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Cap and Trade is worse than millions of people dying? Because that was the actual proposed policy solution. That and slowly phasing out old coal plants.
What exactly are the proposed policy solutions that are worse than large chunks of currently inhabitable Earth becoming uninhabitable?
You only spout this sort of bigoted ######## because you know the Amish won't slap your ugly mug.
I didn't know that you weren't status quo. This is part of the problem. I just don't get what people get out of claiming that global warming doesn't exist.
A basic tenet of systems theory is that you can't solve the unintended consequences of differentiation (that is, systematization) by further differentiation. That means you can't solve the problem created by, say, industrialization by further industrializing (technologizing). This should be clear on the face of it. Any further development of technology will require MORE CO2 emissions at every level: people need to go to work to dream up the idea, they need a building to do the work in, the smooth functioning of which depends on CO2 emitting technologies. The technology will need to be built by mining from the earth whatever raw materials are necessary and transporting them with CO2 emitting technologies and on and on.
To solve the unintended consequences (global warming) you need to re-order the system that created it, which means interrupting its ability to continue doing what it's doing (in systems terms, arresting autopoeisis or the ability to make itself from itself). Scaling back is probably the only solution.
I think it was very respectful of him to stifle his laughter so fully.
Even if we accept that, "warmest period of the last 1000 years" is a pimple on an elephant's ass compared to the life of the planet.
Right-wingers hardly have a monopoly on not wanting to scale back.
Unless the technology being developed is a carbon neutral or better energy source. Which we happen to already have in nuclear (when compared to all other energy sources).
The liberals really screwed up by ditching God and the Bible. If everyone agreed the Earth was 2,000 years old, it would be a lot easier for them to make their case.
The tornado was yesterday.
I think the shrinking rain forest problem has been solved!
Not using huge amounts of money and resources to
redistribute wealthattempt the silliness of altering the climate.(As if the climate can be altered by "using CF bulbs, buying stuff locally, and trying not to drive our cars so much and not to use so much electricity." People who believe this really are living in a fantasy world, and they not ought be taken seriously.)
No. We could deal with shifts (rising seas and such) as they happen.
Wasting vast amounts of money and resources.
Besides, the Sun's going to blow up first and who the hell are we gonna blame that on? There's no play to call for that one.
Yeah, let's make everything nuclear. There will be no unintended consequences from that decision. I wonder why I didn't think of that. Nuclear just isn't a safe option. Look at Japan. For decades they've been banging the "safe nuclear" drum. Humanity just can't guarantee that it can safeguard nuclear material until it's not radioactive anymore.
At some point, yes you could create a system that was entirely self-sustaining using just, say sunlight, to be friendlier to the planet and its inhabitants than nuclear power. But the time to reach that point is probably many hundreds of years of CO2 emissions. Once again, I just don't get it. What is so bad about scaling back?
Plus the Rapture is right around the corner, we should be focusing on more important things than long-term survival of species.
If he doesn't, he's not alone.
Yes and no. The governments of the world would love to have all the money and power that would come from a global tax scheme. Self interest? I expressed a desire to allow China, India, Brazil, African nations to seek better lives though economic growth. I pointed out the folly it is to think in the near future we are going to manage to cut CO2 and allow millions and millions from these nations to rise out of poverty. From my chair, "liberals" are motivated by vanity here. They want to feel good about themselves by merely driving a Prius or buying an expensive carbon offset for their jet setting ways.
The Rapture is so last year. This is the year of the Mayans!
I actually don't know that because the temperature data by month jumps up and down so much.
I've seen trendline graphs that show it leveling out around 4 or 5 years ago, but that's really just a simple trendline as is the 0.13 Celsius per decade.
I've also seen Christy and Spencer's data critiqued, but for the most part I think what major problems it might have had has been pretty well sorted. I doubt the data is perfect, but I'd suspect it's less flawed than other temperature reading methods.
Like I said, this isn't my field and to the extent I wanted to know something about the subject I looked up the temperature record. Because that's the only thing I could evaluate myself without having to take one side's word for it over the other. Yes I know what side Christy and Spencer are on (notionally anyway), but I think their temperature record is now at a place where it holds up to scrutiny fairly well.
Sounds to me like a market inefficiency ready to be exploited!
...Yes?
Typical anti-technology, anti-science rant against nuclear. Yea, let's look at what happened in Japan....what? You don't think technology improves? We are much more likely to solve the weaknesses in nuclear than we are to create a better energy technology in the next 50-100 years. In nearly all other known energy production sources, we are bumping up against the laws of physics in trying to expand efficiency.
The nuclear question is how I call the bluff of the global warming crowd. Here we have a solution to hundreds of millions if not billions of people facing sure death due to global warming and we have an energy solution that Einstein himself helped develop, yet that's not good enough because of safety risks.
You freak when "conservatives" don't even try on this issue, you freak because "what if we are wrong", yet here is a solution, viable today, and in full use today, yet some relatively little accident causes you to crap your pants.
Sorry, but you and all of your friends are bluffing. You don't want a solution, you want control, you hate consumption, growth etc....you hate Africans, the Chinese, Indians, etc.
And yet the Irish, perhaps the most repugnant homonid to ever pass out in its own vomit, gets away unscathed? Shame! Shame!
Wow. How bizarre.
That's what I feel about the soccer and basketball threads. But I don't pop in to tell them that I'm above it all.
Torii Hunter was trying to exploit it.
But he picked the wrong home.
But Vlad does, cause he's an #####.
I'm not anti-technology, and you're off your rocker again when you claim that "liberals" are anti-technology. That's just stupid. It is, frankly, why I think it's pointless to discuss this or any issue with you. At some point you just go all haywire and make repugnant and idiotic claims that have nothing to do with anything. You started there tonight, got more reasonable (I mean I felt like we could disagree and that was OK) in the middle, and now you're back in bizarro land claiming that liberals don't like technology.
Anyway, I've had enough and I'm going to bed.
It's those damn progressives again. You tell 'em!
Agree. Piehole is actually reasonable on Global Warming with a dose of emotion thrown in. I saw Jim post the question on political threads. There were mostly cry babies on there saying they were scared to go on this site because occasionally 1 in 5 threads becomes political.
I don't think it's that high. But posting a story like this has nothing to do with baseball, clearly. No way +OPS discussions are held here in this thread. The political threads are fine with me as long as they don't appear early in what otherwise would be a good baseball thread.
China and India are too big to just sit back and take it, of course. See the recent situation w/ the EU aviation carbon scheme, and China and India telling the EU (and Airbus as punishment) to go screw themselves.
Anyhow all that to say that I know that those RCMP officers came with hands on their weapons but not with the weapons drawn. Too much danger of accidental discharge under stress (or so I was told). Different places may have different policies though. (Plus, when you have to respond even though you "know" it's a false alarm there's probably some complacency)
You are Magneto and I claim my five pounds.
I can only assume this "Consensus" is a new Jim Lee super-group, yes?
This is not at all what happened. The guidelines were part of a broader program of reform, the culmination of 20+ years of work to standardize federal criminal code. The enabling legislation for the establishment of sentencing guidelines passed in 1984.
Congress didn't spaz out after Len Bias died adding many new drug laws to the federal books? I think you should check your history.
As I said, Len Bias dying didn't cause the only law on this subject to be written, but it was huge and had many unintended consequences. Lots of knee jerking and opportunism. What makes our American system of government so great is it usually requires great time to make dramatic change. So drawn out, usually the process itself allows the public sufficient debate, to where the public can accept either outcome.
1986 Laws Post Bias.
source: Len Bias – the death that ushered in two decades of destruction
It is true that in the broader sweep of earth's history, we are living in a rather cold period. It has been much warmer in the past. It was much warmer in the Cretaceous. It was much warmer in the Eocene, with carbon dioxide levels 8 to 10 times the current levels. And quite a bit of the reason why it is colder now has to do with carbon dioxide being pulled from the atmosphere by the weathering of the Himalayas and by a freakish event (lasting 100,000 years or so) 50 million years ago in which large blooms of a particular fern sank into anoxic bottom water in an isolated Arctic Ocean and didn't decay. And Antarctica, sitting right over the pole and isolated by circumpolar ocean currents, is part of the reason it has stayed relatively cold.
But the problem is that human agricultural civilization developed at the temperatures and ocean levels of this colder period. Our crops and animals were tamed for this climate; we farm river deltas that would submerge with just a modest rise in ocean level. To change that at a rapid pace is to invite vast human misery.
------
Oh, and on a different subject: armed responses and people getting shot dead. There's a case unfolding in the Los Angeles area (Pasadena, I think). A man called 911 to say that two men had waved guns in his face and taken his backpack and a laptop computer, and they were still in the area. The police responded quickly and a very high level of tension, since they expected to confront armed robbers. They located the two men. One of the subjects made an unfortunate twitch. The police shot him dead. The suspects, including the dead one, were not carrying guns. And there was no laptop. And there's a surveillance video which shows them lifting the backpack from an unoccupied parked car - which makes them thieves but not robbers. At this point, the DA has come up with a unique response, inventive enough to be a Law and Order plot device: charge the 911 caller with involuntary manslaughter. (Whether anything more than "filing a false police report" will stick remains to be seen.)
This is the single argument that really gets to me. Let me rephrase this statement to demonstrate how stupid it is.
"Temperatures remain at/near global record highs for 10 years. Arthoprogenic global warming confirmed further by continuing global high temperatures."
I'd argue that this is the mostly the result of the plan by the folks who started the push back (mostly big coal). There seem to have been a few key decisions made fairly early. First, rather than attempt to fight on "scientific" grounds (when I say "scientific" I have in mind things like the asbestos industry who have scientists who claim to be independent but routinely bill industry members and who crank out papers that others can't reproduce) but rather to
a) cast aspersions on the motives of the people involved (in particular the scientists. Though Al Gore's involvement as a point man was a huge bonus for the strategy)
b) recast it as a partisan issue (again Gore helps)
Making it easier for these strategies to work is the tendency of a large number of people to talk in terms of what I'd call the 100% solution (ie scaling back).
Again pimping for the Economist, they had an article on the costs of measures that can be taken to combat climate change. Many range from very expensive to insanely expensive, but by their estimation about 30% of the measures are either relatively low cost or next to no cost (though they would create winners and losers). Al Gore (and many folks of a similar mindset) are utterly uninterested in partial measures or measures designed to mitigate the consequences of climate change. And if you frame it as all or nothing, it's going to be mighty tempting to just roll the dice.
Ray, that's practically impossible. If seas start to rise like environmentalists predict, there is no way to deal with it without a decade or two of dedicated preparation. Just look what Netherlands is doing to protect its coast, and they doubt it will hold if sea rises more than five meters. And in US New York will be flooded, large parts of Florida, most of coastal US. Without long preparation, the only thing left will be evacuation.
There is only one way to realistically significantly reduce CO2 emissions: nuclear energy. A lot of it. US should increase its NPP capacity 10 times in the next 20 or so years, with Europe, Russia, India and China following. That would remove coal and gas fired power plants and also create enough of surplus electric energy to switch to electric cars. Anything else, renewable energy, energy conservation, whatever, simply doesn't have enough capacity and is way too expensive.
Problem with nuclear waste (high-level nuclear waste) is mitigated by its low volume. With reprocessing (a must, with fast breeder reactors, for such an increase in nuclear power), volume is further reduced. With proper care, nuclear waste can be kept in specially designed warehouses (under guard) with no risk for guard or population.
The future energy source is nuclear fusion. The problem is, we are at least 50 years, probably closer to 100, from developing self-sustainable fusion at reasonable price. There are even some suggestions that the favourite (and most invested in) technology of the last 30 + years will never make economic sense, that we will have to go back and start developing another technologies, but with technological advances, nuclear fusion as Earth's primary power source is virtually a certainty. But until then, we would need at least two life-times of classic nuclear energy (fission).
Added bonus of going nuclear: biodiesel would not be needed, land will be used again for food, and not fuel production. With transport turning to electricity, oil prices would fall maybe even to single digits. And there would be enough oil for foreseeable future for fertilizers and chemical processes. There would be no need for energy conservation, so we could keep our light bulbs, instead of switching to ones that are more efficient, but less friendly for the eyes.
So what?
If global warming is as big a risk as you say, one Chernobyl or Fukushima every 30 years is a small price to pay (not that we can't do better).
Frankly, the death toll from Fukushima is likely to be a tiny fraction of those who died in the Tsunami Even a horrible nuclear accident is just not a huge deal.
Note: Not really anti-nuclear.
Honest question: Is it really logically sound to conclude that being against one type of technology makes you altogether and "typically" anti-technology and anti-science?
Uh, that's the point: that it's tremendously complex. And therefore when people like MCOA claim to have it all figured out, I call ########.
You don't hand over the economy to people who claim to have such a tremendously complex issue all figured out.
And? So we evacuate.
True. I've only lightly skimmed, so it may have been said, but the one time I called police to my house (came home to discover the door kicked in), the first two on the scene were very definitely in defensive mode. One knocked, then backed away about 5 feet and place his hand on his weapon. The other was just to the side of the first and about 15 feet back, also with hand on his weapon. When I opened the door they asked my name and then to see ID. Not until they were satisfied I was the owner and the guy who made the call did they relax.
I have no idea what, exactly, that adds to the conversation, but they certainly didn't just pull up and assume the white guy was okay. And I was glad for it. Would they have given a black guy a harder time? Quite possibly, although one of the cops was black. But they definitely viewed me as a potential threat and made it visibly clear that is what they thought of me. Can't really blame them.
I also thought one of them might shoot me after their crime scene guy spent a couple of hours taking prints off my deck, then asked who had been out there recently. I told them I'd had a party three days earlier and about 50 people passed through. Then I thought he'd shoot the tech when I told him no one asked me that before they started. Fun evening.
I mean, "I'm the homeowner" seems like a rather natural thing for a criminal to say.
This. Obviously.
What types of areas are more dispensible? Chernobyl, or the entire coastline of the United States and the Netherlands?
How is this even a debate?
If global warming is truly the danger it's purported to be (and I tend to believe the science), why isn't there a major national effort afoot to improve and build a raft of new nuclear energy facilities?
Most proponents of moving off of fossil fuels are supportive of new nuclear power plants, to some degree. The French have gotten pretty good at building those efficiently and safely. It's almost always noted as part of the short term solution, at the very least.
But hey, keep hitting those scarecrows if that's easier for you.
Right ... that's why zealots like Al Gore are out there pounding the drums for nuclear energy plants as opposed to the biodiesel stupidity in which he has a large financial interest.
Keep swinging. That mean old stuffed headed golem you've constructed surely is the most difficult of interlocuters, I'm sure.
We are always 50 years from sustainable fusion.
No need. The referee just counted 10 and I'm busy putting my belt back on.
It'll probably end up getting thousands of posts, like all the pointless threads around here do.
1. Liberals are derided for wanting to see us move away from fossil fuels to other, new, clean technologies.
2. Liberals are derided for supportint the consensus of (97%? 99%? I forget the number, but it's near unanimous) climate scientists that human-enhanced global warming is happening.
Yea, the two defining science/technology issues being debated in this thread (and really, the two biggest science issues of our time) really show how Luddite-ish we liberals are.
I thought they were being derided for being so anti-nuclear when the alternative is the eradication of the world's coastlines.(*)
It's no great badge of honor to be "pro-science" yet be so unwilling to engage a simple cost-benefit ledger.
(*) You aren't going to power a modern economy with wind turbines, sun rays, and cow ####. And when Al Gore talks alternative energy, he's talking his book. (In the Wall Street sense.)
Your aversion to any sort of dialog that actually engages the question is duly noted.
Again.
If I accidentally set off the alarm (i.e. by going into the garage first, and not being able to hear the beeping control panel), I will just tell the alarm monitoring company that I'm home, and everything is okay. If I'm away from home, I send a responder. The last time I had a break-in, I had a similar experience to Bunyon. I was away, and arrived at about the same time as the police car. The officers immediately had me verify my identity as they surveyed the scene.
I engaged it entirely. What's the best solution to the apparently warming planet? Nuclear power.
Why? Because its downside is wildly overstated (*) and the alternatives are expensive, ineffective, and require too much government subsidy and involvment. Moreover, expecting China and India to voluntarily stop spewing materials that tend to cause climate warming is entirely unrealistic.
(*) Nuclear energy would be a desirable alternative even if the earth's temperatures were the same as they were in the late 70s. The human and monetary cost of keeping the arteries of oil commerce clear and secure dwarf Chernobyl, Japan, and other nuclear accidents.
Been some stuff recently on re-trying the whole Thermite/salts nuclear plants. People think they can fix the reasons why they didn't work in the 60's. They are supposedly more safe than water cooled sites, but there's a lot of reluctance to build a prototype plant because we don't have a bunch of history with it.
Also, on the national scene, nuclear is a no-go due to massive NIMBYism regarding it. We do have a representative republic, so politicians have to come up with programs that have a chance at success. I don't get the point of mentioning over and over again that it's a solution. Republicans won't even sign off on a bill to rebuild/modernize the electric grid. You would need that before anything else.
Nuclear power is part of a solution. Nuclear power is not "the best solution." You only state that because it's the official fall back canard for people whose tribal allegiances require them to not consider "lefty" options.
Hey whatever it takes to keep those big clown pants from falling down. Why those pants are so big, Al Gore could wear them! Because he's fat!
I was about to say, this is the great thing about Rickey-- he sees a weak-armed catcher and a napping defense, and he could swipe a bag to pad the record, but Rickey's better than that, Rickey doesn't take candy from babies, and Rickey doesn't dunk on white boys. And then I see this:
Most proponents of moving off of fossil fuels are supportive of new nuclear power plants, to some degree. The French have gotten pretty good at building those efficiently and safely. It's almost always noted as part of the short term solution, at the very least.
This is the New York-Penn League, Rickey. You're better than this. You could get this thread shut down 8 times before they even realize you posted. But what's the point? Why crush their dreams, man?
The point is to pretend like you're offering a "solution" while merely digging deeper into your partisan foxhole and blaming everything bad in the world on the other side.
The fans come to see Rickey run, man. Rickey ain't gone disappoint the fans.
Oooh la la, check out Monseur Frenchy here! If you love berets and socialism so much why don't you just move there? I bet you'll like it, they call Freedom Fries just "fries" over there, so you won't even have to think about the freedom you hate so much while you're eating them with a side order of snails.
Despite what some want people to think, nuclear still has problems - first, when things go wrong, they go spectacularly wrong; second, the waste is still a huge problem with "bury it until we find a solution" the only solution so far. It's not that liberals are anti-nuke; it's that they see the potential problems as not worth the costs. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
Nope; I've already said several times that I generally believe the science and believe affirmative steps should be taken to roll back the warming. I'm just more wise and realistic about what those steps should be.
It's a scientific/empirical question whose answers are essentially technocratic. So when non-technocratic solutions are proposed, I tend to blanche. That's what happens when you're a centrist in today's America. You're surrounded by screaming ideologues on the left and screaming ideologues on the right. The extent to which leftists are marinated in ideology and are unable to see clearly is demonstrated by their inablity to distinguish a centrist from a "conservative." We see it here regularly, most recently in this exchange.
Nuclear fusion is the power of the future and always will be!
Because most of the left isn't actually serious about global warming. They're split between people who want to bask in self-satisfaction for driving a Prius and bringing their own hemp bags to the grocery store and people who think they can use the cover of SCIENCE to get a government stranglehold on the economy.
That solution would come more quickly if we weren't wasting time and resources pretending you can power the world with cow ####.
Again, why can't we even get a bill to make the national electric grid more modern/efficient?
Opposition to Nuclear doesn't break cleanly on ideological grounds.
A technocratic answer that includes some new nuclear, some alternative energies, a drastic rebuild of the grid, and a carbon tax.
Statements like this is why people never "confuse" you for a centrist, by the way.
At some point, yes you could create a system that was entirely self-sustaining using just, say sunlight, to be friendlier to the planet and its inhabitants than nuclear power. But the time to reach that point is probably many hundreds of years of CO2 emissions. Once again, I just don't get it. What is so bad about scaling back?
There are no "safe" options, all energy sources have a downside, and we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Too often we in the US look for the "silver bullet" solution, but there isn't one of them, either. We'll need a plethora of "base-metal"-type strategies, and conservation is an important part of that. However, it's the degree of "scaling back" that can be the sticking point.
Many conservatives (I'm one of them) aren't especially comfortable with increased gov't command/control of economic systems, and we're also wary when we read predictions that without an 50% (or even 80%) reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, global warming will go runaway. Even a 1/3 reduction would be a recipe for revolution. Developing countries aren't going to accept economic stagnation that's viewed as being caused by their more fortunate developed neighbors. There's currently no "global" food shortage, due in large part to this continent's breadbaskets, though there are local/regional shortages that are sometimes tragically acute. It's a distribution issue, not production, and usually with politics as the trigger. An economic shift that might result in a major drop in North American food production would likely cause more deaths than are being projected by even the most gloom-and-doom AGW predictors.
Well, that leaves Gore out.
And this would seem to leave Gore in - but it turns out he was just in it to make money.
Leftists have been using SCIENCE to attempt to redistribute wealth for years. Always have, always will. This is no different.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Ah, the circle jerk. A classic.
Why would you think this? You don't think the developed nations can significantly cut greenhouse gasses over the next 45-50 years? And if they can, the benefits of renewable energy will make it that much easier for less developed countries to implement them - they won't have 150 years of infrastructure and inertia to overcome.
Also to undermine the biblical truth that we were created by a loving god and expelled from paradise after being conned by a talking snake. If people really evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
I don't know. Why do you think we can't?
True. It's why I said most.
That's not the relevant question -- which is whether they will. It's unlikely they'd agree to do so, given the fact that they're trying to lift their economies into the modern world and the best way to do that is through energy-guzzling industry.
If you were a senior Chinese or Indian official would you agree to refrain from burning CO2 when the US and Europe got rich from doing so, thus causing the problem they're now asking you to solve? I wouldn't.
Infrastructure spending has become weirdly politicized. Senior officials would agree to it off the record, and if a Republican president comes in, most likely it would happen. The Tea Party fringe in the House is against infrastructure spending because they view it as stimulus (which it is, but it's not really the point). The Senate Republicans remain devoted to preventing any policy from getting through, no matter what it is.
Basically, Republicans are against infrastructure spending at the moment because they believe it either wasteful or, if not wasteful, helpful to Obama. Some mix of those camps prevents legislation.
China is the largest investor in solar that there is. They've poured billions upon billions into research and subsidies. It's a large part of why the per/KwH price of solar is dropping so fast.
I'd guess that's geo-politically motivated.
They're likely scared shitless that we can cut off their oil imports and destroy their economy with 2 submarines in the Straits of Malacca.
I think this slightly undersells the neoconfederate camp that just opposes it because it's federal.
China is also a dictatorship. If they want to cover hundreds of thousands of square miles with panel farms, they'll do it and the people that live there can go screw. It's much easier to make solar power scalable when you don't need to worry about stuff like property rights or environmental impact.
I'm sure some of it is, but the environmental angle is pretty real in China. Parts of China are in the "set Lake Erie on fire" stage or the "London Smog" phase. Environmental concerns are very real to the population. Especially, because it's China, you have 20 million people in Shanghai that have to deal with the Smog.
Edit:
Yes, indisputably. It's a lot easier to govern if you don't have to worry about congressional Republicans, either.
My point was that China has taken steps to drastically reduce CO2 on their own due to scaling, environmental and geo-political concerns. It's not that hard to see the potential problems of more and more coal plants.
I miss the old days when liberals at least pretended they didn't want to run the U.S. as a dictatorship.
It's been two to three years since Tom Friedman waxed wistfully poetic about the ability of China's one-party system to get the trains running on time.
We saw where that got us. How is it compromise that we always get more government?
If you ask for 10% more, and we give you 5% everytime, we end up in the same place eventually.
Doing nothing would be compromise. No increases, no cuts.
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