There is too much political bickering and name-calling on this topic so lets try to have a reasoned discussion. I'll post a detailed line of reasoning and you tell me at which point you disagree. I'll number them, so say where in the chain of reasoning and assumptions you disagree.
To reduce the shouting about reliable sources only wikipedia is going to be accepted for this discussion since we can all agree it's unreliable.

1. First step, forget everything and who is to blame and conspiracies so forth.
   
2. Let's assume climate indeed changes over time. There seems to be a lot of evidence for this in terms of ice-ages and other cycles over very long periods of time, since well before humans existed. The entire field of Paleoclimatology is based around this. You can see it used to be a lot colder and warmer in the past so let's assume that it can still change.
   
3. Further lets assume that climate affects us in various major ways, such as what crops grow well, the likelihood of storms, and so forth. Of course wikipedia has an article on it.
   
4. From the above it follows that there is a certain ideal climate that would be 'best'.
   
5. We should in theory be able to engineer the climate in various ways.
   
6. Thermodynamics tells us that there are ultimately only 4 modes of Heat Transfer, and since our planet is inside a vaccum (space) the only three ways to change the total entropy (heat) of the planet is incoming radiation, by energy lost to entropy, and outgoing radiation.
   
7. The notion of Earth's energy budget quantifies these a bit and splits some of these categories.
   
8. We can't do much about geothermal or tidal energy, and even if we theoretically could changing our amount of waste heat significantly would be difficult, and it presents a very small part of the overall budget. Most of the energy is incoming solar radiation, and aside from moving the planet or controlling the sun we can't do much there either. Though this will vary as the earth moves through it's elliptical orbit.
   
9. That leaves outgoing radiation, and this is primarily controlled by the atmosphere, clouds will reflect heat and so forth.
   
10. Therefore we should be able to alter the climate by adjusting the atmosphere. This is largely known as Geoengineering.
    
11. It would therefore be desirable and possible to tweak the planet to have the best climate. Not having the 'best' possible climate would have a cost in terms of lost opportunities and so forth.
    
12. Climate is global and therefore everyone should have some say in what the best climate is. Most agree keeping to the climate more or less as it has been in the last few centuries would be best, our croplands and cities are arranged largely on that assumption, but geoengineering is also expensive (so is moving cities, but I digress). Therefore we might have to settle for something that is not best, but still relatively close to it. (I disagree, having another ice-age would be cool )
    
13. Various gases released by our industries do have an effect on climate, so we want to tweak them so as to keep the geoengineering costs down, but this has it's own cost, so somewhere there is a happy medium.
    
14. Since most people and companies do not pay directly for the geoengineering it's an externality if you do something that effects it.
    
15. Scientific consensus is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
    
16. Scientific consensus is that the climate is warming.
    
17. Scientist aren't always right but they are the best we have at the moment.
    
18. If they are wrong we are miss-allocating our resources for little benefit (though cleaner air is nice, and so is less reliance on middle eastern oil. It does mean that millions of people in poverty stay in poverty for a bit longer, and everyone has to make do with a little less.). If they are right we are miss-allocating our resources and for the next century or so we'll need to spend a lot to make up for it in various ways (building dikes or moving cities, geoengineering, possible famines, millions of people dying, everyone has to make due with a lot less.). Given that they are probably right and the potential outcomes of the decisions it makes sense to err on the side of caution and spend more on prevention.
    
19. Since we know how to geo-engineer and how to release more or less greenhouse gasses we can compare the cost of both approaches and pick the one that is cheaper.
    
20. It is generally agree that unless you want to make the planet warmer it's much cheaper to reduce emissions of CO2.
    
21. A fair way to deal with externalities is to tax them, eg if you pollute the water, and a city down river needs to spend an extra few million on water purification it would make sense if you are the one to pay for it. Everything has a cost to fix it, so if you break it you pay for it. It is often very expensive to fix something after it's broken, eg it's much cheaper to spill oil into the gulf than it is to clean it up.
    
22. A fair tax on emissions would therefore be the cost to fix the emission, and if you release a gas that does only good things you get rewarded with a tax credit for how much cheaper you have made things.
    
23. This would apply to everything, so if you have a factory that kills thousands, causes billions in health-care cost and in associated geo-engineering cost to fix it you need to pay those billions in taxes so it can be fixed. If in contrast you have emissions that make people healthier so you save millions in healthcare and geoengineering cost you would get those millions in tax credits.
    
24. If you applied this point rigorously then all coal powerplants would be replaced by cheaper ones. And if the private sector could do a better job of cleanup than the government it would be sensible for them to step in and cash in on those tax credits.
    
25. Due to the massive disruption you would need to phase such a scheme in gradually, and the adjustment would have some cost.
    
26. A lot of ecologicals are not so much concerned with the cost of things as they are with the sin of polluting. It's a very human way of thinking but not very rational.
    

I'm working on a little story about a 13-year-old fenkinder girl who goes through a Disneyesque/Home Alone-like adventure on one of the Crystal Cities, captures a couple of incompetent zwilniks, and gets a Sailor title as a reward.  Story date is kind of locked by several necessities to middle June 2012.
I have several questions above and beyond what I can find in the Fenwiki.
First off, I need a Crystal City that preferably has an incomplete segment in June '12, or failing that, a goodly sized "mechanical" area where a couple of zwilniks (whom you may imagine as being played by Joe Pesce and Daniel Stern, if you like) can hide, camp and run a small operation.  The zone has to be big enough for a 12-year-old to get lost in.  Is there an ideal choice, or can I just pick a city at random?
Second, I'd like to give Our Heroine an extra piece of swag at the end:  a henshin wand.  In other words, a handwaved costume-changing gadget, which does nothing but swap whatever she's wearing for a seifuku, or back again.  It might be a prototype, or a one-off gadget; it'll probably have at least one quirk along the lines of "only works for teenaged girls".
Third, is there a canonical youngest "named" Sailor yet?  (I ask because I'd like to give the honor to Our Heroine if no one already has it.)
And finally, will this break anyone's plot or cool?
Thanks.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Just a quick one - is Mass Effect represented in fenspace to any degree? Seems like conceptually the tech would fit pretty smoothly in. Wondering if it would be its own faction or folded in with something else - like general SF gamer fen?

Oh and... sudden thought while I was typing the above - same general question would work with World of Warcraft and related properties. There's a LOT of fen for that. Now I'm wondering if any fen so inclined would want to biomod to anything that resembles a Draenai or Orc?

I've been meaning to post this for over a week, but I kept forgetting.
Yesterday, as some of the non-US folks here might not know, was the USA's annual election day.  In New Jersey, every State Legislature seat was up for grabs, and it seemed like the same applied to every town council and mayor.  As a result, those little political signs promoting various candidates and combinations of candidates were on every lawn, median and roadside.
Anyway, along about Halloween or just before, I was driving an unaccustomed route to work (thanks to traffic problems and my GPS), and I passed one of these signs in an area I'd never been in before:
VOTE THE DYNAMIC DUO:
BATEMAN
and
ROBBINS

(I know Bateman was running for State Senate, but I have no idea who Robbins is.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Here's a topic I'd like to see explored a bit:
What fanfic authors do you continue to (re)read and enjoy despite massive problems in their work?  By which I mean anything from systematic inability to grasp spelling or grammar to author rants and imploding storylines?
Let me cite a couple of mine.
Skysaber.  Absurd SI antics, effortless defanging of enemies, authorial rants appearing in the mouths of his characters like clockwork, stories that never get finished, and a combination of paranoia and thin skin that results in his abandoning the Net every couple years over some slight.  But when he's on his game, he's pretty damned good and a lot of fun to read.
Fred Herriott, aka "Pyeknu" on FF.net.  Melodrama, melodrama, melodrama.  Long, rambling sentences that fill up entire paragraphs -- with multiple internal digressions -- and (frequent parentheticals), punctuated with EMPHASIZED words.  An obsession with punishing every character he feels has sinned in canon against his protagonist, sometimes with long lectures delivered to them on how bad they were.  An inability to write a story without inserting the Nendo-kata and his other original creations into their plots.  Mary Sue-level powerups to his favorite characters, to the point that no matter how he escalates their opposition, they always triumph in a flash.  But he has great ideas and despite their faults the stories are fun.  (Except when they get a little too into the "punishing" thing.)
So, who do you hate to love?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

The Truth Beneath the Rose by Within Temptation



Give me strength to face the truth

The doubt within my soul

No longer I can justify

The bloodshed in his name

Is it a sin to seek the truth, the truth beneath the rose?

Pray with me so I will find the gate to Heaven's door

I believed it would justify the means

It had a hold over me

Blinded to see

The cruelty of the beast

Here is the darkest side of me

(Forgive me my sins)

The veil of my dreams

Deceived all I have seen

Forgive me for what I have been

(Forgive me my sins)

Pray for me 'cause I have lost my faith in holy wars

Is paradise denied to me 'cause I can't take no more?

Has darkness taken over me

Consumed my mortal soul?

All my virtues sacrificed

Can Heaven be so cruel?

I believed it would justify the means

It had a hold over me

(Forgive me my sins)

Blinded to see

The cruelty of the beast

Here is the darkest side of me

(Forgive me my sins)

The veil of my dreams

Deceived all I have seen

Forgive me for what I have been

(Forgive me my sins)

I'm hoping, I'm praying

I won't get lost between two worlds

For all I've seen,

The truth lies in between

Give me the strength to face the wrong that I have done

Now that I know

The darkest side of me

How can blood be your salvation

And justify the pain

That we have caused throughout the times

Will I learn what's truly sacred

Will I redeem my soul

Will truth set me free

(Forgive me my sins)

Blinded to see

The cruelty of the beast

Here is the darkest side of me

(Forgive me my sins)

The veil of my dreams

Deceived all I have seen

Forgive me for what I have been

(Forgive me my sins)

Summons a version of Rits post-overcoming Gendo's influence - not the most stable individual, but a good computer or bio scientist and the song is long enough at a little over 7min for her to have a chance at accomplishing something. Might also work for Rei II or III.

- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Okay, with Greece unable to find a government to administer what is definitely bitter medicine and with Italy following next, it looks like the Germans and French are seriously thinking of restructuring the euro zone into a a more smaller membership..
The CNBC report

So what happens next? : Some probable scenarious
Which comes to my next question? What will be the effect here in the U.S and elsewhere?
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

While I think the final mission needs a few tweaks, maybe a little more dialogue to explain things in the boss fight...

Um...

CRAP. This is not good at all.

...is now available in replica format.  I just wish I had $3000...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Here's a new thread.

Here's the old one.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll