Why is being difficult to control glacial melting a point in the favor of increasing greenhouse gas emissions?
It's true that climate change models are limited in their ability to project climate change accurately, although they're getting better all the time. Unfortunately, the evidence currently suggests that they're undershooting actual warming rates even at their upper limits.
The pro-warming arguments on your site essentially boil down to "warm earth is better than cold earth, so we should try to warm the earth up." Regardless of the relative merits of a warmer or colder planet though, rapid change of climate is a major burden on ecosystems. Flooding and forest fires are relatively trivial effects, it's mass extinction events that are a real matter of concern.
Why is being difficult to control glacial melting a point in the favor of increasing greenhouse gas emissions?
That is hard to parse. You are asking why I think the rate of runaway positive feedback cycles is difficult to control? That is because that is often their nature.
It's true that climate change models are limited in their ability to project climate change accurately, although they're getting better all the time. Unfortunately, the evidence currently suggests that they're undershooting actual warming rates even at their upper limits.
You talk...
Ideally, I'd like to save the world. One way to do that involves contributing academic research, which raises the question of what's the most effective way of doing that.
The traditional wisdom says if you want to do research, you should get a job in a university. But for the most part the system seems to be set up so that you first spend a long time working for someone else and research their ideas, after which you can lead your own group, but then most of your time will be spent on applying for grants and other administrative trivia rather than actually researching the interesting stuff. Also, in Finland at least, all professors need to also spend time doing teaching, so that's another time sink.
I suspect I would have more time to actually dedicate on research, and I could get doing it quicker, if I took a part-time job and did the research in my spare time. E.g. the recommended rates for a freelance journalist in Finland would allow me to spend a week each month doing work and three weeks doing research, of course assuming that I can pull off the freelance journalism part.
What (dis)advantages does this have compared to the traditional model?
Some advantages:
Some disadvantages:
EDIT: Note that while I certainly do appreciate comments specific to my situation, I posted this over at LW and not Discussion because I was hoping the discussion would also be useful for others who might be considering an academic path. So feel free to also provide commentary that's US-specific, say.