I'm guess from you're tone your American, or at least only figure Americans are going to be reading? You note that 'we' can't get to the moon, while Chinese rovers navigate it's surface. You note with alarm what coastal Florida will face from sea level rise, and not an entire nation like Kiribati. When we look at a global problem we can't ignore technology just because it's Chinese, or focus so hard on Florida's coast we ignore an entire nation in peril.

Sea levels aren't going to be fine in 2099 and then rise a foot on the eve of 2100. They will continue to rise about 3mm annually, as they have already for the last 100 years.(on a more granular level slightly less than 3mm nearer 1900 and slightly more nearer 2100 but the point stands). Coastal land owners aren't merely going to see this coming. They've watched it happening for nearly 100 years already and managed to cope thus far. Cope is of course a bad word for building housing near the coast and at less than a foot above sea level. It's like how occupants at the base of active volcanoes 'cope' with the occasional eruption. All that is to say, the problem for homes built in such locations has always been a matter of when not if disaster will strike. The entire island nation of Kiribati is barely above sea level. It is one tsunami away from annihilation. Climate change though is, let me be brutally honest, a small part of the problem. A tsunami in 1914 would've annihilated Kiribati, as a tsunami today in 2014 would, as a tsunami in 2114 would. And we are talking annihilate in a way the 2004 tsunami never touched. I mean an island that's all uninhabited, cleared to the ground and brand new, albeit a bit smaller for the wear. That scenario is going to happen sooner or later, even if the planet were cooling for the next 100 years so let's be cautious about preaching it's salvation through prevention of climate change.

Your points on food production are, sorry, wrong. You are correct enough that local food growth is a big part of the problem. You are dead wrong that most, or even any appreciable amount is to blame on climate change now or in the future. All the African nations starving for want of local food production lack it for the same reason, violence and instability. From this point forward referenced as 'men with guns'. The people in Africa have, or at least had, the means to grow their own food. Despite your insistence that men with guns couldn't stop them from eating then, they still did and continue to. A farmer has to control his land for a whole year to plant, raise and harvest his crop or his livestock. Trouble is men with guns come by at harvest time and take everything. In places like the DRC or Somalia they rape the farmer's wife and daughters too. This has been going on for decades and decades, and it obviously doesn't take many years for the farmer to decide it's time to move their family, if they are lucky enough to still be alive. That is the population make up of all the refugee camps of starving people wanting for food. It's not a climate change problem, it's a people are horrible to each other problem. A different climate, better or worse growing conditions, is a tiny and hardly worth noting dent in the real problem.
CO@ emission restrictions do not equate to global economic downturn, they could just as easily mean global economic upturn as new tech is adopted and implemented.
I stated meaningful CO2 emission changes. That means changes that will sway us to less than 1 foot of sea level change by 2100 and corresponding temperatures. Those are massive and rapid reductions, and I'm sorry but that can not be an economic boon too. I'm completely confident that electric cars and alternative or fusion power will have almost entirely supplanted fossil fuel usage before 2100, and because they are good business. Pushing today though for massive emission reductions can only be accomplish be reducing global consumption. People don't like that, and they jump all over any excuse to go to war if it means lifting those reductions. That's just the terrible nature of our species.

As for glaciers, I did read the article. You'll notice it observed that increasing the spatial resolution of models changed the picture entirely? The IPCC noted this and updated their findings accordingly as well(page 242). The best guess by 2100 is better than 50% of the glaciers through the entire range remaining. The uncertainty range even includes a potential, though less likely GAIN of mass:
. Results for the Himalaya range between 2% gain and 29% loss to 2035; to 2100, the range of losses is 15 to 78% under RCP4.5. The modelmean loss to 2100 is 45% under RCP4.5 and 68% under RCP8.5 (medium confidence). It is virtually certain that these projections are more reliable than in earlier erroneous assessment (Cruz et al., 2007) of complete disappearance by 2035.

If you still want to insist Nepal will be without glaciers in 2100 please provide a source of your own or stop insisting on contradicting the science to make things scarier.

@VoodooV: "Every one of these youtube crusaders are comfortably enjoying the perks of a system they despise."

What perks? Like roads and firemen? You know, it's not like we couldn't have those things without government. And those kinds of services are only a small portion of the federal budget. In fact, from all the excise taxes collected on gasoline, tobacco and alcohol, they'd cover the roads completely, which costs around $60 billion annually. In fact, things like the EPA, Dept. of Trans, NASA, Dept. of Edu, all cost less than the revenue the federal government categorizes as "other." Look it up: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals

So what about all the wars and militarism? Is that, too, a perk? And the prison industrial complex that locks up 1% of our population? What are these perks you speak of?

Even Ayn Rand took gov't assistance.

I love it when statists bring this up. I personally am not an Objectivist, and find lots of flaws with their ideology, but this is a cheap blow. Obviously it shows the economic illiteracy of most statists. For one, she's forced to pay into social security, so therefore why shouldn't she receive some of it back? And second, if you spend more than a couple seconds reading about U.S. monetary policy, you'd know that the purchasing power of the dollar is reduced over time due to inflation, and hence savings are always impacted. This should alarm you instead of excite you.

The whole thing is infested with logical fallacies: false equivalencies, ad homs, strawmen, and even a no true scotsman thrown in for shits and giggles.

By all means don't take any time to point out which things he said were these things. No, that'd be helpful, and we wouldn't want to cloudy any appeals to emotion with pesky things like fact and well thought out rebuttals.

they spend all this time criticizing the problems of gov't and NEVER ONCE demonstrate how it would work without these systems.

I think there are plenty who do. It's just that statists don't accept those answers, or any answers that don't emulate the current status quo systems they're accustomed to. I'm not interested in replacing public schools with another bureaucracy.

Yeah, not going to happen. Most mainland Chinese, even those who are studying in HK, have very different political outlook:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/hongkong/11131802/Analysis-Hong-Kongs-democracy-protests-pose-little-threat-to-China.html

Also, the scale of this protests is not unique, even for HK standards. Annual protests routinely drawing hundreds of thousands of people.

Well if RT news has said it... I think its pretty clear WW3 is upon us...

Oh wait... guess RT news left out that this is an ANNUAL exercise...

http://rt.com/news/170380-sea-breeze-2014-bulgaria/

Nope... guess they didn't... this idiot just 'forgot' to mention it... and because of the conflict there, its "significantly reduced" in size. 30 second google search.

"Last year the number of participants was much greater. It included Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine and the US, with France, Germany, Libya, Lithuania, Qatar, and UAE sending observers." RT News

Utter BS...

It's unfair to compare this remote rural town with a big urban city with well established infrastructure. A better comparison would be the tornadoes that hit rural towns in the US, annually destroying many homes and taking several lives. Yes, those houses could be built to be tornado-proof, but they aren't because it would cost 3x as much and the average residents are too poor to afford it (and storm shelters and advanced warning make it less deadly)

(Of course, China should still be more strict about building codes. Although they'd have to tackle corruption first- too easy to bribe inspectors, and too many contractors cut corners to save money. They are rightly focused on improving food safety now - what other country would you find counterfeit eggs?? )

Also this because I hate Comcast:

"I say it as a loyal Comcast employee for almost a decade, if you have Comcast - get out now, you're just wasting your money. They're going to increase your bill 3-5% twice a year, it's part of the annual budgeting process even though our costs actually go down. The internet business (as in, high speed customers) is almost purely profit, and it's turned down on purpose like everyone here already knows. Comcast has DOCSIS 3 capabilities and the infrastructure to support it in most major areas (this means gigabit speeds, by the way) - it can be activated simply by pushing the proper bootfiles out to the modems. This can be evidenced anywhere they have competition, they can respond overnight."
http://np.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2arg1k/comcasts_customer_service_nightmare_is_painful_to/ciy33bx

It's the annual The Million Duck Waddle!

Less snobbery and more information would have made for a better video.

Ok, so it'll cost 20 trillion dollars to replace all the roads in the country... How much would it cost to repave all those roads? I suspect that would also be more than the annual federal budget, yet all those roads still exist.

Apparently it takes a shitload of energy to melt ice, but how much energy does it take to prevent ice from forming?

Skepticism is absolutely the correct position here until we begin to see functional systems in real-world situations but, if you're going to spend the last 3 minutes of your critique video puffing on about how you're doing the real investigative journalism that we all need, then maybe you should perform a proper investigation and reveal your facts and findings like an intelligent adult.

The snow melting thing is highly exaggerated. The panels might generate enough juice to keep black ice from forming, but would need to draw power from the grid to do any significant melting, let alone somehow dealing with several inches from a sizable storm.

I do see huge advantages to having roads made of these. The cost would no doubt be enormous, but the long-term advantages could make them a reasonable investment. I don't have any of the numbers to reference, but would guess that we could replace a sizable portion of the US roadways with a fraction of the military's annual budget.

Stop banking in the 19th century people. I can honestly count the number of times I've used cash in the last year on one hand.

I constantly see credit card companies attempt to prey on people in malls or with mailouts. Hell, they did it to me when I was young and stupid. When I started work, I got a credit card with a $500 limit on it for travel and expenses, etc. Less than 6 months later the bank had increased the limit 4 times to over $3000. If I was smart I should have refused each increase, but like an idiot I basically looked on it as free money. Suddenly I was paying a fortune in interest and struggling to clear the card. Every penny I earned went on it, and then I'd rack up the bills over the next month again just to live.

But credit cards are great if you know how to use them. Eventually I paid mine off and now I live completely off it; fuel, groceries, the works. I pay for everything on it, and I get reward points that easily cover the cost of the annual card fee. I make sure it's cleared every month. Meanwhile, my salary sits in my bank account offsetting my mortgage. Now it literally is free money.

I actually feel kinda bad, because essentially people who are bad with money and run up credit card bills at 20% interest are basically subsidising my card for me.

(Because I know you won't really read any links: Texas VOTED to REMOVE Capitalism from their textbooks. Yes, you read that correctly. Texas, REMOVED the word Capitalism from their textbooks because of negative connotations. Instead, you should use the term Free-Market Enterprise. So yeah, good thing those pesky liberals didn't vote to keep the word capitalism in the textbooks . . . )

You do know we have an education BECAUSE of liberalism. Much like everything else conservatives hold sacred . . .

You WILL mind dumb kids when they can't pay their taxes to support your liberal/socialist social security checks later in life, or the roads you have to drive on.

You WILL mind dumb kids when statistically speaking, less educated men are more likely to commit violent crimes and less educated women will have more children, which means more food stamps. You know, the things conservatives hate spending .5% of our annual government budget on.

So while us "liberals" have been petitioning for more teacher freedom, higher pay to attract better teachers, been against standardized tests and against for-profit schools, you conservatives can keep trying to hawk your proven to fail for-profit "capitalist" schools.

Oh, and I hate to tell you, but public schools don't teach kids to hate capitalism. Neither does the Lego Movie either. Turn off Fox News once in a while and step outside. Maybe talk to a total stranger (which means putting the gun down for a minute and not Standing Your Ground). Which coincidently, would diminish greatly with a robust liberal education. (In case you didn't get the play on words, as in teaching kids more than how to recite words and flip hamburgers. It's called A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep.

But hey, you would know all this if the Texas School Board wasn't eliminating pieces of history because they don't fit their current political agenda.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/texas-school-board-approves-controversial-textbook-changes/954/

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20131122-texas-education-board-approves-science-books-that-fully-cover-evolution.ece (They wanted to prevent evolution from being taught despite the piles of evidence supporting it.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html You want to talk about "bias"? Yeah, conservatives are trying really hard to rewrite history in their favor by making sure no experts ever have a say in the selection of textbook material, but people who "feel" like there is a bias. You know, because truth has a well known liberal bias.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/education/texas-education-board-flags-biology-textbook-over-evolution-concerns.html?_r=0

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/

Yeah, I'm sorry, but the facts don't bear out in your case. Except, that our system is going downhill, but it's not because of their "liberal" education, that's for sure.

An interesting bit from that Wiki link:
"It is believed that a contributing factor in the accident was the JR West policy of schedule punctuality. As a result of this, Masataka Ide, JR West adviser who played a major role in enforcing the punctuality of the company's trains, announced that he would resign in June 2005 at the company's annual shareholder meeting, with the company's chairman and president resigning in August."

Executives taking responsibility for things? Woah. An unfamiliar concept in America...

Here is a longer 18 minute video of more of Senator Burr's questions to the witnesses. I wish I could find the full hearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0Gxtsz1A

It includes this little gem from Senator Burr, "The American system HAS access to healthcare for everybody, it's called the Emergency Room. Now we don't admit that because clearly we are lobbying for a particular angle, but every American can access healthcare."

Nice slight of hand there Senator, only difference is whenever I go to the emergency room (I live in Canada), I don't get a bill in the mail a few weeks later that I have to pay.

The average American ER visit costs $600 dollars in 2009, today it's probably well more than that, and that's just for simple problems. Anything more serious than a urinary tract infection and you are going to be paying thousands of dollars.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll give my 2 cents on my experiences with the Healthcare system in Quebec.

I use the public system and private system and constantly dabble between the two. Wait times can be long for sure. I've had a long running ankle problem since my teens, and to get my first appointment with an ankle specialist here took 1 year and 3 months!

My MRI was covered by private insurance, so it only took a couple days to have the scan done. I was put on a surgery waiting list for just over 2 years. The Dr let me know that he operated at a private clinic in Montreal. I could have had the surgery in only 2 weeks, at a cost of around $5000, but because my pain was minimal and I could still walk, I opted to wait.

Post surgery access to follow up appointments was swift. I could easily see the Dr in a week or two, with very little advanced notice. Follow up MRI's weren't covered by my new private insurance, so I had to wait for an MRI scan, which took around 2 months. I was supposed to have an MRI arthrogram, but the waiting list for that procedure is about twice as long, so the Dr just opted for a regular MRI. Cost for an MRI arthrogram is $875 in private. Again I just waited it out.

I've only needed to go to the emergency room twice, since I've been here, both times I was in and out in under an hour and a half.

I've been to many walk-in clinic's. These are a crapshoot, sometimes they're incredibly fast, sometimes incredibly slow.

I don't have a family Dr, so I opt to go to a Dr at a private clinic for my annual checkups. Even private clinics are a grey zone sometimes, as some services are covered by the provincial plans, so visits to the GP cost out of pocket, but visits to specialists within the same clinic are free.

Finding a family Dr is definitely plausible, it just involves phoning around every clinic and/or Dr in Montreal asking if they have space, but I just haven't invested the time yet. Some people get lucky this way, but even then, getting an appointment with your family Dr can take many weeks, appointment times can be inconvenient (mid afternoon, etc), so I'd rather make the investment of seeing someone at a private clinic, where I can have an appointment at 8:30am within a couple days.

I contrast all this with the fact that I was born and lived in South Africa well into my mid 20's. South Africa has abysmal public healthcare, and being born into a white middle class family, thanks to my parents I had access to private healthcare.

Private insurance in South Africa is less exploitative than in the U.S. Much less fighting with insurers to pay for coverage etc. Access to most Dr's is swift, and most procedure's are well covered. Obviously the overall experience compared to Canadian healthcare was much better, but the S.A private system only barely covers 20% of the population's needs and even with the disparity in wait times for service, the Canadian healthcare system at 100% coverage feels like an undeniable success, and a model that needs to be improved and iterated upon.

The debate around healthcare is tough here. Health issues and frustration with waiting can easily escalate the egocentric side of our human nature, but even with my negative experiences I would never denounce this system, because the broader social contract that has been written is valiant, and the price paid for this is worth it.

Nobody should be financially ruined because of health issues.

Oh and another thing you should probably remember about Canada.

Estimated Population of Canada, 2013 - 35,158,300

Total Eligible Voters in California, 2013 - 23,857,732 (est Pop. 38.4M)

You 'merikuns are TAD bit more numerous than us. We had a "$2Million" long gun registry that annually ate HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars, and every single person that really needed to participate completely ignored.

I can barely imagine the bureaucratic nightmare your combative legislative system will create, but honestly, you'd probably be better off on the whole.

That's a great talk. It's particularly interesting in light of the recent iOS and GnuTLS bugs.

http://videosift.com/video/NSA-operation-ORCHESTRA-Annual-Status-Report