Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

Hmm.... The role I seem to be drawn towards is that far more ably played by Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison at previous 3T / 4T cusps. They saw the flaws in the existing culture more clearly than most, anticipated the values of the new culture better than most, and scared people a lot. They anticipated that compromise would not work when most were seeking small solutions or inaction. They stood for strong principles, logic and common sense when others didn't want to see.

Should they have stopped doing that? Should they have abandoned principle? Should they have settled for anything less than the transformation of their societies?

If you like, you can play good cop to my bad cop. See if compromise and polite persuasion will work. Best of luck. I'll stand back for a time with science, logic and common sense and scare people. I seriously hope the voices of moderation and compromise will work this 4T. I just don't see much in the way of historical precedent to see it as likely.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

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 think you are absolutely right. Still, being right isn't useful if no one is willing to plan and prepare for what is coming.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

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?

If we are addicted to CO2 producing technology, I believe the first step is traditionally to get the addict to admit he has a serious problem. Nothing real can be done before that.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Finch, you continue to boggle the mind. Can you explain what you mean by H. sapiens astralis?

Want to really get boggled? Cory Doctorow describes it much better than I can.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

OK, I'll stop being coy. Here's how I see it. Alright, we're all on this great big bus, see, and the bus drove over a cliff a few minutes back. We're all in midair, and we're about due to hit the bottom of the ravine shortly.

No, let's not presume. Let's act. Precipitously and irrationally, if we like. Why not? The alternative (SPLAT) is looming ever closer.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

We're all running around in circles because the Dow just hit another record high; we're still getting while the getting is good.

In other words, there's still lots of yummy snacks to eat on the bus as it plummets toward the bottom of the ravine.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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?

Actually I found it a little interesting that you have generally preached a pretty liberty-neutral course of action, and then all of a sudden you posted:

The real issue involves community versus individuality. Those on this thread who take a skeptical position all seem to be libertarians. Tackling an issue the size of global warming, requiring the kind of change to our economy that one necessitates, means a swing to community. We can't scatter and atomize as much. We have to pull together. Whether it's voluntary or coerced, that means a sacrifice of personal autonomy, at least temporarily.

When you present that as being fundamentally opposed to the goals of folk like myself, you effectively put in the 'coerced' field only.

Maybe I read too much into it. If so, please excuse.

As for your other post:

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

But if we assert that for the purposes of the hypothetic the most liberty-friendly (in fact, absolute positive, from that perspective) steps are not effective; and then so on, does that really get us anywhere? I suppose we could arrange the question such that, from the point of the hypothetical, we know (proven by some very complex squigglies, one presumes...) that only the total removal of the human species from the face of the Earth will stop the catastrophic climate change. But again, what good does that do us?

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

I really must have read too much into that other post.

My humble apologies to you. I mention, without using as an excuse, the fact that I have been mentally elsewhere these last few days...

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

You don't have to convince people that the problem you perceive is real if you're advocating a thing that they want to do anyway. That's a good plan.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

I proposed three reasons to believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the extreme heat of Venus, lab experiments, and observation and modeling of Earth...

Lab Experiments?!?. They'd be the first I had heard of. Links, please!!

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

If we're looking to compare apples to apples -- all the previous extinction events having occurred over several thousand years (at least) -- the rise of homo sap overall could very easily be considered an 'extinction event', given the numbers of species knocked off since then. Ask again in a few dozen million years...

Originally Posted by Bob Butler

'Invisible stars' and 'CO2 is not a greenhouse gas' were claims made by Justin which he has not been able to defend

Strictly speaking (that is, factually), neither of those is a claim I made.

The first I'm not exactly sure how you extrapolated from my pointing out that the solar system is moving very quickly past and through things that: a) we for the most part don't anticipate, and b) affect the Earth's climate even more profoundly than the current changes the models appear to be showing. While I appreciate your attempt to sound-bite your mocking disdain of the fact that there are some things you do not understand, the phrase you picked in this case brushes strongly against flat inaccuracy.

The second isn't even a distortion of anything I've said. So it really shouldn't be terribly surprising that I haven't answered your thrashing and flailing. Your tactic of wordy misrepresentation without an actual rebuttal of substance is usually support enough for the plausibility of the points to which you respond.

You know, the best strawmen have an element or two of correspondence to the view for which they are supposed to stand-in. Maybe you just need more practice?

The Times just put up an article on plant migration, Feeling Warmth, Subtropical Plants Move North. Among other things, the Government seems to want to migrate the gardener's hardiness zone maps north slower than the gardener's associations, so the gardeners are putting out their own maps. For discussion purposes...

Forget the jokes about beachfront property. If global warming has any upside, it would seem to be for gardeners, who make up three-quarters of the population and spend $34 billion a year, according to the National Gardening Association. Many experts agree that climate change, which by some estimates has already nudged up large swaths of the country by one or more plant-hardiness zones, has meant a longer growing season and a more robust selection. There are palm trees in Knoxville and subtropical camellias in Pennsylvania.

But horticulturists warn that it is shortsighted to view this as good news. Warmer temperatures help pests as well as plants, and studies have shown that weeds and invasive species receive a greater boost from higher levels of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, than desirable plants do. Poison ivy becomes more toxic, ragweed dumps more pollen, and kudzu, the fast-growing vine that has swallowed whole woodlands in the South, is creeping northward.

Already, some states are facing the possibility that the cherished local flora that has helped define their identities — the Ohio buckeye, the Kansas sunflower or the Mississippi magnolia — may begin to disappear within their borders and move north.

By the end of the century, the climate will no longer be favorable for the official state tree or flower in 28 states, according to “The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming,” a report released last month by the National Wildlife Federation.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Lab Experiments?!?. They'd be the first I had heard of. Links, please!!

Why am I not surprised you have never heard of it???

The carbon dioxide greenhouse - is it effective?: a lab ICT test (teachers’ notes)

The above isn't a link to a refereed journal. It looks like a high school chemistry teacher's classroom guide. You could do the experiment yourself if you really wanted to. The science isn't profound or new...

Since the Industrial Revolution various industrial processes, including the combustion of fossil fuels, have led to a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which is considered by many scientists to be linked to an increase in the Earth’s average temperature. Since 1896 it has been known that the gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (dinitrogen oxide) help to stop the Sun’s infrared radiation being transmitted straight back into space again once it has been re-radiated by the Earth’s surface.

If the original work was done in 1896, finding the results in a professional journal would be hard. I suppose one could visit a very good university library which keeps old journals. Mike could likely tell you where to look up the constants that came out of such experiments. I'm not surprised that most of the hits in my search were about more advanced aspects of greenhouse warming.

I did find NOAA'a Chemical Sciences Division which does similar work on light absorption and how long various greenhouse gases take to decompose. I saw no mention of CO2 here. CO2 would be old news to them, but the work they are doing seems similar in principle to the high school set up. You can measure the absorption of IR radiation by various gasses in the lab. Figuring out how long stuff will stay in the atmosphere before decaying would be harder. As the properties of the well known gasses such as CO2, Methane and SO2, and how they are removed from the atmosphere are well known, NOAA CSD seems concerned with more exotic chemicals, released in smaller quantities, but with very long term lingering. The ocean's ability to absorb CO2 doesn't occur with other gasses.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Why am I not surprised you have never heard of it???

The carbon dioxide greenhouse - is it effective?: a lab ICT test (teachers’ notes)

The above isn't a link to a refereed journal. It looks like a high school chemistry teacher's classroom guide. You could do the experiment yourself if you really wanted to. The science isn't profound or new...



If the original work was done in 1896..

Oh, my mistake. I thought you said that there were experiments supporting either the AGW contention, or at least supporting the functioning of the model being used. If the experiments you give are all that side has, then you're really saying you have no experiments at all.

Unless you're trying to flog the whole "EEEEK! Denialists claim that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas!" strawman a bit more. In which case, good job; your point is proved, and no one will argue with you about that point ever again (or even for the first time). But I thought we dealt with that one already.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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?



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?

I just outlined a way to go that preserves liberty. Carbon taxes leave choices up to the individual--and creat opportunities.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

any solutions that do not involve the rapid, permanent slashing of liberty are [u]no good at all.

A carbon tax raises the price of certain kids of fuels. How is this a "slashing of liberty".

Oil prices have risen strongly in recent years because of ME instability and rising Chinese demand. Are these a slashing of liberty?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

A carbon tax raises the price of certain kids of fuels. How is this a "slashing of liberty".

A tax in general takes money from (in principle) both sides in a transaction. Under threat of jailing or ultimately death. It has nothing to do with pricing itself, which is morality-neutral, and everything to do with stealing.

While I could imagine a cost premium associated with the use of AGW-agents, the mode of such a cost that does not conflict with liberty is not a tax, but an insurance premium (the ever-available alternative to the paying of which is simply to accept the risk oа operating uninsured upon one's self and be unprotected should one's actions incur significant consequences.)

Taxes are simply free-for-all looting, even further detaching choices from their actual consequences.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

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.

I don't have time to obsessively follow this forum and its every post.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

A carbon tax raises the price of certain kids of fuels. How is this a "slashing of liberty".

Oil prices have risen strongly in recent years because of ME instability and rising Chinese demand. Are these a slashing of liberty?

A tax is a forcible transfer of wealth and property from one to another. That means that ultimately, a gun is put to your head. All taxes are punishments in the end. All subsidies are rewards in the end. Thus, a tax is essentially someone putting a gun to your head and asking you to reward someone whom you do not know.

Currently, vast amounts of waste is subsidized, the risks of few socialized by the many. There are some obvious ones. Some less obvious ones include a large Navy whose purpose is to protect shipping lanes on the high seas, or to guard key strategic straights between points of valuable land. This activity could be shifted to private shipping companies if need be. What happens if this occurs? Prices on imports may go up, but then taxes to pay for the Navy go down. Plus, the hidden taxes of currency devaluation and debt go down.

Another less obvious subsidy is a large standing army garrisoned in hundreds of countries around the globe. Don't you think it's costly to ship them back and forth and feed them, and to fuel their gas-guzzling tanks and hummers?

All subsidy is taken in the form of taxes, which punishes economic productivity. A tax may be direct or it may be sneaky. But, in a sense, nearly ANY activity of the government is a subsidy, since it is focused on a certain group under the guise of being for the good of the many. Taxes do not change the price of things. They simply make the currency worth less, a bad legacy for our children much like AGW might be.

We all know what happened in the extreme case of where a central planning authority tried, tried again, and ultimately failed to set a price for everything: The Soviet Union evaporated.

Economic freedom is ultimately the same thing as individual liberty. You can't muck with one without harming the other.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

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.'

Justin has made a more substantive objection too. He doesn't exactly understand the science but intuits a real issue with his coefficients issue, although the situation is not exactly as he argues it is.

You also do not understand the science either. You claim that scientists put CO2 and other greenhouse gases into containers and study their absorption of IR radiation to show that the greenhouse effect is real. Actually this was done by Angstrom in 1901 in response to Arrhenius's paper in 1896. He placed CO2 and water vapor into a glass tube, shone IR light through it and measured the amount of aborption. The amounts of CO2 and water were chosen to be similar to the amounts a beam of IR light would actually encounter as it passed through the atmosphere. He measured signficiant absorption, which supported the idea that there is a greenhouse effect that warms the Earth above its radiative temperature. He then doubled the amount of CO2 and water and measured no increase in absorption.

He concluded that although the CO2 greenhouse effect was likely responsible for keeping the Earth warmer than the temperature it would be from radiative balance, the absorption bands of CO2 were saturated at the present concentration of CO2 and further additions of CO2 would have little effect on temperature. For fifty years after Angstrom's work the scientific consensus was that increases in CO2 would have little effect on temperature.

So you see it is not a matter of simply studying the absorption of CO2 in the laboratory. If it were, there would be no controversy at all, anthropomorphic climate change would have become an accepted fact a long time ago.

Dear fellow T4Ter Partialists and True Believers,

I invite you to offer solutions to the Human portion of the Global Warming of our Planet on the Homo Global Warming topic on the other forum above:

Please address

Technologies
Taxes, Credits, Subsidies
Populations
Ameliorations
or Other Methods

Yo. Partial Sv.
VKS

I also invite all to make objections to those Partialist and True Believer solutions to a given of HGW.

Thank you.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

A tax in general takes money from (in principle) both sides in a transaction. Under threat of jailing or ultimately death. It has nothing to do with pricing itself, which is morality-neutral, and everything to do with stealing.

There's the crux of it, Brian. Property in general and money in particular.

You can't have liberty without having money. Illusional from my POV, but that's how it is....

How is it stealing when it's not really mine in the first place?

Originally Posted by Justin '77

A tax in general takes money from (in principle) both sides in a transaction.

No it doesn't. It takes it from the buyer.

It has nothing to do with pricing itself,

Of course it does, it is one of the components of the price the buyer pays.

(it has) everything to do with stealing.

You didn't address the other examples I gave, which clarify the situation. Gas prices today are much higher than they were a few years back because futures markets price the stuff higher. As a result more wealth is transferred away from consumers for the exact same benefit as was the case several years ago. Is this theft?

The effect on the consumer is exactly the same as if a tax had been imposed on gas. The effect on the seller is also the same. His product costs more now so he has to charge more. He get the same markup--but faces the possiblity of lost business because of the higher price he must charge.

The only difference is who gets the transferred wealth, futures market speculators or a government.

Does this affect the morality? If so why?

Originally Posted by Justin '77

A tax in general takes money from (in principle) both sides in a transaction. Under threat of jailing or ultimately death. It has nothing to do with pricing itself, which is morality-neutral, and everything to do with stealing.

That's what I was getting at when I asked you to define "rapid and permanent slashing of liberty." I had a feeling you might be using libertarian-speak there instead of regular English.

If you believe that taxes are an unconscionable infringement on liberty, then there is no collective solution to ANY problem, let alone global warming, that will satisfy you. Taxes certainly are coercive, but they are also necessary if any functions of government whatsoever are to be supported.

If a non-anarchist uses words like "rapid and permanent slashing of liberty," he might be referring to something like Bush's misuse of the Patriot Act (at weakest), or (at strongest) something like Stalin's gulag system. He is certainly not referring to a tax, unless perhaps the tax is so weighted against those least able to pay it that it imposes serious hardship. A carbon tax would not meet that criterion.

While I could imagine a cost premium associated with the use of AGW-agents, the mode of such a cost that does not conflict with liberty is not a tax, but an insurance premium

Again we come back to the idea, underlying that one, of holding people legally accountable for the damage they, as individuals, do to others, as individuals. I've pointed out that this will not work when the damage is done to society as a whole, not to any individual within it in particular. When everyone suffers equally, no one suffers especially, and thus no one is in a position to sue.

Originally Posted by Ricercar71

A tax is a forcible transfer of wealth and property from one to another. That means that ultimately, a gun is put to your head. All taxes are punishments in the end. All subsidies are rewards in the end. Thus, a tax is essentially someone putting a gun to your head and asking you to reward someone whom you do not know.

No it isn't. You are free not to buy the product and so not pay the tax, just as you are free not to buy the expensive gas produced by commodity speculation or the expensive homes produced by real-estate speculation. See my example above wrt to the speculators. What is the difference here?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

No it isn't. You are free not to buy the product and so not pay the tax, just as you are free not to buy the expensive gas produced by commodity speculation or the expensive homes produced by real-estate speculation. See my example above wrt to the speculators. What is the difference here?

Erm, there are avoidable and unavoidable taxes. You can avoid a sin tax on cigarettes by not buying cigarettes. You can avoid property taxes by not owning property, or by choosing land in a place with lower property taxes. You can't avoid income tax except by becoming a beggar. (The rich manage to minimize income tax with charitable donations, but they still pay.) I think this is why income taxes (and head taxes, in ancient times) arouse such emotion: it's the fight or flight response of the person trapped by a predator.

Originally Posted by Ricercar

No it isn't. You are free not to buy the product and so not pay the tax, just as you are free not to buy the expensive gas produced by commodity speculation or the expensive homes produced by real-estate speculation. See my example above wrt to the speculators. What is the difference here?

Erm, there are avoidable and unavoidable taxes. You can avoid a sin tax on cigarettes by not buying cigarettes. You can avoid property taxes by not owning property, or by choosing land in a place with lower property taxes. You can't avoid income tax except by becoming a beggar. (The rich manage to minimize income tax with charitable donations, but they still pay.) I think this is why income taxes (and head taxes, in ancient times) arouse such emotion: it's the fight or flight response of the person trapped by a predator

I was talking about gas taxes, not property taxes, head taxes or income taxes.

I was trying to make a comparison between high gas prices due to a tax (which you see as theft) and high gas prices due to high oil prices in the commodity futures market. Do you see the latter as theft too? Why or why not?

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

I seem to need to invent a new category of speech here, similar to the oxymoron (friendly fire, military intelligence).... In a quite similar way, I'm having trouble with 'minor extinction event.'

It's only minor in comparison to MAJOR extinction events. The Chixculub Event at the K/T boundary was a major extinction event... every one of the epoch markers on the posted graph was minor one. We're pretty much causing a minor one now; the intent is to avoid causing a major one.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

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?

Can't survive now. Might survive somewhere else, somewhen else. Once upon a time tropical rainforests grew in Ohio. Not very long ago polar bears roamed there. Gene/egg/seed/embryo banks are for the ages... and also for the stars. What would grow well on Mars? Under the ice on Europa? On Gliese 581c?

We might consider helping some species migrate.

Already in progress.

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?

Heh. Actually, powdered iron supplements are quite effective. There are other tricks; the silt and fertilizer runoff of the Mississippi River has a similar effect. (It's also causing a relative dead zone in areas not getting that lifeblood, which is another good reason to re-engineer the lower Mississippi Basin, on top of post-Katrina hurricane protection via wetland support.) The trick will be to not under- or over-nourish areas; we don't understand the plankton cycle very well, or how things like El Nino and ocean currents should be affecting it.

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.

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. -- Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895

That Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. -- New York Times editorial, January 13, 1920

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. -- New York Times corrections notice, July 17, 1969

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

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.

You rang?