as he said "there was less sceintific evidence that the missile sheild will work than there is for kyoto [to work]"
I added the "to work' bit becasue kyoto is a plan of action or 'defense' against something, similar to how missile defense is a plane/system, adding it clears the question up a bit.

We 'know' we can hit an incoming ballistic missile with another missile. Buddy I've seen the video of it hitting. the second one worked. Now, do we have any evidence that global environment polities of kyoto will work? No, at least not to my knowlege. Global warmming itself is still debated, but even if you could establish it firmly, you would have the incredibly hard job of justifying that mankind is the cause or contributes in any significance to it.

now as for the 1 out of three success rate for our missile sheild it help to put it in relative terms. Say a company is developeing a car. They take it out for crash testing and it does pretty poorly the first time. The company says "oh man, thats no good," so they take it and tweak it here and there from the data they got from the first crash test and try it again, and the second time it worked great! so the company says "hey lets try it one more tiem jsut to make sure we got it!" and the last time the car gets a flat tire while being lauched toward the wall and spins out. Does the company say "what a peice of crap! forget it, throw it away its not worth it!"? No! It was a flat tire! a freak accident that only happens to about one out of several thousand times you take cars with similar tires out on the road, and it just 'happens to strick the car on the track.' The third missile sheild test was a boost phase fialure, and only happens with that boster to about one out of a hunderd launches. It is pure folly to extrapolate that failure as 33% and not one percent. furthermore it is bad to extrapolate the first launch failure as 33% since improvements were made to the system to correct for the first failure. that brings us up to a success rate greater than 49.5%.

out of 100 lauches, once percent would be bost phase failures, so you have 99, once it get past the boost phase it will have a greater that 50% (>49.5) chance to hit becasue the second try was improved with data from the first. I do not count the chance of a lucky hit the second time because there was a chance of unlucky miss for the first as well.

However, if a 1 percent chance of failure can show up as 33% in a test, then it means you need to test a little more. therefor I think we should proceed with the program and do more testing.

Either way, show me real world datat that Kyoto will work, and set some definable goals for its effect on the environment (models don't count, they don't count for the missile shield, so why should they count for kyoto?)

-Justin Kelly