Well I haven't seen Ghostbusters yet, but remember when everyone was pissed off because the new Star Wars had a woman and a black storm trooper as the lead characters?

Do you also remember when the film succeeded on its own merits and no one gave a shit any more because the film was actually good?

Releasing a film where the four principle characters are 3 intelligent white scientists and a streetwise sassy black woman is hardly a fucking exercise in equality anyway. And we're talking about a remake of a comedy that was popular and successful in the 80s - it's not like they're taking big risks and giving the women a chance to shine on their own, is it? How about an all-woman written and directed original film, or can't they spare the money? Because they seem to find enough cash for Seth Rogen or one of the other comedy clones to vomit out another catastrophe every year. Or maybe the people with the money are all men and prefer jokes about farts and masturbation.

That's the worst thing that seems to get ignored - this is Hollywood's lazy way of brushing a few crumbs from the table and saying 'See? Women have just as much power and prominence in the movies! By the way, do you know any girl who's turned 18? We need the new love interest for a 50 year old in the latest action flick. We need someone who looks just good enough that we can photoshop a huge pair of tits on her. We're going to take it in turns to take her to dinner and try to bed her before filming starts.' Hello people? There is enough sexism to deal with in Hollywood without worrying what IMDB rating Ghostbusters got and why.. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

Not really a counter argument, because it presumes that there has been no human based change to the climate. Human based change to the climate has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. I know people love to quote the 3% of scientists that believe there is either not enough information or that the other 97% are involved in a secret global conspiracy to make people believe in climate change, but lets be realistic. If you went to a doctor and he said there is a 97% likelihood that you will die if you do not change your lifestyle, would you be willing to bet on the 3%?

When you have people that have devoted their lives to studying a branch of science getting choked up with emotion at the likelihood that we will have a catastrophic incident in the next few decades, should you ignore them or try to come up with reasons why they might have a statistical gap of 3% of being wrong?

You can't get 100% of people to agree on anything, it's impossible simply due to human nature. But if you have a scientific result that is within a -3 percent of certainty, it's illogical to prevaricate.

The simplest counter argument to your catastrophic prediction is the stability of the paleo-temperature record. If there has been a methane 'time-bomb' just sitting there waiting to be set off anytime the temperature got an extra degree warmer then temperatures wouldn't be stable as they have been over the last millenia. The gradual shifts from ice-age to global rain forests wouldn't have been gradual at all, and likely wouldn't have been reversible either.

The more likely answer is our understanding of climate functions and things like just how much methane is likely to escape in a certain time frame is incomplete.

I can see this one from both sides. The potential for litigation -- which could be truly catastrophic for a school / business / private person / whatever -- is real. It's fucking retarded, but it is a real danger.

In the early 2000's, I was living in a trailer park with a buddy while we were going to college. We lived right next to a movie theater that had a nice, huge, paved asphalt parking lot in the back. We used to take roller blades, sticks, and a PVC hockey goal into that lot and play roller hockey after closing time -- like 2AM or so. Nobody there, no parked cars, no property around to damage with errant shots or whatever.

One night we went a bit earlier than usual, and the manager had happened to stay late to close. He saw us as he was driving out and started driving towards us. I figured "well, there goes this spot". He asked us what were were doing, we explained. He asked us if we had asked anybody for permission, and we admitted we hadn't. He asked if we knew that companies sometimes got sued by people who wiped out and broke a leg or whatever, and we said yes.

And then he surprised me. He said "OK, consider this me, the manager, giving you permission to keep on playing here, on these conditions:

1) Never play there if there are parked cars in that part of the lot behind the theater.
2) Come in and ask for permission again if we want to play with more people, or if any other conditions change.
3) Look me in the eye and give me your word as a man that you wouldn't sue me for being an idiot and falling down and breaking your arm or whatever, and shake my hand to seal the bargain."

Awesome theater manager. Not sure if things have gotten enough worse in litigation-crazy USA that he'd be willing to make that same bargain again. But that wouldn't be his fault, it would be an outcome of our crazy legal system.

The inherently chaotic event that exists in the otherwise predictable / trainable environment of driving a car is the unplanned / unmeasured disturbance. In control systems that are adaptive or self learning, the unplanned disturbance is the killer - a short duration, unpredictable event for which the system is unable to respond to within the control limits that have been defined through training, programming and/or adaptation. The response to an unplanned disturbance is often to default to an instruction that is very much human derived (ie. stop, exit gracefully, terminate instruction, wait until conditions return to controllable boundary conditions or freeze in place) which, depending on the disturbance, can be catastrophic. In our world, with humans behind the wheel, let's call the unplanned disturbance the "mistake". A tire blows, a load comes undone, an object falls out of or off of another vehicle (human, dog, watermelon, gas cylinder) etc.

The concern from my perspective (and I work directly with adaptive / learning control systems every day - fundamental models, adaptive neural type predictors, genetic algorithms etc. ) is the response to these short duration / short response time unplanned disturbances. The videos I've seen and the examples that I have reviewed don't deal with these very short timescale events and how to manage the response, which in many cases is an event dependent response. I would guess that the 1st dead person that results from the actions or inaction of self driving vehicles will put a major dent if not halt to the program. Humans may be fallible, but we are remarkably (infinitely?) more adaptive in combined conscious / subconscious responses than any computer is or will be in the near future in both appropriateness of response and the time scale of generating that response.

In the partially controlled environment (ie. there is no such thing as 100%) of a automated warehouse and distribution center, self driving works. In the partially controlled environment where ONLY self driving vehicles are present on the roadways, then again, this technology will likely succeed. The mixed environment with self driving co-mingled with humans (see "fallible" above) is not presently viable, and I don't think will be in the next decade or two, partially due to safety risk and partially due to management of these short timescale unplanned disturbances that can call for vastly different responses depending upon the specific situation at hand. In the flow of traffic we encounter the majority of the time, would agree that this may not be an issue to some (in 44 years of driving, I've been in 2 accidents, so I'll leave the risk assessment to the actuaries). But one death, and we'll see how high the knees jerk. And it will happen.

My 2 cents.
TB

I used to do this at parties as a kid all the time with glass beer bottles. I tried a plastic vessel once, and while it does work, I only recommend doing it once and allowing the plastic to cool completely. Using zippo fluid and a plastic bottle repeatedly will eventually cause the plastic to heat to an unstable temperature producing a catastrophic failure with disastrous effects to your mother's carpet.....for science.

As disparate and fractured as US society is, I think that one good catastrophe could still unite us.

Politicians used 9/11 that way, and we actually did come together quite a bit. They turned that unity into terrible purposes, (unnecessary and idiotic wars, Patriot Act, torture programs, stomping on constitutional protections, mass surveillance, etc.) but a lot of stuff got done.

I'm more optimistic (if that is at all the right word) about the unifying power of a Trumptastrophe, AND optimistic about our ability to spin a reaction to a Trumptastrophe in a more positive direction than what happened after 9/11, but I can easily understand your reservations also.

Looks catastrophic - English speaking? I'd say it looks like what 'Rise of an Empire' was to 300, but Crouching Tiger was a far classier film.

Might be something relevant to countries where they have high speed roadways, but honestly, I doubt there's a car out there that could maintain any sort of integrity in the driver area for such a catastrophic stop. Most of the vehicles in the second video just disintegrate.

Heck of a thing to have on the resume though... "I fuck up cars for a living".

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

@dannym3141,
tl;dr is always the risk when trying to also provide actual backing to something complicated, I understand the temptation, but by skipping over what I've said you've not understood me.

On the IPCC scenario, I used the RCP4.5 scenario, the one that is most widely quoted by them as their best estimate. It also the estimate they use when comparing model projections to observations, and the observations track well within it's error margins, albeit on the lower end of the RCP4.5 spectrum.
The IPCC says on temperatures by scenario in Chapter 12 of AR5:
global mean surface temperatures for 2081–2100, relative to 1986–2005 will likely be in the 5 to 95% range of the CMIP5 models; 0.3°C to 1.7°C (RCP2.6), 1.1°C to 2.6°C (RCP4.5), 1.4°C to 3.1°C (RCP6.0), 2.6°C to 4.8°C (RCP8.5). Global temperatures averaged over the period 2081–2100 are projected to likely exceed 1.5°C above 1850-1900 for RCP4.5
My sighting of 1.5C for 'best' from IPCC is derived from classing the 4.5 scenario as their best guess and I disagree with you that I'm materially misrepresenting or understanding them on it.

You also said:
... let us not pretend that the IPCC are above the skepticism...
Then later
I don't apologise for not reading the entire thread
I understand the thread is long, if you go back though you'll find I've made numerous references to additional peer-review journal articles backing and corroborating claims from the IPCC to make sure I'm not just cherry picking what might have been a politicized summary or assessment. So forgive, me but when you conclude with :
when you've cherry picked one quarter of a conclusion from one source
You are simply put, flat wrong.

Would you mind weighing in with your own position rather than a simply sitting on the fence calling us both too far on either side? I've been here refuting the notion that the scientific evidence tells us we face catastrophe prior to 2100, and even from some posters claims, catastrophe by 2050. I'm merely taking the stance that the science's best guess as approximated in IPCC RCP4.5, we aren't facing catastrophic collapse worthy of an action movie by 2100. I've said multiple times up thread we are facing problems, it's the severity I claimed by others that I am calling out for not being supported by evidence.

pay attention to the what the scientists say that study this issue.
Thank you, that's been exactly my point in linking to the IPCC about 5-6 times already and more than a dozen other peer reviewed articles on the subject.
The consequences are serious.
Serious is different than catastrophic so depending on the definition of serious I'd agree. If we start to significantly reduce our emissions by about 2050 we track with the IPCC 4.5 scenario which is manageable through mitigation measures, accelerating emissions still to 2100 though is madness.

Again, I can't seem to pull up the full text of your article through google scholar. Even your summary though states an additional warming contribution of 0.3C by 2100. Sorry, but I don't class that as catastrophic. What's more, simply doing a google scholar search for articles on "permafrost methane climate" and taking the first four full articles give the following, with absolutely zero effort taken to pluck out ones that support my particular claim:

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/4/045016/fulltext/
According to our results, by mid-21st century the annual net flux of methane from Russian permafrost regions may increase by 6–8 Mt, depending on climatic scenario. If other sinks and sources of methane remain unchanged, this may increase the overall content of methane in the atmosphere by approximately 100 Mt, or 0.04 ppm, and lead to 0.012 °C global temperature rise.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010RG000326/full
It's a more sweeping assessment so it doesn't have a nice short quotable for our particular point. It's most concise point is in Figure 7 which I'm not sure how to link into here as an image. You can check for yourself though that even the highest error margins on methane releases touch natural emissions till long, long after 2100, matching the IPCC millenial timescale statement I cited earlier.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018680/full
A detailed study of one mire show that the permafrost and vegetation changes have been associated with increases in landscape scale CH4 emissions in the range of 22–66% over the period 1970 to 2000.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/36/14769.full
We attempted to incorporate in this study some of the latest mechanistic understanding about the mechanisms controlling soil CO2 respiration and wetland CH4 emissions, but uncertainties remain large, due to incomplete understanding of biogeochemical and physical processes and our ability to encapsulate them in large-scale models. In particular, small-scale hydrological effects (36) and interactions between warming and hydrological processes are only crudely represented in the current generation of terrestrial biosphere models. Fundamental processes such as thermokarst erosion (37) or the effects of drying on peatland CO2 emissions (e.g., ref. 38) are lacking here, causing uncertainty on future high-latitude carbon-climate feedbacks. In addition, large uncertainty arises from our ability to model wetland dynamics or the microbial processes that govern CH4 emissions, and in particular how the complicated dynamics of permafrost thaw would affect these processes.

The control of changes in the carbon balance of terrestrial regions by production vs. decomposition has been explored by a number of authors, with differing estimates of whether vegetation or soil changes have the largest overall effect on carbon storage changes (39–41). These results demonstrate that with the inclusion of two well-observed mechanisms: the relative inhibition of respiration by soil freezing (42) and the vertical motion in Arctic soils that buries old but labile carbon in deeper permafrost horizons, which can be remobilized by warming (3), the high-latitude terrestrial carbon response to warming can tip from near equilibrium to a sustained source of CO2 by the mid-21st century. We repeat that uncertainties on these estimates of CO2 and CH4 balance are large, due to the complexity of high-latitude ecosystems vs. the simplified process treatment used here.

And I was able to find the full PDF for your own original sink on the subject:
here
We conclude that the ice-free area of
northeastGreenland acts as a net sink of atmosphericmethane,
and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under
future warmer climatic conditions.

All of the above seem to fairly well corroborate my earlier citation to the IPCC's own summary of the current knowledge on permafrost and northern methane impact on future warming:
However modelling studies and expert judgment indicate that CH4 and CO2 emissions will increase under Arctic warming, and that they will provide a positive climate feedback. Over centuries, this feedback will be moderate: of a magnitude similar to other climate–terrestrial ecosystem feedbacks
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter06_FINAL.pdf
From FAQ 6.1

If you want to more simply claim that there exist studies, with noted high uncertainties, that under the worst case emission scenarios that show a possible significant release of methan prior to 2100 and possible catatrophic releases after, then I agree. If you want to claim that the consensus is we are facing catastrophe in our lifetime, as your first post claimed, then I most point to the overwhelming scientific evidence linked above that simply does not agree, once again chosen at random and with no effort to cherry pick only results that match what I want. I must note I lack surprise though as the IPCC had already been claiming the same of the literature and existing evidence.