What about George II and the Prince of Black Gold?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Simply put, I don't want to be required by law to be environmentally correct. Even though it may come to pass that most of us will have to be, I want to preserve choice. Therefore I favor financial incentives so that most people will volunteer to do the right thing, but the curmudgeons amongst us can still opt out--as long as they pay for the privilege. This is why I oppose a mandatory national health service and school vouchers. I favor national health insurance, but with a parallel private system, like public and private schools. Everybody pays, but you don't have to use it.

The problem with this is that having a parallel private healthcare system along side a public system will lead to the powerful to neglect the public system because they have no personal stake in it functioning properly, that is why, IIRC, most Canadians crucify politicians there that suggest that private medical practice should be legalized.

(Off topic. Doing the medical subtopic again.)

Originally Posted by The Rani

I find this fascinating, because it's exactly what the right says about the left. It's amazing to me that you guys fail to realize how often you adopt the tactics of the other side, while simultaneously condemning them.

Fascinating, but illogical, as Mr. Spock would say.

Could you give a few examples of what you mean? Yes, antibiotics have been over used. Yes, I've seen rumblings on the net of vaccination side effects. Perhaps progressives are over ready to implement solutions when one might later learn of drawbacks.

I just don't see that we should stop trying to solve problems for fear of unforeseen kickbacks.

Also, the corporate profiteers have a hand in that one too. Once they have a path for making money, they defend this path, perhaps by blocking or avoiding research that might lead to lost profits. Antibiotics and vaccinations are big bucks. I can defend and understand using life saving methods before every possible negative effect is understood. Blocking research into the negative effects is something else entirely.

But I see political suppression of science as a fairly new thing in the United States. I don't see it as a conservative thing, or a Reagan Revolution thing, but as a Bush 43 thing. They are extending political propaganda techniques to the point of interfering with scientists employed by the government, blurring the line between political partisanship and government to the point where it interferes with scientific research.

Well, I guess the argument over teaching evolution might be older than that, but that is religion v science. That goes back to Galileo. If God had meant man to fly, we'd have wings, and all that. That feels different to me, and once again it is the conservatives who are suppressing science. By definition, conservatives suppress what is new.

But can you give a few more examples of progressive suppression of science?

Originally Posted by catfishncod

The main things this chart implies to me are:

1) The Earth, as a whole, can take a much larger shift than even the doomsayers are predicting.
2) However, such a shift would in effect be a epoch-ending (or maybe even period-ending) minor extinction event.

I seem to need to invent a new category of speech here, similar to the oxymoron (friendly fire, military intelligence). A while ago someone combined the words 'Pity' and 'Wolfowitz' adjacent to one another in the same phrase. It just isn't right. The words just don't apply to one another, somehow. In a quite similar way, I'm having trouble with 'minor extinction event.'

Originally Posted by catfishncod

The Earth goes through extinction events on a regular basis on a megayear timescale, so there's no need to panic on that account. But we do need to look to our own survival, and the survival of all the species we rely on and are caretakers of -- such as the honeybees, who are being whapped by the Columbian exchange at the moment.

Not an absurd idea, and I'm not opposed to building a genetic library. It's just that species will become extinct because the environment suitable to support them vanishes. What good is saving a gene pattern that can't survive?

We might consider helping some species migrate. As the weather has warmed, species have been drifting north and uphill. Species that were already living at the top of mountains, however, are in trouble. Finding another mountain for them a bit further north might be plausible, though introducing alien species can be highly problematic to the natives.

Originally Posted by catfishncod

As to CO2 management: we need to re-seed the oceans, which have been overfished, and we need a CO2 sink. Perhaps we could start by encouraging plankton growth, which kills two birds with one stone?

Not absurd. One hears all sorts of proposals for what science fiction people might call terraforming. We might deliberately increase soot release to generate global dimming to counter global warming. We might orbit space umbrellas to block sunlight as another way to create global dimming. We can sacrifice a king to some volcano god, in hopes he might trigger a volcano or three to produce global dimming.

But how are you going to go about encouraging plankton growth? Genetically modified plankton? Dumping garbage in the ocean as fertilizer? Visiting the beach and cooing encouraging words into the waves?

I suspect we may well end up playing with 'terraforming' ideas, but a lot of them still seem rather way out. It is a bit difficult maintaining a straight face.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I don't think it is realistic to cap total ghg at such low levels. It's not going to happen.

Agreed, and to clarify my point (and Monbiot's), the governments of the US and UK know it's not going to happen, and they know that the consequence of it not-happening (according to the IPCC projection) is catastrophic climate change, millions dead.

He's simply pointing out that by the UK government's official admission, they've already given up.

Originally Posted by catfishncod

1) The Earth, as a whole, can take a much larger shift than even the doomsayers are predicting.
2) However, such a shift would in effect be a epoch-ending (or maybe even period-ending) minor extinction event.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

The words just don't apply to one another, somehow. In a quite similar way, I'm having trouble with 'minor extinction event.'

I agree with the Fish. It's only a major extinction event if you're a member of homo sapiens sapiens. I don't plan on being a member of that species by the time the extinction event comes around. I plan on being a member of the successor species, perhaps homo sapiens astralis. And no, I'm not kidding.

Okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that AGW is a real thing.

Isn't there some way to deal with it without further empowering bureaucrats, central planners, politicians, governments, and collectivists?

Perhaps a great place to start would be removing all of the tax-supported giveaways to giant oil companies and their interests...?

Well, "minor extinction event" is a term referring to a mass extinction that isn't as huge as, say, the K/T extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. It's somewhat arbitrary of course. Compared to the end-Permian extinction, the K/T extinction itself was arguably pretty "minor." Humans are in position to cause a major, not a minor extinction, but it's still not inconceivable we might pull back from that brink.

Finch, you continue to boggle the mind. Can you explain what you mean by H. sapiens astralis? If you mean what I think you do, that species can only come to exist after we've successfully nagivated the environmental shallows, not as a way to do so or to avoid having to do so. But let's not presume.

Originally Posted by Ricercar71

Okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that AGW is a real thing.

Isn't there some way to deal with it without further empowering bureaucrats, central planners, politicians, governments, and collectivists?

That's exactly what I was trying to get at earlier. What's the way we can switch to a post-carbon economy that will be least dangerous to liberty?

Perhaps a great place to start would be removing all of the tax-supported giveaways to giant oil companies and their interests...?

Mikebert opined that while this would make a good start all right, it wouldn't be enough. I asked whether, with incentives pushing the other way -- i.e., the way we want to go instead of the way we don't -- it could be done without coercive means. He said he didn't see why not, but never elaborated.

Maybe it's time to elaborate?

Originally Posted by The Rani

Phew! So what does this have to do with global warming? Maybe nothing. But maybe the analogy is that as the first scientists growing bacteria in petri dishes couldn't have predicted Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, scientists looking at a bunch of graphs might, just MIGHT, not be able to predict what our climate will look like 100 years from now.

Maybe, but one thing to keep in mind is that medicine, although it's called a "science," is really more like engineering than science. It's first goal isn't to gain academic knowledge, it's to promote health and cure disease: a practical goal.

I think the people who invented pennicillin COULD have predicted the development of AB resistant bacteria, if not methicillin-resistant S. aureus precisely. If they were looking to develop an overall model of bacterial reproduction in interaction with the immune system and antibacterial drugs, that would have been an obvious thing to look into, and the concept of natural selection predates antibiotics by many years. But they weren't, because they were really engineers, not scientists. They wanted, not pure knowledge, but a way to cure infections. And that's what they found.

So the comparison between medicine and climate science isn't necessarily as close as you're suggesting.

Originally Posted by Ricercar71

Perhaps a great place to start would be removing all of the tax-supported giveaways to giant oil companies and their interests...?

I think we pretty much all agree on this one.

Justin was also on board with planting trees.

Originally Posted by The Rani

My point... was that right-wingers try to dismiss the views of scientists by saying that they are all liberals and therefore biased...

Umm, methinks you're confusing scientists with our disdain for so-called "journalists" in the mass media today.

p.s. On the subject of this thread, I quoted a legitimate MIT professor, who confidently questioned St. Gore's GW religion and was utterly vilified for it.

Originally Posted by Ricercar71

Okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that AGW is a real thing.

Isn't there some way to deal with it without further empowering bureaucrats, central planners, politicians, governments, and collectivists?

Perhaps a great place to start would be removing all of the tax-supported giveaways to giant oil companies and their interests...?

That's far from enough. All the things that need to happen require pain - up front. The only way that pain is bearable is to make it either mandatory and shared or less painful than some desirable alternative(s).

I think Mike's carbon credit system has a lot of potential to fulfil the second option. Even that is unlikely to be sufficient in and of itself. There will still be the need for grand plans and Promethean projects, complete with their huge shared costs.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

I think Mike's carbon credit system has a lot of potential to fulfil the second option. Even that is unlikely to be sufficient in and of itself. There will still be the need for grand plans and Promethean projects, complete with their huge shared costs.

Maybe.

Would you agree, though, that we shouldn't ASSUME that a priori? If we can do the transition without coercive measures, wouldn't that be better?

It seems to me that we should -- well also that we WILL whether we should or not -- try the gentlest ways first and only go to the others in last resort. Of course, the longer we delay, the more likely it becomes that said "last resort" will become necessary. If we'd started earlier, we'd have a lot more time.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Huh? I'm sorry, but once again I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Actually I think it's the other way around . . .

My point in the post that you quoted was that right-wingers try to dismiss the views of scientists by saying that they are all liberals and therefore biased, while you guys try to dismiss the views of skeptics by saying that they are all libertarians. Same song, different verse.

Not quite. "They're liberals and therefore biased" is a way of dismissing an authoritative claim. Skeptics aren't making an authoritative claim, so that's not what's being done here.

Instead, what I at least was doing was trying to get at the reason why Justin keeps presenting totally far-fetched alternative mechanisms for GW (which in a normal frame of mind he's WAY too smart to take seriously). And the reason I was doing that was not to dismiss what he was saying and try to silence him, but to turn the discussion away from science and towards politics. Because I think if we can show a libertarian-friendly way to deal with the problem, it will make it easier for people like Justin to acknowledge there is a problem to start with.

Originally Posted by zilch

Originally Posted by The Rani

... My point ... was that right-wingers try to dismiss the views of scientists by saying that they are all liberals and therefore biased, while you guys try to dismiss the views of skeptics by saying that they are all libertarians. Same song, different verse.

Umm, methinks you're confusing scientists with our disdain for so-called "journalists" in the mass media today.

p.s. On the subject of this thread, I quoted a legitimate MIT professor, who confidently questioned St. Gore's GW religion and was utterly vilified for it.

H-m-m-m. You picked an oil-industry funded contrarian with good credentials and no publication trail except for skeptical criticism of other people's research, yet you want his opinion, learned though it may be, to be persuasive over that of hundreds of equally credentialed scientists holding the opposite view. Why am I surprised? And why is this important?

The only question that needs to be answered is whether it is wiser to accept or reject the hypothesis/theory of AGW, and this can be done without committing to any particular position on the issue. To determine what makes the most sense, you merely have to compare all the costs that derive from each of the possible responses (from doing nothing to extreme intervention), to the aggregate benefits of that response. Of course, the true value of the response is based on how serious the problem really is. No, you can't know this with absolute certainty, but some responses are overwhelmingly positive (there is virtually no downside to conserving energy, for example), while others are equally negative (there is little good derived from unmitigated use of coal as a fuel).

The entire AWG issue only needs to be invoked for the more expensive or demanding options. Since there's plenty to do without going there, let's get started on those things, now. Changing our energy use pattern away from fossil fuels is easily justified on national security, ecological and economic terms. If it also saves the planet - great! Knowing that a net benefit exists, but arguing that we shouldn't avail ourselves of it because a group of dissidents argues that a theory like AGW can't be proven, is simply foolish ... and foolhardy.

I don't have to know the exact value of some unknown foreign money I find laying on the ground to know I should pick it up. If you plan to pass it by, let me know.

Originally Posted by The Rani

My point in the post that you quoted was that right-wingers try to dismiss the views of scientists by saying that they are all liberals and therefore biased, while you guys try to dismiss the views of skeptics by saying that they are all libertarians. Same song, different verse.

Not all libertarians. The few on this web site honest enough and loyal enough to their values to argue them openly and firmly seem to be libertarians. In Washington, the corporate corporatists have far more influence than the libertarians, but they seem to be using lower key tactics. This is prudent of them. They haven't got the science on their side to be confrontational.

But I'm trying to keep the scientific and political argument somewhat separate, impossible as it might be. I'll talk science. Again, the two main denialist claims are 'invisible stars' and 'CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.' I proposed three reasons to believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the extreme heat of Venus, lab experiments, and observation and modeling of Earth. Justin has attacked the computer models of Earth, but none of the denialists have addressed the other angles.

Only when people cling to science they cannot defend would I care to ask why.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

H-m-m-m. You picked an oil-industry funded contrarian...

And you're a ill-informed, albeit intentional, liar who didn't even bother to read the original Newsweek link I posted nor the rebuttal to which I nuked your nauseous "funded" lie.

Face it, Horn, you don't give a damn about any facts or science in this matter. All you care about is spewing moralistic sermons that make you feel good.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Not quite. "They're liberals and therefore biased" is a way of dismissing an authoritative claim. Skeptics aren't making an authoritative claim, so that's not what's being done here.

I can second this.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Instead, what I at least was doing was trying to get at the reason why Justin keeps presenting totally far-fetched alternative mechanisms for GW (which in a normal frame of mind he's WAY too smart to take seriously). And the reason I was doing that was not to dismiss what he was saying and try to silence him, but to turn the discussion away from science and towards politics. Because I think if we can show a libertarian-friendly way to deal with the problem, it will make it easier for people like Justin to acknowledge there is a problem to start with.

Here, I'm not quite with Brian. I have no problem with implementing libertarian friendly approaches first, and going government mandated only when we have to. The problem is if we don't get past the bogus denialist science, we won't be aware of what must be done to achieve various goals.

It seems some are willing to accept a 'minor extinction event.' Land values go up in Canada and Siberia, and go down where seacoast properties used to be. Traditional crops might no longer flourish in their traditional zones. Some areas near the tropics will no longer be able to sustain their populations. The problem with unemployed young males being attracted to insurgent warlords will grow worse. The specifics of the resulting politics are yet to be defined, but it seems safe to assume the have nots will find a way to blame the haves. Meanwhile, the haves will want to make the minor extinction event as pleasant as possible... meaning they will cling to the life style to which they have become accustomed.

I just don't see where less than a Fourth Turning scale social transformation followed by a First Turning scale rebuilding of infrastructure is going to do it. Even then, it will not be enough. My crystal ball is becoming a bit clearer. The new Awakening values are going to proclaim that whatever we are about to do won't be seen as enough. We are the generations that thought a 'minor extinction event' wouldn't be so bad.

So perhaps I'm a bit less tolerant than some about bogus pseudo science.

Originally Posted by The Rani

while at the same time claiming that everyone else has a hidden agenda.

There's nothing hidden about it. It's smack out in the open.

Originally Posted by Ricercar71

Okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that AGW is a real thing.

Isn't there some way to deal with it without further empowering bureaucrats, central planners, politicians, governments, and collectivists?

Perhaps a great place to start would be removing all of the tax-supported giveaways to giant oil companies and their interests...?

Again, I already made that point. There are several things done today to encourage fossil-fuel consumption, among which are many measures taken to socialize the operating costs for extraction and distribution. Doing away with those would make a very logical first step -- followed by a 'pause-to-see-how-much-of-an-effect-it-had', since we really don't know the marginal effect of CO2 accumulation on the global climate.

But the Believers are adamant -- as Brian's thesis-on-ideologies makes clear -- not only that AGW is real, but that any solutions that do not involve the rapid, permanent slashing of liberty are no good at all.

Makes you wonder what, exactly, their main priorities are...

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

The problem is if we don't get past the bogus denialist science, we won't be aware of what must be done to achieve various goals.

I realize that makes logical sense, Bob. The problem here is that human beings don't. You're scaring people. You need to stop doing that, or they won't listen.

It seems some are willing to accept a 'minor extinction event.'

A little late to worry about that, don't you think? We already have one.

I just don't see where less than a Fourth Turning scale social transformation followed by a First Turning scale rebuilding of infrastructure is going to do it.

So exactly what leverage do you consider need be used to bring those things about?

Originally Posted by Justin '77

But the Believers are adamant -- as Brian's thesis-on-ideologies makes clear -- not only that AGW is real, but that any solutions that do not involve the rapid, permanent slashing of liberty are no good at all.

Would you please translate that from Justinian into normal English so I can understand what you're talking about? I've advocated a shift from subsidising fossil fuels to subsidising efficiency and green energy instead. Is that "rapid, permanent slashing of liberty" in the private language you seem to be employing? If so, could you please define the phrase in quotes for the sake of us who are linguistically challenged?

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Doing away with those would make a very logical first step -- followed by a 'pause-to-see-how-much-of-an-effect-it-had', since we really don't know the marginal effect of CO2 accumulation on the global climate.

The premise of the hypothetical was that we know enough to go on, and that consequently we need to transform our energy economy into one that is net-carbon-neutral, i.e., adds zero (or very near zero, or even negative) CO2 to the atmosphere on a net basis (i.e., we can add some, but only to the extent we also take it out).

The question is what steps need to be done to make that happen. The exercise is to see if we can do it in a way that doesn't require curtailment of liberty or expansion of government beyond what's already being done. If we agree that taking that "logical first step" would not suffice to do this, then we need to consider second and perhaps third steps.

We're still a long way from rationing, central planning, or concentration camps so far.

Edit: You know, it just occurred to me that one reason we're running around in circles is that all of us participating here are Boomers and Xers. A few Millies might cut through this crap.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Dude, you didn't just ask why and wait for them to respond, you came up with your own self-serving answer. Now, how scientific is THAT?

I've been asking for science all along. Justin, to give him some credit, has been at least trying to bring up specifics of what might be wrong with the the results coming out of the scientific community. Ricercar71 is asking good questions and seems open to learn. Mike has really done his homework. There are others tied to reality.

But right now, if you can pardon some stretching of the term, the 'scientific' critiques proposed to pretend the main line science is flawed are 'invisible stars' and 'CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas.' I'm wide open to your providing another line of criticism. Quote a peer reviewed paper, rather than a press sound byte. Make a claim that glaciers are not melting. Whatever. If you don't like my approach to the scientific questions, define your own challenge. 'Invisible stars' and 'CO2 is not a greenhouse gas' were claims made by Justin which he has not been able to defend. I feel proper to keep pushing at Justin's claims until he either releases them or succesfully defends them. His style, though, is just to fade into silence for a while, then return and reassert his claims as if no one will remember he hasn't rebutted the flaws in his 'science.'

If you don't like the political arguments, join the scientific arguments. If you hold a political opinion about scientific work, without being able to back your politics with science, expect a few comments about your political values.

And if you want to do pure partisan sniping at motives and character, expect pure partisan sniping at your motives and character. Frankly, we've had enough of that, and I'd as soon move in other directions.