves we're headed toward an ice age than the existence of record highs is indicative of global climate catastrophy.

I do find it interesting how this particular piece of raw data is being 'spun' though...

[muddyboots]

Ernie, I am not debating semantics here. It is and has been tested and borne out. Therefore it is a theory. Many theories are overturned after testing and this one may well be.

However a hypothesis is UNTESTED. Global warming has been tested. It's a theory. A hypothesis isn't just lower on the crdibility scale, it has NO credibility. For better or worse, a tested hypothesis becomes a theory until proven wrong or made a law of science.
Global warming may not be valid, but under ANY criteria any true scientist would call it a theory, not a hypothesis. The only people who demand to abuse the terminology seem to be those who don't really have either scientific training or who have an agenda. The rest of us simply want to use the word in it's true meaning: a hypothesis that is testable and has been.

I'm not trying to be petty or mean, It's just that the words are actually important. I have a hypothesis that Americans came from both Europe AND Asia. Those who came from Asia came from both the north (hunting along the ice via boat not across the bering straight) and from the south (across the pacific. THis is a hypothesis because I am unable to test it--the land where the boats would have been abandonded is now under water due to--you guessed it--global warming. the sea level has risen so much that the old beaches are under water. Any evidence which might support my hypothesis is under a couple of hundred feet of salt water. Alas, my hypothesis will remain so until I find a way of freezing all that water and thus lowering sea levels so I can do my research lol!

I vote we all hold our bretah and quit farting so the methane levels drop. Maybe it'll kick off a new ice age...

You may have noted elsewhere that I believe in global warming, that I do NOT believe it is anything horrendously abnormal, and that we may very well have not done it (Lots of natural causes for what's going on including "just because" But I do believe the temperature fluctuates and is rising right now. As do the VAST majority of world scientists. Why this is happening is the real debate, and can and should we do anything.


btw, my hypothesis is based on some empirical evidence. European technology appeared in North America a while back before they were upposed to be here. How did it et here, and why did it disappear, and why two thousand years later dod similar technology reappear? And why are there so many truly ancient remains being found almost simultaneaously in South America wit hthat found in North America? The oldest we've found so far has been definitively dated at 14K back, on the Channel Islands in California. That's midway between the two paths I mentioned. It seems strange that we got here 14K years ago, and suddenly appeared in South America AND California at the same time, almost at the same time we got here from the nrotherly route. Also, genetically, there seem to be similarities between the southern populations and northern populations ancetry, but the break in DNA seems to go back FARTHER than 14K years. I think global temperature changes make my hypothesis likely, but untestable. poor little me. There goes my doctrate.

[bdk]

I tend to go with the crowd, when it comes to science. Call me simple minded but I'm like that.

These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.[

wikipedia

You are waaaaay funny! In this post you quote Wikipedia of all things as a factual source (a source where the true author and their potential biases are undisclosed), and in another post you chastise me for not identifying an opinion piece's source as being from a libertarian organization.

[muddyboots]

that's because I, being an undisputed authority on everything from Bra size to astrophysics, don't need to attribute what I post

Or it could be I forgot
I really wasn't chastizing you, dude. I just thought it was interesting where you got that piece--I started clicking on links from that site and had a lot of fun reading their pieces, so I thought I would put it in.

You'll notice that that wikipedia actually attributed and linked pretty much all of their factoids. Which your article failed to do *sticks tongue out*. I'd trust that wiki article's factuality before your posts', because I can click its links to read them. In your article's case, I have to take it on faith that they are telling the truth or not presenting partial or distorted facts in order to make their point, and being an opinion piece, it would be nice if thier "facts" were verifiable without doing a massive internet search.

I admit that I failed to attribute that to wikipedia- you'll catch me a lot on that, I think. Mostly cause I am a spaz. You, on the other hand, are expected to be perfcect in all ways at all times. Therefore I can be excused and you must be horsewhipped.

[bdk]

I think I understand now!