Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting

bricko sends this news from The University of Texas at Austin: Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it's being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where accurate information has previously been unobtainable. The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.

Comments

Queue the deniers

[NoKaOi]

Queue the climate change deniers, who will try to skew this as meaning it's geothermal activity and not our CO2 contributions that are causing ice melt, not realizing that this really means curbing CO2 emissions is that much more important so we don't accelerate it.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

And queue the alarmists that will take every little thing and blow so moronically out of proportion that it bears no resemblance to the data or science.

Both sides are enemies of reason and science. If you have a vested emotional interest in a given conclusion and are inclined to ignore evidence that contradicts that position or inclined to exaggerate/fabricate evidence that supports your position then you're an enemy of reason and science.

And BOTH sides of this issue have lots of those people.

There is a moderate middle that just wants to hear the science and deal with this in a reasonable fashion. But they're shouted down by the fanatics on either side that scream "YOU"RE WITH US OR AGAINST US" while foaming at the mouth like diseased animals.

That is what needs to stop. This issue have been hijacked by political interests... left and right when really it should supersede the factional struggles in our political system.

Global warming is not an issue to be used to profit the political ambitions of democrats or republicans. Socialists or capitalists... or any other label you'd prefer.

Global warming must be an issue that is dealt with in a respectful, bipartisan, and transparent fashion.

Anything short of that and any claim to scientific purity is GONE. Utterly irrelevant. It becomes nothing more then a political struggle with the issue of truth being irrelevant to the process. Power politics against power politics. One screaming stupid face against another screaming stupid face... the winner being decided by who can shout louder and longer.

Choose.

Do you want this to be about science or do you want this to be about who can yell louder? Because if you want it to be about science, the politics need to be put away.

And for that, you're going to have to stop trying to twist people's arms and ACTUALLY convince them. Which will mean compromises and respect for contradiction. It will mean going through a long drawn out process where there is no roughshodding, steamrolling, or other terms for the attempt to push things through without going through due process.

Will this take awhile? How fast is the currently process going? What we have no is sort of like stop and go traffic. Everything rushes forward for a moment and the alarmists think they've suddenly broken through. Only to have the whole thing either stop or outright reverse itself taking away most of those gains. Graph the progress over time and its not going fast if its going at all.

So why not try something else? It can't be slower then what you already have and you might find it more pleasant to actually talk respectfully with people rather then try to undermine their very right to participate in the process at all.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

It means that geothermal activity is caused by CO2 emissions too.

When I drop something, I usually blame gravity.
Everything else that happens, I blame global warming, um... climate change.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Geological processes tend to reduce the global temperature, due to the release of sulpher dioxide which reflects sunlight in the upper atmosphere. Until the 1970s, coal fired power stations had a similar cooling effect, but then scrubbers were added to remove the sulpher, since the resultant acid had other bad effects. So, if we get uncomfortably hot, then we can remove the scrubbers from the smoke stacks and pretend that they are volcanoes.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Queue the climate change deniers

...but what if I don't like being labeled with an epithet (ha, take that, you alarmist!), and furthermore, what if I don't feel like being forced to stand in a line?

Your imperative sentences are strange.

I suppose a queue is better than a stack. Fine. Queue the deniers, but stack the alarmists!

Re:Queue the deniers

[MadKeithV]

I have to respond to this, because it's clearly an attempt at a "balanced" view but missing some very important key points that distort your opinion.

First of all reducing the AGW debate to "both sides" with a neutral "middle ground" is disingenuous - in the count of number of people the balance is very strongly in favor of accepting AGW to degrees ( e.g. this recent set of studies arriving at between 91-97% consensus ). The denialists get disproportionate attention, which is actually a known type of political manipulation (e.g. argument to moderation) and this type of attention has been shown to disproportionately affect people who aren't specialized in the subject matter to moderate their position when no such moderation is required (more on this subject, though I can't find the scientific paper about it right now.

Second, appeal to "scientific purity" is overshooting. Science is constantly advancing, improving models, replacing wrong assumptions with less wrong assumptions. There is nothing "pure" about it, and in no way does it need to be to advance the cause and be useful to our lives. Words such as "purity" are much too loaded to be used, exactly because of the scientific approach. There's no need to deny - the scientific world does not have all the T's crossed and the I's dotted on AGW, just as it doesn't on gravity, physics and quantum theory, but we still happily cross bridges every day. The degree of certainty has long reached sufficient levels to warrant seriously looking at how to realistically (not politically, stupid carbon credits) mitigate instead of discussing a black and white position on AGW's existence.

And thirdly the AGW debate is much bigger than the USA. I understand that you have bipartisan issues across the board (not just AGW, and to be clear: I think both parties are in the wrong) but that doesn't extend to the rest of the world and this is a global issue.

So I think that while I don't entirely agree with your argumentation, I agree with your position. AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree. The challenge is to find solutions, and that's also with science.

Finally, I find the actual article very intriguing and somewhat challenging to my own views on AGW, as evidenced by my first thoughts on this: could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity? But that's a conjecture from an explanation that wouldn't challenge AGW, and real science must of course also look for other hypotheses.

Re:Queue the deniers

[WinstonWolfIT]

It's clear the apocalypse is coming -- whether it takes the form of Communists vs. the West, a new Crusades, or climatic change, our grandchildren are well and truly fucked.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? Global warming must be dealt with? WHY? You think trading carbon credits is going to do a fucking thing to save the planet? Do you think anything you do in your first world country makes a fucking bit of difference when it's the rest of the world making the crap you buy, spewing out the toxins? By all means, drink more bottled water, and drive an electric car. all of which causes more harm to the planet to go "green" so you can feel better. Go visit a 3rd world country and see where your copper, nickel, and rare earth metals come from to make your "green" parts. You're living in a fantasy world, and there's NOTHING you can do, short of killing yourself to stop spewing more co2 yourself. Don't eat, don't drink, and don't buy a damn thing.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Queue: To get in line. A favorite pasttime of the British.

Cue: A prompt to tell an actor it's time to go on stage. "That's my cue".

It's tricky, which one to use to alert a waiting group of deniers that now's the time to get in line for the echo chamber? Cue the queue?

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

You're just trying to justify the ongoing politicization of the issue.

Which is fine. The price of that is that the science is irrelevant and that the issue becomes one purely of politics.

That is the price. And that is not a decision I can make for you. You must make that decision yourself for yourself. But I do think its important that you understand that this choice has a cost.

You are calculating that it is more expedient to attain your goals by applying political pressure rather then go through the tedious process of actually gathering consent.

However, in doing that you force opposing forces to likewise employ political pressure. And when political pressure meets political pressure - logic is irrelevant.

I find it to be rather puzzling that people that think they have the stronger scientific argument have done more then any other to make the science irrelevant to the discussion. You've dramatically undermined your position by doing this and none of the science will be relevant in the discussion until the nature of the discussion changes.

You're going to bring up poor little villagers in the pacific that have lost their village or something due to encroaching tides due to AGW... and the opposition is going to talk about rust belt cities turned into urban wastelands due to punitive ecological controls.

You are not winning the political argument. The international coalition is toothless and if anything more against you then for you. And that is made all the stronger by the poor economy.

In short you have two options.

1. You can have the humility to have the discussion the way you should have in the first place without dismissing people or calling the science settled.

2. You can make this political, render the science irrelevant, and lose to entrenched economic forces.

Choose. You can moderate your position and actually get somewhere while enlightening everyone to the risks and problems of the issue. Or get downed out in a political screaming match and lose.

I know you don't like your choices but those are your choices. Pick one.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

stack yo mama

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

I never said anything about carbon credits. Kindly don't put words in my mouth or assume you know all my positions simply because I said we should do something about it.

Something is an extremely vague statement. Something could be just talking about it. Something could be a great deal more. You can't assume what I would do simply because I said "something".

As to my preferred means of dealing with the issue. I'd like to move more to closed loop fuel systems. That is, rather then taking oil out of the earth, I'd like to grow the fuel or create it using atmospheric carbon which can safety be reemitted without altering the background level of CO2 because all the CO2 used to create it came from that source.

Obviously such systems are more expensive so I wouldn't suggest we throw a huge amount of money at them. But we can do things like us solar, geothermal, nuclear (I am a big fan of nuclear power), wind etc to power chemical plants that produce fuel FROM atmospheric carbon. These plants could ramp up their production and ramp it down with the supply of power from the renewable source. This would allow us to store solar energy in a way that we cannot do right now because batteries are frankly terrible places to store energy.

I do not believe in carbon credits. I do not believe in big taxes on CO2 emitters. And I do not believe in anything that significantly increases the price of anything.

Furthermore, the sort of technology I'm talking about can be miniaturized. That means you could have a fuel refinery in your garage that makes enough fuel to keep your car filled and is supplied entirely by solar power on your roof or maybe just electricity from the grid turned into fuel.

I am not an enemy of the modern world and I'm very happy to be reasonable on everything. Don't assume I'm a fanatic please... I'm a nice guy and my ideal solution is one where EVERYONE is happy.

Re:Queue the deniers

[CurryCamel]

Well, at least our children (we?) are not fucked, as the previous generation managed to thwart the nuclear apocalypse.
Should we do any less with the threat of the apocalypse we are facing now?

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate is change dear. Saying "Climate change" is like saying "TCP Protocol" or "NSA Agency".
There is a long way between accepting that weather patterns are changing and that a corrupt but popular, politician can assign a beurocrat the task
of deciding who can produce what, where and how much it should cost the consumer. That is in short the goal of all greenies and commies.
Full control of production ability.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't rely on a poll in the Gardian for being balanced. Their small and shrinking readership is made up increasingly of those with hard left views, due to the content of the paper.

Incidentally the BBC advertises its jobs in there, which is why it also has such a biassed view toward left issues ( such as the famous notice board with "stop the cuts" type newspaper clippings )

Re: Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

"You're just trying to justify the ongoing politicization of the issue." -- No reasonable Individual could read the comment to which You refer and come to that conclusion. GP was clearly stating how the existence of AGW is not a political issue anymore than asking "Is 15 bigger than 5?" is a political issue.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

Any problem which requires cross-the-board action to resolve will quickly become political, and will never be separated from politics. In more sane countries where the them-vs-us mentality isn't so pronounced, the politics doesn't degrade into a yelling match. That seems to be reserved for developing countries and the US.

Now, that being said, that does not reflect on the science one bit. The science is sound, the problems are real, and the time to implement solutions is now. How loudly people argue over it doesn't change the research, so your claim about "scientific purity" is abject nonsense from the get-go - science doesn't work like that.

There is no respect in a scientific discussion for those who ignore the scientific method and the findings that result from it. There simply can't be, by very definition. If we are having a discussion on scientific findings, and someone says they're bogus (but can't show how, or tries to show but their claims are demonstrably bogus themselves, as is the case with every AGW cynic) and sticks to their guns even though their issues have been debunked time and time and time again, how should the discussion proceed? Accept their opinion as equally valid as the scientific findings so as to not upset them by highlighting their inanity? That's no answer.

Re:Queue the deniers

[peragrin]

The problem isn't climate change. the problem is that glacier melts every 5,000 years or so. guess when it last melted? 5,000 years ago, Maybe it melted back then because the pharaohs were putting out too much CO2 with their slave labor in building the pyramids.

Is CO2 having an affect and should we try to curb it. Of course. is the planet getting warmer, Of course. Do we Want clean air to breath, of course. Those are good reasons why to clean the air. The planet however under goes constant temperature shifts. it shifts from 4 degrees colder to 4 degrees warmer every 20-40 thousand years. We don't have accurate non localized temperature maps for more than 50 years. Ice core Samples, tree samples, etc are all immediately affected by the local temperature. and we are trying to guess planetary temperature from two or maybe three locations. I am sorry but that is not statistically possible.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

1. The science is settled. This is not up for negotiation just to make some scientifically-illiterate numpty happy
2. The science is not political, but the solutions are, as they require broad cooperation to implement. That is non-negotiable, too.

The real options are:

1. Accept the scientific method, accept the findings of the world's climatologists, and implement solutions.

oh, wait, that's it. You don't seem to understand the difference between the science and the politics.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Layzej]

To be clear, the researchers did not find an increase in geothermal activity under the west Antarctic ice sheet, they just mapped sources of geothermal activity and found that there were significant sources. If the models do not take these into account they may greatly underestimate the rate of collapse.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

Your closed loop system doesn't work as it's woefully inefficient, and as energy demands increase, the amount of temporary CO2 in the atmosphere will increase. It will help (slightly) but is rather short-sighted, and is no long-term solution. Also using electricity to create fuel from the atmospheric CO2 suffers from the same issue - it will not reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will continue to rise even if everyone used your system.

The real solutions are:

1. Carbon sequestration (a fair bit of research is required)
2. Sensible nuclear power (new reactors & fuel cycles)
3. Improved use of renewable and carbon-neutral energy sources.

Carbon credits make sense as they limit the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by the companies in the market, allowing companies to buy and sell the permission to release CO2. They are not a solution, but they are a quick fix to lessen the problems in the short-term while long-term solutions are found.

A solution where everyone is happy will not be found, as people will find problems with anything, even if it's simply because the person suggesting it is from the wrong "team", hence the need for politics.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Your talking bollocks,

that 97% consensus is just garbage that keeps getting repeated, no matter how many times you say it it still is not fucking true!!.

Any science that tries that is just political bollocks.

Re:Queue the deniers

[narcc]

The science is settled.

I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Layzej]

That is not true. The WAIS last lost mass as we came out of the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. It melted to its current state at that time: http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/...

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the fucking math's and crap stats they use, AGW eco nutters don't seem to be able to do that.

so sorry, they won't show the raw data, methods. so you can't check the bollocks they spout, It is NOT the fucking scientific method in any form !!!.

(and don't say it's been peer reviewed, it hasn't it's been PAL reviewed (again not bothering to check method and data are valid, due to being too dumb).

When they show the data and methods I might believe them, but so far I see fuck all worth listening too.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

For lunatics or those who rely on funding for their science based on AGW... they'd love the "science settled".

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

The pyramids were not built with slave labor.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

you obviously don't either. just another biased eco nutter.

1. nope, fake 97% consensus claims don't make it true, and that's not science anyway.
2. It is political, scare the voters so that when you take money off them with the excuse you are doing it for the environment (money actually gets shoveled into pockets of their funders), they don't tell you to fuck off and vote for the other guy.

options
1. nope they are not scientists so they are talking bollocks.

2. stop panicking you fucking idiots.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dargaud]

I have to point out that Antarctica is geothermally balanced. There's about 4km of ice in W Antarctica (much less in the east), with only a few cm added each year it turns out that the oldest ice at the base is only about 1 million years old. Why is that since it's been a continent of ice for tens of times that duration ? Glaciers calving in the sea are not enough to explain it as they run too slowly in the center. It's simply because the ice at the base melts off and the water runs to the ocean in underground (or rather under-ice) river runways. At the base of the ice, there is a thermal equilibrium between the weight of ice (lower melting point, only about -6C in the center) and the geothermal flux.

Re:Queue the deniers

[AthanasiusKircher]

The science is settled.

I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.

Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.

Example: I accept that in normal everyday life, that light obeys the "Law of Reflection." That is SETTLED science. When I'm driving my car, I don't wonder: "Gee, maybe I should do another experiment with the rearview mirror just to be sure," nor do I worry, "Oh, maybe the Law of Reflection won't work today, so I should be careful and not rely on my mirrors to tell me where things are."

More importantly, if something goes wrong with my mirrors in the real world, my first thought is definitely NOT "Oh, the Law of Reflection is probably wrong." Instead, I assume the mirrors are damaged or poorly designed or something else. At this point, that's the ONLY reasonable conclusion to come to -- as a scientist.

The science is settled.

That's what we mean by "settled" in everyday life. When we say a disagreement is "settled," for example, we don't mean that we are denying the possibilityof ever disagreeing again. We mean that we've reached a practical stability point, and it's not worth continuing the discussion further at this time.

From a scientific standpoint, it's necessary to establish these core assumptions within a research paradigm so that we can work on actually refining our work without running around questioning fundamental assumptions all the time. If you think Thomas Kuhn's notions of paradigms and scientific "revolutions" is too extreme, a very reasonable alternative is Imre Lakatos's notion of research programs , which was developed in response to Kuhn. From the Wikipedia article:

A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the 'hard core' are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme - they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to 'protect' the 'hard core'. Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme's explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely.

For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.

I suppose there are a few scientists who would continue to debate this issue specifically about global warming. But you simply cannot deny that actual scientific research in general necessarily has to accept "core assumptions" as "settled" in order to make any progress.

Re:Queue the deniers

[tbannist]

I don't know what that can possibly mean.

It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.

Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.

That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Kythe]

Fine -- let's an a condition: "The science is as settled as the scientific conclusion that cigarette smoking causes cancer". I hope that clarifies things.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Kythe]

All scientists rely on funding. And if I were looking to get rich, I'd be producing results favorable to the denialists. There's a lot more money there, and a lot less competition.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

The system I'm offering would be powered by systems that don't power the grid efficiently as it is or systems that generate so much power that no one cares if they're used efficiently.

That would be renewable energy which is all but useless because its unreliable. However, if you're using it to power a fuel generation plant then the unreliability doesn't matter so much. Grid power must meet demand at all times. No exceptions. Supply cannot go up or down randomly. It has to be meet demand period. Renewable energy is typically unable to do that because the output fluxuates constantly and often stops alltogether. If the wind stops... the power stops... if the sun goes down... the power stops. You can't use that in grid power without storage system and we don't have one.

So instead of wasting our time and money pouring that into the grid, you can instead use it to power a fuel generation plant which won't care so much if the power goes up and down. The power goes down... the plant shuts down and waits for the power to start again.

Alternatively you can use nuclear power which generates so much power that it renders the question of inefficiency irrelevant.

As to temporary carbon levels... no... the levels would be constant. You'd be taking out as much as you're putting into the system at any given time which would mean human industry would generate zero net carbon if it used this system for all fuel.

You can look at forests as an example. They suck up carbon when the trees grow and then release most of it when the trees die and decompose. Trees don't really sequester much or any carbon. They just hold on to it for a time and then release it. The a rotting tree and a tree on fire are ultimately the same thing in the end. The only difference really is that the fire releases the carbon faster but on a global scale and over time periods relevant to climate the difference is irrelevant.

Further, I'd like to point out that just because current processes for fuel conversion are not very efficient there is no chemical reason that they must be inefficient. That's more a matter of the technology not being very refined more then anything. Simply attempting it will likely improve efficiency in and of itself. And over time the efficiency will improve more.

As to your three solutions. I have no problem with any of them.

As to carbon credits, they're a great idea if you're willing to go to literal war over them.

No really. How badly to do you want to do that idea... because you're going to have to nuke cities to do it.

I know you think you can just sweet talk people into that idea... but you can't. Its a dead idea. Still born. Blue, gnarled, and strangled by its own umbilical cord.

You can clutch the corpse of that idea to yourself and pretend it lives still... but its dead. The price of bringing to life is subjugating a few billion people on the planet that won't accept it.

You don't have the military strength, moral will, or political support to do that. So at best you can delude your political allies as to the possibility and waste the opposition's time playing whack-o-mole with you.

But that's it.

I strongly suggest you come up with an idea that won't get people to come out with their pitch forks and torches.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Xyrus]

You can't have a balanced discussion when the people involved want to remain willfully ignorant of the science. Check that, you can't have a balanced discussion when the people involved want to deny reality (hence the term "denier"). If science and reality can't convince someone that something is happening, you're just wasting time and resources that could be better put to use elsewhere.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

just saying its not political, doesnt make it true. This is a topic that has been abused by politicians in the same way immigration and drug reform have been. Both sides like to pay lip service but they only talk about it because they know it divides, We have real pressing issues that are affecting us *TODAY* that politicians dont talk about in any real substance because they would rather have americans bickering about abortion, something that is a blip on the radar in reality, or the death penalty, where we have had an avg of 2 executions a year since 76, in other words a non issue.

meanwhile they fundraise on global warming and these other issues while our bridges rot away, our people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more, and no one wants to talk about those issues seriously

Re:Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

1. The science is settled

I know right? and the world is flat, I mean the science is settled!

Re: Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

Which means you're justifying not negociating but imposing your will. Which means you're going for the political option.

Which means the science under your policy will be irrelevant as to whether you succeed or fail to impose your will. It will come down literally to whether your faction is more politically powerful then your opposition.

The right or wrong of it will be irrelevant.

Do the logical math. Watch Variable1 interact with Variable2 through EquationX.

Check your premises and think the issue through.

What you are saying is "I think I'm right so everyone should do what I say"... that's great but you have to convince people not only that you're right but that your solutions to the problem are right.

If you refuse to go through that process then what you have to do is overwhelm/strong arm people into bending to your will. And that means whether you are right or wrong won't matter. You can strong arm people into saying the sun is made of puppies that way. Look at what is going on in the Islamic world for a good example of what I'm talking about. Do you think things work that way over there because someone convinced everyone that was the best way to run a society? No. They just threatened to kill anyone that disagreed with them. They've fought literally hundreds of wars over that over the last 400 years. You have no idea the bloodshed. But they got what they wanted.

And being right or wrong doesn't matter if you're forcing people. You're just forcing them. End of story.

I'd like to think my society is better then that. That we can arrive at common action through a less coercive policy. But that will require patience and flexibility on everyone's part to arrive at action that a plurality feels acceptable.

Any such policy is not going to make radicals on either side happy. The radicals on the right and radicals on the left will not like it because they both want the reciprocal extreme options.

What shall it be? Are you willing to try to go through a rational dialog on the issue or do you want to use power politics to compel people?

Because the choices you make there will have consequences as how things are run and maintained.

If you maintain your authority at gun point you can get people to comply. But the instant the gun wavers.. is dropped... things can shift very quickly and possibly violently.

This is an appeal for moderation, patience, and civility.

The environmental movement has damaged itself by allowing itself to be hijacked by political factions that seek to use it for their own selfish political gain. That said, if those same political forces dominate they will probably give you everything you want.

So that's a calculation you'll have to make. Of course, if you lose politically... you'll find no cooperation in the political organizations that struggled to shut it down. They'll oppose you reflexively.

Re:Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

and who gets rich from these carbon credits? thats what people are missing. If I pollute, i should not simply have to pay more to do so, that does not stop the so called pollution. Carbon credits to me just show that its all a farce, someone is getting rich on carbon credits and the cost of goods rises because as everyone knows, companies DONT pay higher taxes/fees, the costs get rolled into the finished product, and WE pay for them.

If you honestly believe carbon is bad, than you need to go for broke, if not, stop playing games with peoples lives.

Re:Queue the deniers

[stenvar]

in the count of number of people the balance is very strongly in favor of accepting AGW to degrees ( e.g. this recent set of studies arriving at between 91-97% consensus).

That's not what those studies actually say. Furthermore, even if that were true, pre-20th century, there was nearly universal agreement on the validity of classical physics, but then QM and GR came along, so consensus doesn't tell you about truth.

The denialists get disproportionate attention, which is actually a known type of political manipulation (e.g. argument to moderation) and this type of attention has been shown to disproportionately affect people who aren't specialized in the subject matter to moderate their position when no such moderation is required

Funny, it seems to me that people like global warming activists have been getting "disproportionate attention", given the weakness of their actual evidence.

And thirdly the AGW debate is much bigger than the USA. I understand that you have bipartisan issues across the board (not just AGW, and to be clear: I think both parties are in the wrong) but that doesn't extend to the rest of the world and this is a global issue.

And the general attitude of the rest of the world is something like "oh, it's a big problem, and someone else should give us money to fix it". Then countries try to pick metrics to shift the blame on someone else. Europeans point to current per-capita emissions, the Chinese want to emit for a while in order to develop, and everybody gangs up on the US because we have money. Rationally, if you believe AGW requires action, it's clear that Europe should bear the brunt of any costs and payments for carbon emissions, China should curb its emissions, and the US is somewhere in the middle.

AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree. The challenge is to find solutions, and that's also with science.

The second sentence doesn't logically follow from the first. Yes, AGW does exist, but whether that is a problem and whether we need to find "solutions" is an open question.

Finally, I find the actual article very intriguing and somewhat challenging to my own views on AGW, as evidenced by my first thoughts on this: could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity?

No, that doesn't work for many reasons. But it's a nice illustration about how people love to fit new data in with their existing preconceptions instead of looking at it rationally.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

in fact, i call "the science is settled" weasel words. it is as disingenuous as calling
darwin's theory of evolution "just a theory," and "teach the controversy," when in fact
there was none for 100 years. the whole of modern biology would be unintelligible
without it.

the idea that human activity leads to increased atmospheric co2, and that co2 is
a greenhouse gas should be more accepted than it is, but the problem is that the
zealots simultaneously pushed the harder-to-see awg claim, and made dire predictions
that will cost people bit money with it. it's a political football, and naturally when pushed
people do what they have to, including making illogical arguments.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Namarrgon]

It doesn't mean, "the science is complete".

It does mean that the results so far show with confidence that humans are responsible for the majority of global warming. This conclusion is deemed strong enough to act on.

There is still much more work to be done on nailing down mechanisms, reducing error bars etc, but none of this is likely to change the above conclusion. That would require both strong new evidence and a counter-explanation for all the results so far.

Re:Queue the deniers

[NotDrWho]

Queue the climate change deniers, who will try to skew this as meaning it's geothermal activity and not our CO2 contributions that are causing ice melt, not realizing that this really means curbing CO2 emissions is that much more important so we don't accelerate it.

Queue the anthropogenic climate change zealots who will claim that all climate change is the fault of us evil, evil humans who are a plague on the planet--who will attempt to discredit this study.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Attila Dimedici]

I will accept that the science is settled when the scientists and politicians who claim that the science is settled stop jetting around the world to meetings to discuss how they can get other people to stop jetting around the world to meetings.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

As I made clear, your two options here are as follows:

1. Make this about science and abandon the politics. Discuss things with people. Be patient. Do not attempt to compel people to comply. Accept that there will be differences of opinions. Work for mutually agreeable solutions.

2. Make this about politics and render the science irrelevant. Try to force people with law. Do no argue. Do not negotiate. Test your political will against their political will. Shout them down. Shut them down. Take no prisoners and offer no mercy.

Those are your two options. And as much as you've said the science is settled, you've apparently chosen option 2 which means the science doesn't matter. Its all politics if you go down that road. The winner there will not be whomever has science on their side but whomever has a stronger political coalition.

And I should note... you're losing the political fight.

I strongly suggest that if you want to have a chance to win... you choose option 1. Option 2 is leading to a pathetic defeat.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

meanwhile they fundraise on global warming and these other issues while our bridges rot away, our people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more, and no one wants to talk about those issues seriously

The future and the present are both relevant. They're talking about global warming not because it's not a real problem, since it is, but because they can make a buck pretending to do something about it.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Sarius64]

Yep, they were all Upper Middle Class with nothing to do all day long but stare at the little people. The rudimentary fallacies people like to spew are just too funny at times. Oh, and Obamacare isn't a tax, unless SCOTUS says it is.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

> You are calculating that it is more expedient to attain your goals by applying political pressure rather then go through the tedious process of actually gathering consent.

Consent of society is always a political process, basically by definition.

You've fallen prey to the conceit of the technocrat - that pure science and hard math are all that matters. Except that both are just as susceptible to manipulation by those who choose the questions that the science is applied to answer. They are especially subject to manipulation when one side insists on framing the issue in terms of questions that seem clear-cut but, due to the nature of having only one planet, can't ever be answered with the confidence of laboratory science.

BTW, when you said "calling the science settled" you are betraying your own bias because he never wrote that.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and queue the dipshits who say any temperature rises today are due to CO2, while all the rest of the temperature rises and falls throughout the Holocene were not, yet you do not need to know why, but think crushing economies for a bogeyman is good policy. Idiot.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

Then you should check up on how science works, as that is clearly what happens.

If we didn't assume certain things to be settled, no-one could use them as the basis for their work. If we assume evolution isn't settled, there would be no medicine.

I know it's easy to just claim climate change isn't settled, but that's not what the evidence or the scientists say. It makes you look a fool every time you parrot that ridiculous claim. You are denying science, just as creationists and anti-vaxxers do.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

What's with the false dichotomies? It is about science, as the science is providing the evidence that bad things are and will continue to happen. Politics is needed in order to create solutions, as they require many countries working together in unison.

The political fight in the US is a joke, but elsewhere in the world it is far from being lost - quite the opposite, in fact.

So you can keep your made-up options. The science says the environment as we know it can't continue the way it is if we keep pumping CO2 out, and politics is trying to figure out ways to implement solutions to protect our little blue/green life-raft.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

"you simply cannot deny that actual scientific research in general necessarily has to accept "core assumptions" as "settled" in order to make any progress."

You are jumping from Lakatos' description of how science works to saying that is the way it must work. What specific examples did Lakatos use to generate that description?

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

The IPCC's reports show (with a high certainty) that AGW will be a problem, and we do need to find solutions. Saying otherwise reflects very poorly on you, as it's all spelled out nice and neatly.

The "general attitude" of the rest of the world isn't what you seem to think it is. You sound like you've been listening to Christopher Monckton.

You are parroting the unfounded opinions of others, and it's pathetic. Your attitude is a major reason why this issue has become so politicised. What should be a simple case of follow-the-science (that has yielded a massive decrease in population, massive increases in quality of life, etc.) has turned into a case of lets-argue-against-science-because-we-don't-like-what-the-science-says-even-though-it's-sound-science. Again, it's pathetic. Future generations will be embarrassed that people like you ever existed.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

If you make this a political struggle then your arguments are ultimately political ones.

What will matter is who supports you, how many of them there are, and how much political will and force you can bring on the issue.

You will also need to sustain that effort because you will have only attained your goal by overwhelming other factions that will likely come back for reprisals later if they feel you slighted them.

Which is what you have happening now. Look at all the reversals the AGW lobby has faced lately. Seriously. Look at the countries that have reversed course... that accepted your policy and then repudiated it.

You've gone in most cases one step forward and two steps back.

What is going on in Australia is a good example. We're also seeing rejection in Canada, most of Asia, France, and we're even seeing wobbling in Germany which is just about the strongest supporter the AGW has at this point.

Look... You have no more control over the wider battle taking place then I do. I'm just pointing out that these choices have consequences and that the results are predictable if you understand the rules.

By making this a political battle what you've done is make the environmental issue itself irrelevant. The politicians you rely upon to push your issue don't even really care about your issue. To them, its a weapon. They see it as a means to power. A talking point. Something they can say to embarrass rivals and increase poll numbers. Which means they don't care if you ever actually accomplish anything.

What they care about is if they look good from one moment to the next. Grasp that they can do this for another million years without accomplishing anything and so long as they keep getting elected they won't care.

That's politics.

If you want to actually accomplish something you have to take it away as a weapon and rather make it an issue that supersedes political rivalry. You have to make it clear it isn't sufficient to argue or try to do something. Rather you have to actually accomplish something. And if nothing is accomplished you can't reward them simply for trying.

This is one of the reasons the money in politics is so incidious because so often what is actually going on is that politicians will suggest they might do something just to get the campaign donations flowing. Its sort of like a protection racket. Would be terrible of taxes went up on your lobster fisheries... maybe you should lobby congress to make sure that doesn't happen. Imagine that but with every industry and every coalition. Then add the dollars up.

This is one of the reasons the tech issues are getting rattled right now. Washington sees all this money in Silicon valley and not enough of it is getting spent on lobbyists and campaign donations. So they fuck with the tech sector until the money starts flowing.

The various issues like AGW are no different in many cases.

They're revenue streams.

You go the political route... and its quite likely you'll pay and pay and pay... and never get anything. They'll bleed you white... of money... of will... they'll leave you disappointed, depressed, and without hope.

It takes awhile to see how it works. You watch the pattern... you see how they do things... and this is the result. Sorry to say.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

exactly my point. The people who are speaking the loudest (in politics, im not talking the avg person who truely believes in their cause) are doing so only because they know it can make them money. This is why some people such as myself have trouble taking it seriously because as GP pointed out the issue has been taken over by politicians who dont know jack shit about science, but know an awful lot about fear mongering

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

Your "solution" still has a basic flaw you have not addressed - it keeps the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and as demand for energy increases, your "solution" ensures more and more CO2 ends up in the atmosphere. All your solution does is preserve existing fossil fuel reserves. That's it. It isn't sustainable, and will not help in the long run.

Nuclear power is great for the base load - I don't disagree with you on that point. We just need better reactors.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

It limits the amount of pollution. So if you pollute, you buy some credits and use those. That means someone else won't pollute as much, maintaining the amount of pollution being emitted, making it quantifiable and more manageable.

Just because you don't like/understand carbon credits doesn't mean the science they're drawing on is bunk.

Re:Queue the deniers

[rossdee]

"Geological processes tend to reduce the global temperature, due to the release of sulpher dioxide which reflects sunlight in the upper atmosphere"

That is true of the big, violent eruptions like Mt St Helens, and the Indonesian volcanos. However the small, bubbly lava type (Hawaii) volcanoes don't get to put their stuff into the upper atmosphere, and the CO2 they do produce still acts as a greenhouse. Of course if a geothermal hot spot is under an ice sheet, then it has to melt the ice first before it can spew into the atmosphere.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

This is why some people such as myself have trouble taking it seriously because as GP pointed out the issue has been taken over by politicians who dont know jack shit about science, but know an awful lot about fear mongering

Some people abusing an issue for their own ends doesn't change the validity of that issue, it only makes it more difficult to find a voice not focused on deception. Suggesting that you can't take an issue seriously because some people abuse it is simply making excuses.

Re:Queue the deniers

[ideonexus]

I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:

• The peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change" includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
• The IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report cites hundreds of references and is authored by hundreds of experts. It clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years.
• The IPCC also makes all of its data and models available for review. So you can see for yourself.
• The US Government also recently updated its regularly scheduled report written by over 300 experts.
• The USGS has a Climate Model Browser that lets you try out all the different simulated predictions for Global Warming. You'll notice the specifics vary widely, but they all predict dramatic temperature rises.
• The NOAA has a National Climate Data Center where you can watch the temperature trends. Here's a visualization based on the data.
• The United States Defense department has several reports on the risks posed by Global Warming (see here, here, here, and here).
• The Center for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM) has produced some excellent reports on sea level rise due to Climate Change to inform local communities like Norfolk VA, where flooding is already a major issue, what to expect in the near future due to Global Warming.
• You can also watch the sea levels rise at the NOAA's Sea-Level Trends website.
• If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he was no longer a skeptic.
• Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.

If you dispute this science, then I recommend publishing your own peer-reviewed papers, your own models, and your own alternative hypotheses in the scientific journals. I see a lot of skeptics nit-picking the science, but not many actually taking the effort to publish in the scientific forums.

I eagerly await one of the skeptics out there to please post an equally substantive list of references to "balance" my citations, so everyone can review and compare them.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

All the raw data is available. Everything is available. Just because you want to think it isn't, and don't look for it, and ignore its very existence doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You sound like an absolute fool parroting these nonsensical claims.

Re:Queue the deniers

[breech1]

Furthermore, even if that were true, pre-20th century, there was nearly universal agreement on the validity of classical physics, but then QM and GR came along, so consensus doesn't tell you about truth.

I agree that consensus doesn't necessarily imply truth, but I disagree that there were was near "universal agreement" of the validity of classical physics. By the start of the 20th century, physicists knew there were lots of issues in classical physics. Classical physics could not explain the blackbody spectrum, the precession of Mercury's orbit, the propagation of an E&M wave (at the time waves were only found within a medium that could support it), radiation, and so on. Evidence kept mounting that classical physics could solve a wide array of problems, but there were phenomena that classical physics could not handle. That, in turn, led to new physics being discovered.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

what's going on in Australia, Canada, and various countries in europe says otherwise.

What is more the chinese and indians whom are the ones you really need to convince are basically paying you lip service at best.

So I don't know what you think you're accomplishing. I suppose you might just be a political creature and only care about the political fortunes of the politicians. From their perpsective this is working out pretty well. They get people like you to vote for them and they don't really have to do anything to maintain that vote.

So there you go... things are working out great. Just not the way you probably think its working out.

At best you're making very marginal gains that tend to be undermined fundamentally. At worst, you're accomplishing nothing while supporting a political class that sees you basically the way most people see cheeseburgers.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

i worded that wrongly. What I was intending to say was some of the measures some of these politicians are taking seem to be based on fear mongering rather than logic.

I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term. I would think that most scientists would be more reasonable in the approach. We do need to get off fossil fuels, even if you dont believe in global warming but because eventually they will run out, probably not in our lifetimes but it will happen.

the rational answer is to continue funding R+D, while at the same time making the oil refining process more environmentally friendly.

it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor. just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks. to top that off the costs of goods have gone up due to this as well and the poor keep getting poorer and the rich keep getting richer but i dont believe its because of greedy people as much as i believe its due to inept politicians trying to play god. its a mixture of both of course, but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does

Re:Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

it does NOT limit the pollution, it just lines the pockets of X or Y, while raising the costs on everyone.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

That's not how this works. You propose your problem then you suggest a solution.

Everyone makes their own evaluation as to the relevance of the problem and the cost of your solution and then either accepts your offer or makes counter proposals.

Keep in mind that AGW is not the only problem in the world. We have wars, poverty, ignorance, starvation, other various natural disasters, crime, corruption, etc etc etc.

Which means you're playing a game of musical chairs with all those issues. Which issue will I under fund to keep your issue funded? You then have to convince people that your issue is more worth funding then something else.

Don't dismiss me as some simple rejectionist. I'm not dismissing you. I'm pointing out that its complicated and you're going to have to be patient and flexible.

If you start bulling over people, brow beating people, throwing political muscle around... well... you're going to get a reciprocal response.

Some have made it clear on this forum that that is exactly the route they want to take... just push through. And that's fine. But once you go down that road the science is meaningless to the struggle. Its merely about power at that point.

If you want this to not be about power and only about power. Then you have to not force people.

I sadly question whether many people know what that means. Everyone seems to only understand force. Its rather sad.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice post. While I understand that CO2 is a "greenhouse gas", there are also other things that cause more of a greenhouse effect than CO2 (water vapor, for one). Also, unless you kill off about 2B people, I don't think we're going to get our CO2 output down to 1990 level as "An Inconvenient Truth" suggests. I think the obvious thing to do is to focus on prepare, rather than assume we can prevent.

Re:Queue the deniers

[I'm New Around Here]

Can we use one of those spike things they use in restaurants? After all, without it the stack would fall over very quickly.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Rockoon]

Some people abusing an issue for their own ends doesn't change the validity of that issue

But it does change the economics of the issue....

...or are you one of those "at any cost" people?

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

What's more likely to cause a glacier to melt...an increase in temperatures of .5 degrees or a fucking volcano below it?

hmmmm.

Re:Queue the deniers

[greenbird]

AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree.

See. An example of GP's point. Science doesn't agree on things. Science posits theories then performs experiments and looks for evidence that both support and oppose those theories. The problem with the current climate in the climate debate is that any evidence that might oppose current theories tends to get either twisted to fit the current theories or shouted down. It's supposed to work the other way around. The theories are supposed to be twisted to fit the evidence.

could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity?

Wow. You could not have presented a more perfect example.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

But it does change the economics of the issue.... ...or are you one of those "at any cost" people?

I don't know, which people are those? I think we should keep the biosphere in a livable condition at any cost, though. Without that, we won't be here to argue about economics.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

CO2 is naturally sequestered. If we stop emitting new CO2 that will be an enormous help.

I am not saying everything will be fixed if we do that but we won't be making it any worse. All industry if we shift to that system will emit ZERO net carbon.

That's a massive win right there. And once we have that your sequestration ideas might have a point. Short of a zero carbon emission economy you would sequester far less carbon that was being emitted.

And consider that carbon not emitted is as good as carbon take out of the system in the same sense as a penny saved is a penny earned.

Attempting to reverse all the added CO2 by artificial means is probably not practical unless you want to try some of the geo engineering ideas involving sea algae. Though I've heard that would increase ocean acidity by unacceptable amounts.

So I'm not quite sure how you're going to do that.

Re:Queue the deniers

[greenbird]

Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.

The level of ignorance is astounding. "questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about. Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions. And this gets modded up. It's no wonder the current climate debate is so off kilter.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term.

I imagine you meant the long term? Or for the short term?

it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor.

We all breathe. Reducing pollution actually means more jobs. Doing things right is harder.

just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks.

Driving on petrofuel is unsustainable. You haven't done anything to change your habits on your own, so now you're being forced.

but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does

Yes there is, and the excuse is that you have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's a good idea to be burning oil as fuel. It's too valuable to burn, and the secondary effects are harmful to our very existence. We have no need to burn it. For example have the technology (and have at least since the 1980s) to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption with biofuels in a way which is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. As ever, I refer you to this DoE report and information on AIWPS, as well as on Butanol.

I'm tired of your the dichotomy between economic development and ending the wasteful, harmful, and completely unnecessary refining and subsequent combustion of oil. By all means, make plastic out of it. It saves an enormous amount of energy as compared to making plastics from other sources, and the plastics can be recycled. You're repeating this logical fallacy solely to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions, and you're only impressing others suffering from the same brand of cognitive dissonance. In fact, it is wholly possible to reduce and perhaps even eliminate harmful emissions, or at least account for them (e.g. by carbon-fixing schemes) such that there is effectively zero negative impact to human health and biosphere persistence, the latter currently being an absolutely irreplaceable requirement for the former. We have numerous (one might even be tempted to say innumerable) solutions which we are not putting into place for political-economic reasons which boil down to protection of profit for a privileged class of self-entitled robber barons.

Re:Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

The level of ignorance is astounding.

Your level of arrogance is typical.

"questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about.

And yet, science is also based on assumptions. Every scientific paper doesn't start by explaining gravity, even if it's a factor in whatever it's going to go on and try to prove.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

im for reasonable solutions to an end goal of all renewable solutions, but I am not for increasing the costs of "bad things" in the short term to sway people to move towards more expensive options. I am for pumping money into R+D to bring down the price of renewables to the costs (and lower) that we have been paying for example 90s prices. I want the equivalent of a gallon of gas for a dollar again. and I believe that can be achieved. But I dont want to raise the cost of oil now, so that when we bring the price of renewables "only" down to 5 bucks a gallon people are happy with that.

Re:Queue the deniers

[greenbird]

It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.

The biggest problem with this argument is that our level of understanding of the "climate" system on this planet is miniscule when compared to the complexity of the system. This discovery is just another example. The other problem is that anything that challenges the theory of global warming seems to be either twisted to fit the current theory or ignored. The theory is supposed to be changed to fit the evidence.

That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.

You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledge collected. That's actually the primary point of science: doing experiments to test current theories and looking for evidence that doesn't fit current theories.

Re:Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

Carbon credits to me just show that its all a farce, someone is getting rich on carbon credits

Why don't you pick an attitude and stick with it? You're in favor of unfettered economic development through handwaving away externalities which impinge on quality of life for all humans, but you're not in favor of someone profiting by handling pollution? That seems both destructive and downright hypocritical to me. With your attitude towards economic output, you really ought to be in favor of someone profiting from carbon credits.

If I pollute, i should not simply have to pay more to do so, that does not stop the so called pollution.

That's not what carbon credits are for. When you buy carbon credits, someone is supposed to be taking that money and going forth and fixing a certain amount of carbon out of the atmosphere, and this is a completely reasonable means of handling CO2 emissions specifically — and of meeting CO2 emissions targets. The standard means of doing this is planting trees, which has numerous long-term benefits aside from the obvious carbon-fixing activity.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

I'd generally agree. I'd also agree with your notion that many of the proposed fixes and energy around the movement is impractical.

That said, I think we can agree that in a perfect world we'd not have this CO2 emitted or have to worry about it.

We can take steps to make it better. Things that don't cost anyone much or anything but make the world a better place.

Take something like biodegradable plastic. Does that hurt anyone? Not really. You use it in places where you need something to last for a short period of time and then you want it to break down. So you employ it in say grocery bags etc. And when they're thrown away assuming they're not packed into airless/waterless landfills they'll break down harmlessly in compost.

I think I said somewhere in here we could use solar power to generate more fuels that could be used in cars as a carbon neutral fuel source. And yeah, they'd be more expensive then conventional fuels if you did it the conventional way. But maybe we can make them practical by decentralizing production. Micro sized refineries... ones so small they only produce enough fuel for maybe one or two cars could be a household appliance drinking a mixture of solar power from the roof and cheap off hours grid power. They could suck CO2 from the air and produce fuel in chemical reaction chambers.

We have the technology to do this right now.

We also have other fun things we can do like SynGas... which has been used on and off since around WW2. There are people selling machines that cost about 6000 dollars that can produce 15KW from wood pellets... and they also produce a flammable gas very much like natural gas which can be combusted in cars or used in any other task you'd find acceptable for natural gas.

All of which is carbon neutral because you're using fuel that draws its CO2 from the air. Its a closed loop. Zero net CO2.

I'm not advocating hitting people with nasty taxes or regulations. I don't think that's productive. I think that just pisses people off and makes a few politically into little tyrants that get to control everything.

Rather, I advocate win win technological changes that profit EVERYONE. Things that on balance you'll prefer because it will be cheaper or more convenient or something.

I believe we can come to common cause on the issue. But we have to respect each other's rights and interests and not push people around.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

and this is the problem. We all want the SAME goals, we just differ in how to reach them. You want the poor to suffer now so everyone can be happy later, I want to allow the poor mobility and heat now, AND work on a sustainable future. In your view there is no middle ground to me made, its YOUR way or no way

I have to drive to get to work, I cant afford to live closer to work or I would, we are not all rich people out there, some of us dont have a choice in what we can do. Id gladly rather oil barons continue to get rich if it means I can afford to drive to work, AND eat dinner at night

Re:Queue the deniers

[ColdWetDog]

Don't Bogart that joint, my friend.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

except that your wrong. Take the laws surrounding time, space and mass. For years it was "settled". Then came along this guy called Einstein. Have you ever heard of him? He proposed this far out idea which became the general theory of relativity. This completely upended the entire world of the settled science of how objects move and the worlds of kinetic and potential energy. Now we take the Newtonian view of physics as "good enough for every day use" and acknowledge that at extreme speed, it's wrong. And then when you get into relativistic physics, that's far from settled science.

Science is NEVER settled. You always have to take the view that something may come up that completely upends what we know. If you say science is settled, then you stupidly hold on to notions that may be wrong.

Re:Queue the deniers

[AthanasiusKircher]

You are jumping from Lakatos' description of how science works to saying that is the way it must work. What specific examples did Lakatos use to generate that description?

I'm not "jumping" to anything. All of this was debated in philosophy of science 50 years ago. Not even Popper believed in the naive view of "falsifiability" that many people ascribed to him.

You want examples, read the links I gave, then read Lakatos and/oor Kuhn, then read what Popper actually wrote, rather than the simplified view that people reiterate without thinking.

These people spent many years researching the history of science and drawing lessons from it about how science works, rather than some oversimplified textbook description. I can't summarize all of it in a few sentences.

Re:Queue the deniers

[stenvar]

The IPCC's reports show (with a high certainty) that AGW will be a problem,

Please quote and reference specific examples where the IPCC reports "show with a high degree of certainty that AGW will be a problem".

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but if it's not settled it can't be used to move forward? Seriously, did you spend two seconds thinking about what you said? Do you know literally anything about the world around you? As my post above said, we use Newtonian physics all the time. We know for fact that it's wrong. But we know it's good enough for most cases. The world of relativistic physics is far from settled. Does this mean that every bit of science dealing with bodies in motion must screech to a halt until it's settled? NO! What we have is good enough, if we discover something is wrong, we can go back and correct.

Hell, we use relativistic physics to adjust the clocks on the GPS satellites to increase accuracy by accepting that clocks run at different speeds when moving at quickly. But apparently we can't do that because the science "isn't settled". I'll make sure to let the engineers of the world know that they're doing it wrong because you said so.

Re:Queue the deniers

[stenvar]

We are talking here about the level of "validity" of work in climate change, which is a low standard indeed.

By the standards required by mainstream physics, climate change science is little different from tea leaf reading.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

I am for pumping money into R+D to bring down the price of renewables

Well, guess what? The renewables are already profitable, but they're being actively discouraged by the entrenched interests who pay for the legislation. So now that we've proven that your idea isn't going to work, will you agree to try something else? Or are you simply going to fight any viable solution for eternity so that you don't have to change your behavior?

Re:Queue the deniers

[AthanasiusKircher]

Take the laws surrounding time, space and mass. For years it was "settled". Then came along this guy called Einstein. Have you ever heard of him?

Read my post. Read the links. THINK about what I said rather than just parroting some ideology without any comprehension.

Newton's theories were accepted assumptions for scientific research for at least 150 years. They were "settled" science. The ONLY way actual scientists could do any experiments in those 150 years -- and eventually discover the discrepancies that led people like Einstein to question Newton's theories -- was by operating under the assumption that Newton was correct. They treated it as "settled" science.

Now we take the Newtonian view of physics as "good enough for every day use" and acknowledge that at extreme speed, it's wrong.

If Newton was so "wrong," why do we still teach his stuff to introductory students all the time? I realize it doesn't work as well at extreme speed (or under extreme gravity, etc.), it's a close-enough approximation of reality that it works well for many purposes.

You've actually provided an EXACT example of the very quotation I gave from Lakatos. If we actually believed Newton's model to be completely "wrong," we wouldn't teach it to students at all. Instead, there are still many core observations derived from Newtonian mechanics which remain useful today, both as an approximation at normal speeds and in the modified Einsteinian model. Einstein did NOT supplant Newton, but rather started out as ancillary hypotheses that retained many elements of Newton while questioning a couple specific fundamental assumptions. With the full-blown theory of relativity, it was realized that there were more serious reasons to take Einstein's model as more fundamental than Newton, but claiming that Einstein "falsified" Newton's work entirely in any meaningful sense is simply wrong.

You always have to take the view that something may come up that completely upends what we know. If you say science is settled, then you stupidly hold on to notions that may be wrong.

It is a practical impossibility to live your life questioning everything at every turn. You just can't do it. And science couldn't function by doing it. If I'm doing an experiment and a marble runs a little off course, I don't stand up and shout, "Holy crap! I might have just disproved the theory of gravity!" Some tenets in science are simply more "settled" than others, and it would take a LOT to cause us to question them seriously. That's what "settled" means -- it's not currently open for debate, unless you're a wacko or have some TRULY EXTRAORDINARY new evidence.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

You want the poor to suffer now so everyone can be happy later,

By supporting the status quo, what you are saying is that you want everyone (but especially the poor) to suffer so that a few people can have really big bank accounts now, and at the cost of the maintenance of semi-stasis (that is, maintenance of viabilityspecies depends for survival. In fact, the worker's share of profits as well as the worker's real purchasing power have decreased for decades while the worker's productivity has increased. You are demanding more of the same.

In your view there is no middle ground to me made, its YOUR way or no way

In the real, physics-based world that we all live in, actions have consequences which cannot simply be waved away. Not immediately addressing the carbon capture problem has real consequences upon which there is scientific consensus. It is not my way, it is reality's way. I do not set the values of the universal constants.

Id gladly rather oil barons continue to get rich if it means I can afford to drive to work, AND eat dinner at night

And as long as you are willing to give up your future and everyone else's for today's comfort, you're part of the problem. It's not me making you that. It's you. I don't choose your actions for you, and I certainly don't select your attitudes. As long as your basic attitude is selfish, there's really no appealing to your better nature. That it is comprehensible, understandable, and typical is a perfectly human defense, but does nothing to improve your condition, or anyone else's. The best maintenance of the status quo can get you is a continuing downward spiral.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

I didnt say profitable. I said affordable. When renewables can cost the equivalent of 1$ per gallon of gas for the same energy output I will call it a sucess.

can you imagine if for example when color TVs came out and they cost double the same black and white TV if companies raised the cost of black and white TVs to the cost of color TVs rather than allowing the tech to mature and make the cost more reasonable? that would be a horrible way to do business to the consumer, sure its profitable for the company because if both cost the same, people will take the color over the B&W, but in the end it hurts everyone because people have less money to spend

I understand that a TV is not the equivalent of energy but i feel thats a good way of explaining what I see happening today

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

I didnt say profitable. I said affordable. When renewables can cost the equivalent of 1$ per gallon of gas for the same energy output I will call it a sucess.

So because your unreasonably high bar is not being met, it's not a success? Explain why anyone should care about your uninformed opinion as to what fuel should cost? Ever tried to make your own biofuel, or even produced its feedstocks?

I understand that a TV is not the equivalent of energy but i feel thats a good way of explaining what I see happening today

I feel you've been paying too much attention to what the carefully made up heads on TV have been saying to you. They've been telling you that gas should cost a dollar a gallon, dad gum it! Never mind that fuel has become more expensive to produce because of standards designed to reduce pollution, or the influence of inflation which on its own is nearly sufficient to explain the rise of the cost of gasoline, if biofuel doesn't cost what you think it should cost then it's no good.

At times, lives are spent to secure oil. Spills with attendant negative environmental impact are regular and typical. The carbon released is unaccounted for, you get to emit that for free even though everyone has to deal with your emissions. And you want to complain that four dollars a gallon is too much? You're just an incredibly entitled individual.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Rockoon]

I think we should keep the biosphere in a livable condition at any cost, though

So lets kill all humans, and thus the biosphere remains livable. Thats one of those 'costs' that complies with the 'any' requirement.

Oh... you actually think a solution should be reasonable? Hence why some of us feel that its important that fucktards that are abusing the issue are change the economics of it. We dont want 'any cost' and neither do you (although clearly we see that you refuse to admit it.)

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anon-Admin]

Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn.

Your right, You cant go around questioning settled science. it would be wrong.

Marijuana is a dangerous and addictive substance that has no accepted medical uses. The science is settled and there is a federal law saying so. So all the Marijuana deniers are just fighting a loosing battle and need to realize that the science is settled. :P

Re:Queue the deniers

[AthanasiusKircher]

The level of ignorance is astounding.

It's amazing to hear the insights of philosophers of science who spent their lives studying the history and methology of science called "ignorant." If you want to call Lakatos (or Kuhn or Popper or whoever) "ignorant," let's see some credentials. Or some debate on their level. This stuff is 50 years old... it's not some crazy new idea about scientific methods.

And yes, I mention Popper, because even he didn't believe in the naive view of falsifiability that everyone here often assumes. Seriously. Read his stuff. Heck, read the link I gave to the article on Lakatos that explains how Lakatos's ideas are partly similar to Popper's.

"Ignorance" is parroting some ideology without every questioning it or thinking about what you're saying. It's actually dangerous for scientists to believe in the naive view of falsifiability, because it can lead them not to understand how scientific thought actually gets shaped and how much a role various kinds of "confirmation bias" can come into the way we do experiments based on our underlying way of thinking.

"questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about.

Not 99% of science. Most scientists who are working every day in a lab are not actively questioning the foundations of accepted scientific theories. If they did, they'd be wasting their time... and holding back scientific progress.

Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions.

Yes, that's true. But often those breakthroughs target one particular assumption in a core theory, often one that has been causing problems for some time (e.g., the discrepancies regarding the aether theory in 19th-century experiments which led to Einstein's breakthrough in relativity). They don't generally question the entire nature of the underlying scientific paradigm.

And on the few occasions when that has happened, scientific progress didn't really happen through the normal "scientific method." It's not like Galileo stood up and said, "And yet it moves!" and suddenly all scientists on Earth believed him. There was plenty of scientific evidence in favor of geocentrism at the time, and most of that evidence wasn't definitively explained until the 19th century.

Instead, many scientists liked aspects of the heliocentric model (despite the lack of empirical support), and the older geocentric physicists gradually died out in the 1600s. The definitive turning point was probably Newton's theory of universal gravitation, which put heliocentric physics on more solid ground, but it relied on "spooky" unseen forces acting at a distance, an idea that was rejected by many in the scientific establishment because it wasn't "scientific" -- it came from Newton's occult beliefs.

The history of science is "messy." "Breakthroughs" don't often happen in the clean way that is often presented in history books, and they often don't happen through application of a "normal scientific method" at all.

In fact, take a minute and think about this: how exactly does the "normal scientific method" allow you to come up with new theories in the first place? It's not enough to say, "These fundamental assumptions are wrong!" -- you need a better explanation, but where does that come from? How does the naive falsification approach to scientific methodology generate hypotheses? If all that matters is something is falsifiable, how do you determine which of the infinite number of potential hypotheses to test?

(Hint: Falsifiability doesn't generate hypotheses. Scientific paradigms or Lakatos's "research programs" do. Once we have a set of "settled" fundamental assumptions to work within, we can do 99% of normal science by resolving various issues within the research program. Eventually, enough discrepancies may pile up that someone may go back and propose something that could overturn a fundamental core assumption, but that's not what "normal science" does every day... and it couldn't function if it tried to.)

Re:Queue the deniers

[dcw3]

Most well written post I've seen on this topic. Thank you!

Re:Queue the deniers

[AthanasiusKircher]

You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledge collected.

No, it isn't. That doesn't make any sense. Why would people waste their time deliberately setting out to challenge "verified" knowledge? Most scientists spend their time working on fleshing out the details of that knowledge or resolving descrepancies.

Scientists don't wake up in the morning and say, "You know what, I know we've had thousands of experiments showing this to be true, but I really simply don't buy this 'verified' claim that liquid water is composed of gases like hydrogen and oxygen. Let's spend the next few weeks running experiments to challenge that notion!"

No scientist does this. The atomic theory that substances are composed of fundamental elements is pretty much "settled" science, and so is the fact that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Any person who seriously thinks scientists should be questioning something like that every day is either incredibly naive or deranged.

That's actually the primary point of science: doing experiments to test current theories and looking for evidence that doesn't fit current theories.

Nope. The primary point of 99% of science is to test hypotheses, which are usually ways of fleshing out current theories or resolving some minor discrepancies within accepted theories. If we didn't make the assumptions of those theories in the first place, we wouldn't have anything to even guide our further investigations and to come up with future hypotheses to test. If all "verified" knowledge is up for grabs, why is the testing of any of particular hypothesis to be preferred to any other? Why don't all scientists spend their days testing the "verified" claim about the atomic theory as related to water? Or just making up random strings of words to create a hypothesis to test?

(They don't. Instead, the "verified" body of knowledge tends to be questioned when lots of discrepancies start showing up in various experiments -- not sought out, but rather stumbled upon in the investigation of minor points related to bigger accepted theories.)

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the "science" is not "settled" because science was never involved in the process. Unless you define science as a body of politicians throwing money at studies to come to a predetermined conclusion and ignoring all the data that doesn't fit. I don't happen to subscribe to that particular definition. Additionally dissenting scientists have been blackballed, threatened, lost thier funding, and in some cases even murdered. That doesn't sound like settled science to me.

Re:Queue the deniers

[AthanasiusKircher]

You cant go around questioning settled science. it would be wrong.

It wouldn't be "wrong." It would just be inefficient if your goal was actually to make scientific progress.

Marijuana is a dangerous and addictive substance that has no accepted medical uses.

That's not an example of a "fundamental assumption." A "fundamental assumption" is something more like "matter is composed of elements, whose fundamental unit is the atom which can be combined to produce molecules of other substances." While the atomic theory could be wrong (I suppose), there's just such a ridiculous amount of evidence in support of it that I sincerely doubt we're going to find out that it's actually "wrong" in any normal sense of the word "wrong." The exact details of how atoms work and function is being revised, but the idea that substances are composed of some more fundamental building block effectively like them is "settled" science.

The science is settled and there is a federal law saying so. So all the Marijuana deniers are just fighting a loosing battle and need to realize that the science is settled. :P

Your sarcastic statement is a perfect example of precisely what I'm talking about. If science actually operated in this pure realm of naive "instant falsifiability" that many people believe in, marijuana would have been tested and used for legitimate medical purposes decades ago. Instead, consensus (not just scientific, but social) and political pressure kept that from happening.

This is how science actually works, in all the messy real-world details. Sometimes people get thing wrong for a generation or two before they realize maybe they should question some assumption. I'm not saying it doesn't result in crappy results sometimes: I'm saying that it's simply the way human beings function, and science is a human endeavor.

What's even worse is when we refuse to acknowledge the extent that we do simply accept underlying fundamental assumptions without questioning them -- and simply keep chanting: "Science is always open to questioning accepted beliefs and testing theories that are falsifiable!" No it isn't. And the first step to ensure that we don't do stupid things like reject good medical treatments for decades for no apparent reason is to recognize that we're not as good about being able to just "falsify any previous belief" on demand as the naive view of science claims. It's only by accepting that we do have legitimate biases (often for good reasons) that we can realize they might sometimes need to be questioned.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

so what do I do in your world drinky poo?? I dont live close enough to any jobs that I can work that I dont need a car, I need to eat. so should I simply quit, go on food stamps, live in government housing because hey its clean!

I never once said keep things they way they are forever, and you are being intentionally thick with your assessment. if me NEEDING a car to get to work, and food to eat is considered selfish by your standards, plain and simply you are nothing more than an asshole. Its not like we have 2 weeks to fix the world, we DO have some time and its going to take a good part of both of our lives to address. So we can either keep flinging poo at eachother (pun intended) or we can realize that as you said SOMETHING needs to be done, and at the same time work on ways to do so that allow people like me to still afford to get to work, eat and keep a roof over my head

Re:Queue the deniers

[pokerdad]

Your right, You cant go around questioning settled science. it would be wrong.

Its certainly not impossible that AGW will someday be proven wrong, but if it is that proof won't come from the sort of person who is loudly denying it today, it will come from climatologist.

If you aren't a climatologist you aren't qualified to deny AGW any more than the pot heads who for decades claimed that marijuana could cure anything were qualified to make those claims.

That people who are ignorant of science and scientists sometimes end up on the same side of an issue does not lend any credibility to being ignorant.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

when my energy costs are over 50% of my income, there is a problem. I used a dollar as a simple number to work with, im not saying it HAS to be 1$ or im not having anything to do with it. but I never will support artificially raising costs on ANYTHING just to make other products look better in comparison

as for your last statement, Im not only talking about me, Im talking about all the people who are living paycheck to paycheck, the people that you seem to forget when coming up with your utopia

Re:Queue the deniers

[ideonexus]

That's not how this works. You propose your problem then you suggest a solution.

Everyone makes their own evaluation as to the relevance of the problem and the cost of your solution and then either accepts your offer or makes counter proposals.

I disagree. First we have to agree on the science. If any solution I propose can be vetoed by someone because they reject the science, then we aren't having a discussion. If I propose eliminating oil subsidies and increasing alternative energy incentives and the response I get every single time is the accusation that I am pushing a political agenda based on pseudoscience, then I have to take step back to the science and fight for that.

The reality is that I don't care if we do anything about Global Warming for the next 20-30 years. What I care about is science, and the skeptics are calling science into question, which leads to pseudoscience taking hold in other public policy issues. To me, Global Warming is about science education. The public policy dimensions are for other people to dispute. There is no balance between skeptics and scientists. The science is overwhelming.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

You're not listening. I'm going to try again.

If you are precieved as acting in bad faith, where the conclusion of whatever you're doing is going to be harmful to a lot of people... you're going to get struck down INSTANTLY. They're not going to wait for you to get through some process. They're going to drop you as fast as they can so that if anything fails to stop you they'll have many opportunities to do it again and again and again. And by the time you get where you're trying to go you'll be so weak and reduced from all the hits that you'll be no threat.

That is the game.

So no. You're not going to get people to agree on anything unless they believe you're going to respect their interests down the road. If you're not... then they have an interest in dropping you where you stand.

Which is why you get such resistence on the AGW issue. They're not attacking you because they don't believe in AGW. They're attacking you because they are terrified of your "solutions". They see the denial as a means to stop that. So they do it.

Is this not obvious?

It seems very obvious to me. Were your solutions to AGW something like "do nothing, have a beer, fist bump, and go on with your day" then do you think anyone would be attacking AGW research? Probably a lot less.

And the politicians also wouldn't be gloming on to you because there's no power for them to suck off the issue.

its the "solution" that is the problem not the AGW science itself. That's not really at issue at this point.

Politically it will be at issue... but again that's only because its been made political.

If you want the AGW stuff to get accepted and a rational scientific discussion to happen... you need to put the weapons away. You need to make people believe you're not gearing up to fuck every one.

If you can't do that... then you shouldn't be surprised that you're getting resistance.

Really this is all very obvious... at least it seems obvious to me.

Re:Queue the deniers

[kjhambrick]

Sheesh !

It wasn't that long ago in the bigger scheme of things when it was 'settled' that the cosmos revolved around the earth !

Or that EM Radiation was conducted via the aether.

Consensus is not science.

There are too many fortunes of too many types at stake to take any of the AGW debate at face value.

The existence and degree of influence of AGW on Climate Change is NOT settled.

-- kjh

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

so what do I do in your world drinky poo??

You stop making excuses for maintenance of the status quo. We can and must change as a species if we are to survive. Notably, we must stop shitting where we eat. Stop saying that it would cause massive economic harm, because that is bullshit. In fact, it would (as always) mean jobs. If you stop repeating these lies, then they will have that much less traction.

Re:Queue the deniers

[TubeSteak]

Accept that there will be differences of opinions.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Re:Queue the deniers

[greenbird]

Yes, that's true. But often those breakthroughs target one particular assumption in a core theory, often one that has been causing problems for some time (e.g., the discrepancies regarding the aether theory in 19th-century experiments which led to Einstein's breakthrough in relativity). They don't generally question the entire nature of the underlying scientific paradigm.

Not 99% of science. Most scientists who are working every day in a lab are not actively questioning the foundations of accepted scientific theories. If they did, they'd be wasting their time... and holding back scientific progress.

I don't disagree with most of what you say. For the most part you're saying what saying what I was trying to elucidate but in a much more loquacious and elegant manner. When I wrote my reply I was focus more on climate science specifically although I didn't express that very well. I chalk it up to not having finished my morning caffeine yet. From my knowledge most scientific advance aren't from someone saying "That's wrong. I'm setting out to prove it's wrong." As you stated it's usually more a result of discrepancies in a related experiment or observed phenomenon that don't fit the assumed theory and can't be explained by problems with the method.

That being said here's the part where we differ.

For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.

Given the complexity of the system, the scale of the system and our extremely limited knowledge of system's interactions there is no way any theory of how the climate of this entire planet works should in any way be considered settled or part of a "hard core". The problem being that even though they may be right to at least some degree regarding AGW they are most likely largely wrong about the details of how and why and subsequently the consequences and causes of any consequences. These are important because they dictate what mitigating actions may be taken. History shows mitigating actions taken without sufficient understanding of a system usually results in less then desirable if not outright negative result. This has happened over and over in mankind's intervention in nature. We often take a bad situation and make it worse trying to fix it.

Now I'm not saying no action should be taken to try to limit man's contribution to carbon production. I am saying what actions we do take need to based on more solid ground rather than alarmist theories based on insufficient knowledge.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

when my energy costs are over 50% of my income, there is a problem.

The problem is not the price of fuel. The problem is the worker's ever-shrinking share of profit. Once you stop blaming people other than the selfish, greedy corporate masters, you'll stop coming up with excuses for selfishness and greed.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

What an idiotic post. The science isn't even settled on how fast warm water freezes vs. less-warm water in an extremely-controlled setting. The science on gravity is far from settled. The science on *Climate* hasn't even started in comparison to these. They don't even know how many millions of variables they are excluding or including incorrectly, it is more akin to pseudosciences like witch-doctoring or alchemy than it is to real sciences like chemistry or medicine. Simply because certain people are paid to take something for granted does not mean that it should be taken for granted by anyone else.

The economy is a much more measured, simpler system than climate -- and who trusts economists?

Re:Queue the deniers

[greenbird]

And yet, science is also based on assumptions.

Yes it is. And the level of trust in those assumptions should be based on how well our theories explain those assumptions.

Every scientific paper doesn't start by explaining gravity, even if it's a factor in whatever it's going to go on and try to prove.

No but what I have a problem with (and didn't express very well in my post) is people claiming the current theories on climate science are as well understood as the theory of gravity. And our understanding of gravity isn't particularly solid either. Our understanding of the complex interactions involved in the climate of this entire planet are miniscule when compared to our understanding of gravity.

Re:Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

No but what I have a problem with (and didn't express very well in my post) is people claiming the current theories on climate science are as well understood as the theory of gravity. And our understanding of gravity isn't particularly solid either. Our understanding of the complex interactions involved in the climate of this entire planet are miniscule when compared to our understanding of gravity.

[citation needed]

Nobody has yet seen a graviton. Our understanding of gravity is so far utterly theoretical. For example, we have never succeeded in making it in the lab, as we can with magnetism. But we do have both contemporary and historical case studies where we can observe the impact (both local and global) of human activity on climate.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

So lets kill all humans, and thus the biosphere remains livable. Thats one of those 'costs' that complies with the 'any' requirement.
Oh... you actually think a solution should be reasonable?

Well, I think a solution should be reasonable before someone mentions it as one of the possibles. Otherwise, they're just engaging in the logical fallacy of the ridiculous example. And by they, I mean you.

We dont want 'any cost' and neither do you (although clearly we see that you refuse to admit it.)

You also don't want rational debate, which is why you left this latest lame-ass, add-nothing comment.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

Given that the primary point of dispute is what to do about AGW and not AGW itself, we are utlimately debating opinions.

The best or correct solution to AGW is not a matter of scientific fact. You can't say "its science" and then use that to justify carbon credits. There's no climate model that proves carbon credits will or won't be the best policy.

That is all opinion.

Which means its your opinion versus their opinion... and that means you have one of two choices.

1. You can negotiate and good faith and come to a reasonable compromise.

2. You can fight tooth and nail to dominate them and they'll return the favor leaving you both screaming at each other to no particular purpose.

Kindly think for yourself rather then quoting pithy comments from people that don't actually apply to my post or this topic.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Rockoon]

Well, I think a solution should be reasonable before someone mentions it as one of the possibles.

What would you have said if you REALLY meant "at all costs?"

...clearly you couldnt have said "at all costs" because we find that thats not what you mean when you say that.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

You also don't want rational debate, which is why you left this latest lame-ass, add-nothing comment.

He added with his comment. He has noted that some costs are obviously too high and that what he calls "fucktards" distort what you call "solutions" into the realm of "too high." Until you man up and address his point rather than play your petty little social game, it is you that doesnt want what is in your words a "rational debate."

What did he add? He added a simple example of costs that even you admit are "too high." The costs he detailed are in fact so high that you consider it a "logical fallacy" to even mention them. You did claim that no costs were too high, but havent retracted that claim. Your argument is a paradox because it is not internally self-consistent. Either there are or there are not costs that are too high. You do not get to have it both ways. No progress can be made until you pick a theory.

Re:Queue the deniers

[greenbird]

[citation needed]

WTF are you demanding a citation about?

Nobody has yet seen a graviton. Our understanding of gravity is so far utterly theoretical. For example, we have never succeeded in making it in the lab, as we can with magnetism.

Our understanding of pretty much everything is utterly theoretical. For all we know this whole thing is just an illusion and we're in the matrix. We can experimentally in a controlled environment show cause and effect of gravity to a very small margin of error. We can't experimentally show the effect of releasing certain amounts of carbon into the atmosphere on global climate. There is no way to isolate any effects of the carbon verses a million other interactions.

But we do have both contemporary and historical case studies where we can observe the impact (both local and global) of human activity on climate.

Bullshit. Such a study would have to somehow isolate the human effects from all other interaction and effects and we don't even know and/or understand what the vast majority of the interactions are. Otherwise all the study is showing is correlation not causation.

Re:Queue the deniers

[david_thornley]

The science is about as settled as it gets. We could in fact find that evolution was all a big mistake, so we can't say evolution is unsettled (not to mention all the arguments about exactly how it happened).

However, I haven't come up with an example yet of when the scientific community was this wrong about the actual facts as it would be if the planet were not warming. It's easy to find bad interpretations, but the interpretations were based on facts.

Re:Queue the deniers

[david_thornley]

Note that, according to current theory that seems pretty well-based, most matter is not composed of elements. Most of it appears to be in a form that doesn't interact with anything electromagnetically. I haven't noticed particle or solid-state physicists being too upset about this, because it really doesn't change that much of our understanding of baryonic matter.

Re:Queue the deniers

[david_thornley]

The knowledge that the world is round predates science as we know it.

Why don't you go for geocentrism, which at one point was settled science?

The reason geocentrism was preferred was that it was in accord with observations. The observations were not in doubt, and those who argued for heliocentrism had to account for them and produce a better model. There was no theoretical basis early in the debate; only with Kepler and Newton did we get a theory explaining planetary motion (and Kepler's was more of a description than a theory).

In this case, we have a theoretical basis for AGW (it's clear that we're putting lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, and also clear that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so there's a simple causal explanation), and observations showing that it's happening. The theory is obviously lacking in many respects, but the observations exist. The planet is warming up, almost certainly largely because of human activity. Any theory that AGW is wrong will have to account for the observations better than current theories do. So far, there are no coherent objections to the observations, the closest being a exceedingly improbable conspiracy theory. If a climate scientist were to come up with one, that climate scientist would become famous.

Re: Queue the deniers

[riverat1]

Looking at it simply the cost of not keeping the biosphere in a livable condition is the death of all humans. More realistically the human species is very versatile and inventive so I don't expect it to die out completely but it wouldn't be shocking if the population was reduced by half or more 100 years from now if we don't address the anthropogenic causes of global warming.

Re:Queue the deniers

[david_thornley]

So, what you're saying is that we're seriously fucked. Any mitigation of AGW is going to be harmful to a lot of people, so they'll reject it. We can't seriously lower CO2 emissions without spending a lot of money and discouraging the driving of gas guzzlers, for example. This means that nothing will be done as the problem gets worse and worse.

Unfortunately, having beers is going to do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions, or find some other way to cool the planet without majorly screwing up other stuff, or anything like that. If we're limited to solutions like having more beer, nothing useful will get done about the climate.

Do you have anything positive to say?

Re:Queue the deniers

[ideonexus]

And yet nowhere in any of my posts have I made any mention of a need to act on Global Warming, proposed any solutions to it, or even suggested that solutions are needed. All I did was state the science, and that is what you and so many others react to. You are against the science because you fear that to concede even that much will somehow render you powerless to have a reasonable discussion about public policy.

There is the science dimension to this and there is the public policy dimension. If the skeptics would simply accept the science, they might have me as an ally when it comes to debating public policy, but when they even reject the science, I can't take anything else they say seriously.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Layzej]

You should read the paper. Geothermal sources are not thought to have changed over the last 100 (or 100,000) years. They cannot be the cause of recent Antarctic melting. However they could make the collapse come about all that much quicker.

It was recently reported that the west Antarctic ice sheet had hit a tipping point and would collapse completely in about 200 years after about 9000 years of stability. The models used to conclude this would not have taken into account the high geothermal sources under the antarctic. The date of collapse may need to be revised forward taking into account this new data.

So no, I don't think this study upends any existing science. It is just one more data point.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

...clearly you couldnt have said "at all costs" because we find that thats not what you mean when you say that.

Let me phrase it in science-fiction-y terms for you: We must maintain our life support system at all costs. If we don't do something significant and positive about CO2 (or looked at another way, negative about carbon, ho ho) and other major climate-changing activities like deforestation, then the economic impact will be the very last thing on your mind, or on anyone else's. Oddly enough fixing one problem will help fix the other problem, but nobody important seems to give a shit.

Hey, I could be wrong, this could all be a lot of shit, but when the physics of decades ago and the physics of today agree that these concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause harmful effects, and we are actually seeing effects of the kind long since predicted, I take that as a sign that the concerns are probably real and we should do something about them. Complaints about minor variances in models of a chaotic system are just wankery. The credible models only disagree, and then only to slight extents, on how fucked we are and when we will be completely fucked.

Re:Queue the deniers

[riverat1]

Science is always open to revision pending new information but that doesn't stop us from using the information we glean from scientific study to build this technological civilization we live in. It would paralyze progress to insist that we have to know everything before we do anything.

The scientific fundamentals of anthropogenic climate change, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that the CO2 level in the atmosphere is one of the major factors in surface and ocean temperatures on the Earth and that the primary cause of the rise in CO2 levels is human emissions from fossil fuel burning are about as settled as Newton's Laws of Motion. Hoping for some revolutionary new paradigm to overturn that is wishful thinking at this point. There are all sorts of details that are still unsettled and they are getting properly debated in the scientific community but they don't waste their time arguing those fundamentals.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

"You want examples, read the links I gave, then read Lakatos and/oor Kuhn, then read what Popper actually wrote, rather than the simplified view that people reiterate without thinking."

So you do not know the answer to my question?

Re:Queue the deniers

[riverat1]

The biggest problem with this argument is that our level of understanding of the "climate" system on this planet is miniscule when compared to the complexity of the system. This discovery is just another example. The other problem is that anything that challenges the theory of global warming seems to be either twisted to fit the current theory or ignored. The theory is supposed to be changed to fit the evidence.

This is not a discovery at all. Scientists were already aware there were geothermal heat sources under the Antarctic ice sheet. What this study did was measure the location and amount of heat in the Thwaites Glacier system far more accurately than was possible in the past. In regards to the overall effect on the Earth's climate system this is a miniscule tweak.

As far as our level of understanding of the climate system being miniscule, it's been studied scientifically for nearly 200 years. At this point it appears we understand the big picture pretty well and scientists are moving on the the detail. At this point to expect some sea change in our understanding to overturn the current theory is wishful thinking.

Re: Queue the deniers

[ganjadude]

I'm asking you specifically what should i do since you seem to know it all I already told you I can afford to move and I need my car, so what do I do to sacrifice my fair share without causing myself to be homeless??

Re:Queue the deniers

[riverat1]

1. Make this about science and abandon the politics.

The science is out there available for anyone to access. The IPCC Working Group 1 report is a good (if conservative) summary of the basic science. The WG 2 and WG 3 reports also summarize a lot of science. Or you can go directly to the scientific papers cited in those reports. You could even do a literature search seeking out papers that counter the IPCC reports (but you won't find a lot of them).

But most people aren't interested in understanding science well enough to have a truly informed opinion about it. You start talking about science in detail and their eyes just glaze over. How do you make it about science for them?

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

If you can't think about the issue constructively and instead can only think of policies that involve putting guns in people's faces and saying you'll shoot them if they disobey... I think it is you that has nothing to contribute.

This is a complex issue involving too many countries and people to be dealt with by force.

If you want to get anywhere you need mutually beneficial or affordable options.

If you can only image very damaging solutions that are very expensive and require violence to enforce... you have no solution at all. None.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

Again... the proposed solutions are unacceptable and as such efforts are taken to frustrate the entire mechanism.

Lets say for example there were a eugenics movement in the US that proposed sterilizing people that were seen as inferior or something equally monstrous.

Wouldn't you then attack the scientific basis of eugenics? What if the supporters of the position made points that were scientifically valid? There is a cold logic in the idea that isn't wrong as far as science goes. But doesn't matter because its deeply immoral.

Likewise, the people opposing the AGW movement see the solutions as poison. And so will do pretty much anything to shut it down. That means attacking the foundation of the theory as well as the credibility of the scientists as well as the data as well as everything.

Everything is attacked because the solution is unacceptable and the process has never obeyed any notion of due process in regards to determining what should or shouldn't be done.

If you subject the whole process to something that will respect everyone's interests and ensure that the whole thing don't turn into a license to screw people then you'll find less opposition to AGW.

Re:Queue the deniers

[riverat1]

CO2 is naturally sequestered on a time scale of thousands of years. If we stop emitting CO2 now there will be some changes in CO2 levels as the ocean/atmosphere balance is restored, maybe 10 or 20 ppm +/-. Then it will take thousands of years for natural sequestering to reduce the level significantly.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

You have a faster method of sequestering meaningful amounts of CO2 that does not cause further problems?

Someone suggested we release iron oxide powder into the oceans to cause algae blooms that will take carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it at the sea floor... but that apparently will increase ocean acidity so...

What if your idea? all we can do is reduce our emissions. Anything else seems to either cause more problems or have political costs we can't afford.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

You may need to wake to the fact that many of those climate warming predictions made for the last 15 years or so where *not* met. In fact, current data shows that there have been no significant changes, and certainly no alarming changes, on the warming side (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Easterbrook).

Now, you claim a 97% consense to the opposite, in favor of AGW. Now, that's surprising, because for one, it is not common to the scientific method to argue based on consensus (majorities are a political means, but not a scientific argument) and second, because even if a majority of scientists have a consensus on something, there is no more than exactly *one* evidence to the contrary to make all consensus essentially void. And, assuming the argument's of those 3% of scientists that stand up with a different view are as scientific as the others, you have to accept by logic that there ia plenty of evidence to the contrary of the AGW hypothesis.

And that's just stating the facts and apply logical reasoning to arrive at a conclusion.

Re: Queue the deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

That would not be shoking, no. In fact that would proof the theory that the Earth is a living organism capable of cleaning itse!f of a virus that has befallen it and that threatens its existence. Now, of course nobody knows what is going to happen in the next 100 years so any 'predictions' used to make people feel bad today are fear mongering and not constructive. What science should do is present the facts and then let the political forces conclude a course of action. If a scientist feels strongly that her results are being ignored and should have more political attention, then of course she can always start a political campaign, knowing that the very moment she does that means she is no longer a scientist but a political activist. Nothing wrong with that, of course, just saying.

Re:Queue the deniers

[riverat1]

I don't see a real good way to actively reduce the carbon that's already in the carbon cycle. Some suggest making biochar and burying it. It would be possible to some extent to speed up the natural methods of sequestering carbon by exposing more of the rock that can absorb it. My wild and crazy idea about is it that in order for solar and wind to work we have to overbuild them to some extent to account for the variable nature of them. There will be times when lots of excess power is available. We could use that power to actively extract CO2 from the atmosphere and crack it to pure carbon which we bury releasing 02 back to the atmosphere.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

You clearly have read the IPCC reports if you are wading in on this discussion from the position you are. You are either lazy or being purposefully misleading in your position.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

So you accept there's a problem. If you have read what the experts are saying, then you know that a strong reduction in CO2 is required to stop incredible damage being done to the global economy and the human species. What you seem to be claiming is that if a perfect solution can't be found, that we have to do nothing, and everyone has to be silent. Brilliant.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

You are advocating tiny, insignificant, strawberry-scented "solutions" which achieve absolutely nothing without them being forced on people, and even then they are of dubious use. By your own logic you have to now shut up and never speak of them to anyone, lest you upset some people who don't seem to understand climate change or what it entails for the future of humanity, as you have turned this into a political debate.

So, to sum up: You are the very thing you claim sucks about the AGW issue.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

Of course it limits the pollution. You clearly have no idea how this thing works, yet you've convinced yourself you do enough so you can get worked up and start tilting at the windmills in your head.

The government creates credits that allow X tonnes of pollution to be released. All the companies which abide by this scheme (which can be legislated to be all of them in a given area) can now only release X tonnes in total. That's a limit. This is how this works. Those who want to can buy credits from those who want to sell. Or maybe it won't work because Benghazi or something.

Re:Queue the deniers

[dave420]

People couldn't deny nuclear weapons existed, which doesn't hold true for this issue. Also, people didn't have to spend any more money in order to defeat that issue, as it was solved with diplomacy, and any costs attributed to it came from the military & diplomatic sides of government. That was a far easier problem to approach, tackle, and solve than AGW. Plus there were no Koch brothers pouring billions into the pro-nuclear-Armageddon side.

Re:Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

Our understanding of the complex interactions involved in the climate of this entire planet are miniscule when compared to our understanding of gravity.

[citation needed]

WTF are you demanding a citation about?

WTF are you doing here if you can't read?

For all we know this whole thing is just an illusion and we're in the matrix.

Well, that added nothing to the conversation. Just like everything else you said.

Re: Queue the deniers

[drinkypoo]

I'm asking you specifically what should i do

No you aren't, you're just running your suck. Because I told you what to do: Stop telling lies. You are a liar, and no one should give a fuck what a liar says. As long as you repeat the lies about economic impact, you are that liar.

Now stop lying.

Re:Queue the deniers

[ideonexus]

I'm glad you mentioned the eugenics movement, proponents of which used the theory of evolution to support their policy proposals. As a result, an anti-evolution movement rose up in the United States. Many people don't know this, but the Biology textbook at the heart of the Scopes Monkey Trial advocated for eugenics, but instead of attacking the policy recommendations, the anti-eugenics movement attacked evolutionary science.

The anti-AGW movement is making the exact same mistake today. By attacking the science instead of the policy, they are setting themselves up to be remembered as fools, just like the anti-evolutionists of the 1920s.

Re:Queue the deniers

[stenvar]

You clearly have read the IPCC reports if you are wading in on this discussion from the position you are. You are either lazy or being purposefully misleading in your position.

No, I simply read carefully. The IPCC summarizes research that shows a modest degree of warming and shows that humans probably contributed to that. Most of the rest, both predictions about temperature changes and their consequences, are based on numerous assumptions that intrinsically cannot be "shown". You may think those assumptions are plausible, but that's not the same as scientific evidence.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

No, I'm claiming that if the solution causes bigger problems then we shouldn't do it.

AGW is not the biggest problem we face in the world. Your ideas could cause wars and famine. We've seen nothing from AGW that implies that it will be worse then that.

Yes, there are issues in marginal societies but those societies are very sensitive and always have problems. What is more their problems are not destabilizing to global order.

Your ideas would put unbearable stresses on global diplomatic and trade systems.

You would get lots of countries that would not comply or would cheat the system. Then you'd put sanctions on those countries... then those countries and other complaint countries would find ways to cheat the sanctions... which would force countries to put additional pressure on other countries to actually impose proper sanctions or enforce existing ones that were reasonable. Then you'd get some countries that would leave the coalition... and it just wouldn't be sustainable.

Your idea assumes you actually can force people.

Consider this for one tiny moment.

What if you can't?

What if you can't force people?

What if you actually had to get them to comply by choice because you weren't strong enough to do anything else?

Did that ever occur to you? Or do you really think you can force the entire planet to obey your rules?

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

Wrong. My solutions are about getting people to WANT to do the right thing of making it in their interest to do the right thing. Which means wider adoption.

Your solutions require putting a gun to the head of billions of people and nation states that will not comply with your orders.

As such, your authoritarian model not only unethical but counter productive since you won't get compliance.

All you'll do is splutter and rant... pissing people off... and accomplishing nothing.

And because you refuse to listen to anyone its impossible to reason with you. You're just a deluded fanatic that doesn't understand the limitations of force.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

Its not a mistake. Its a political ploy that works.

Again, you're not getting anywhere on this issue unless you're willing to look very hard at your proposed solutions and make them reasonable.

In regards to evolution, I can assure you that if the eugenics movement were actually a threat, we'd have wide spread denial of evolution. Yes, I know there are evangelicals that deny it but I'm not talking about them. I'm saying upwards of 60-70 percent of the population would be against evolution if it were believed that something like eugenics were being justified by it.

That's just the politics. If you want people to be reasonable on the science you're going to have to not try to use the science to justify unacceptable policy.

Here is the central mistake you're making:

You're thinking "I have science on my side, I can win any argument and get people to do anything I want so long as I said SCIENCE".

Well it doesn't work that way. Science can be used to support a position but it does not instantly win any discussion on policy. And if you try to do that then everything you're doing will come under attack including the science.

Re:Queue the deniers

[bregmata]

What, line them up agaist the wall and shoot them? That's the classic final solution for those who disagree with the ascendent political thought.

Maybe you meant "Cue the deniers?"

Re: Queue the deniers

[ncc74656]

Stop saying that it would cause massive economic harm, because that is bullshit. In fact, it would (as always) mean jobs.

If I go around breaking my neighbors' windows, that creates jobs for glassmakers and window installers. Never mind that my neighbors would rather have spent their money on something other than fixing broken windows.

Re:Queue the deniers

[david_thornley]

You haven't said one thing to change my summary of your position. Since AGW is highly likely to cause great problems, and since the only ways to significantly reduce its effects are likely to be very costly and inconvenient, and since you claim that only palatable solutions will be accepted, we're fucked.

What if we can't enforce some sort of meaningful solution? Then AGW happens, and we are facing a whole lot of potential disasters, some of which are likely to be very disruptive and expensive.

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

If you want to run around like chicken little that's your own business.

I'd prefer to work towards attainable ends.

I didn't cause world industry to emit this CO2. That's not my fault. And it isn't my fault that you're not going to get your various ideas accepted wholesale.

All I can do is offer you ideas that might actually accomplish something. Will it be perfect? What planet and species do you think you're on and working with here?

This is earth and we're humans. Your ideas need to be less idealistic and realistic.

Getting 8 billion people to fall into line with your plan at gun point is a pipe dream... and even if you could do it which you can't... I really don't think you appreciate the human cost of getting what you want that way.

If we accept the most extreme alarmist projections on the climate that we've been fucked for years because apparently the oceans started to boil about 10 years ago and we're already dead.

Since that clearly didn't happen we can assume that the valid projections are somewhere between the least pessimistic and the most pessimistic.

Where that falls is debatable. A lot of it seems to come down to poorly understood forcing variables that have had their weightings adjusted so much that its clear they're just guessing.

So fine... that's a problem... now what can we do? Well, there are a lot of things we can do to improve our industry. But all of that starts at being rational about the whole thing and appreciating that it is a global problem and therefore local environmental regulations absent import tariffs are meaningless because you'll just export your pollution to china which at best will mean more CO2 is emitted then if it had been kept in the US with no environmental regulations.

There are a lot of technologies and processes we could use that would reduce our CO2 emissions dramatically. A lot of it involves biofuel which really should be producible on an individual basis to be really efficient. Keep in mind, that the biofuel is turning sunlight or some kind of organic energy into oil or alcohol. That means its going to take up a lot of space. What if rather then taking up a lot of space in a centralized refinery it instead takes up a few hundred square feet in the backyards of millions of homes?

The machinery for this sort of thing can be miniaturized and simplified to be operated by a normal person. Will the machine cost thousands of dollars? Sure. But then what does gasoline cost over several years for a family of 4?

Labor costs would also be largely nominal for the same reason we find cooking at home to be cheaper then eating out even though it takes more labor. The difference is that the extra labor is our own. We pay no one... its our own labor for our own production.

Look at the whole maker revolution. Its all part of the same thing. Can 3d printing ever compete with the efficiency of a conventional factory? Never. But it can be much cheaper because the cost of YOUR labor in the whole thing is effectively free. You've donated it to yourself.

There are all sorts of biofuel crops that we could employ for this sort of thing. Crops that produce oil. Crops that can be fermented and distilled. How many gallons of fuel do you need to produce in a month? You really don't need that much. Get a fast growing crop and intensively farm it on your property. This is entirely possible with current technology.

Will it take the average person some attention to make it happen? Sure. But the rising gas prices are a big motivator.

Let me give you an example of sort of economies we're talking about here.

If I go to the store to buy beer... the cheapest beer I can find... I am going to be paying about 10-11 dollars for 4 liters of beer.

If I brew it myself using whole grain brewing I can get closer to 10 liters of beer for that price... and the quality can be the equal of anything depending on my skill.

And that is assuming I buy the grain and hops AND mail order it paying shipping.

If I actually grew the stuff myself it would be even cheaper.

There are too many middle men in our supply chain and they're making an already tight logistical chain less competitive.

Re:Queue the deniers

[david_thornley]

So, you're not proposing to spend that much of people's money, just their time and energy. You do know that the US is fairly prominent in CO2 emissions, and US employers have been pushing employees to spend more time and energy working for them. If US employees have to brew their own beer and their own biofuels, things are going to get really ugly. It would be better to ask for money. (And more efficient. A brewer is far more efficient at making beer than you are, and the taste is probably more consistent. You're ignoring the economics here.)

Re:Queue the deniers

[Karmashock]

Biofuels if made by the refineries would cost around 5 dollars to 6 dollars a gallon before taxes. After taxes it could be closer to 7 or 8 dollars a gallon if not 10.

Its not competitive unless we do something creative.

Simply getting men with guns to force people to comply or be shot is not especially clever or creative either.

Do you have any original ideas? Ideas you came up with yourself?

Because the men with guns idea has failed and backfired... on top of being immoral and stupid... or possibly because its immoral and stupid. Either way... I'm trying to come up with ideas that don't depend on people being forced to comply at gun point. That means rethinking the industrial process.

As to self generated biofuels undermining the economy, the production of fossil fuels won't stop. We can expect that to continue for a long time to come. But we can start to break the link between that industry and every other. Farmers and other rural dwellers are best positioned to self generate because they have the land, water, and can even use waste biomass to fuel the system.

Furthermore, the decentralized systems that make this stuff will have to be manufactured and maintained. GE for example already has a SynGas generator that they're marketing to large farms. There are smaller companies that are making smaller units for smaller farms.

I've seen SynGas generators for 30 thousand dollars that produce 20kw. Carbon neutral power.

That's cheaper then solar and far more reliable.

People don't like it because it relies on burning things. And they've been mislead to think that burning things is anti environment. When really what is anti environment is burning sequestered hydrocarbons.

Wood is not a sequestered hydrocarbon.

The ideal set up for a system like this is to bundle it with a pellet mill and possibly a hammer mill.

Using the pellet mill and hammer mill... and maybe a wood chipper if needed you can process any kind of plant matter into uniform wood pellets which burn very nicely in the syngas generator.

When generating about 20kw it goes through 75 pounds of fuel in a day. Given that the average household consumes about 5-6kwh per day, you can see that one of these generators could service many homes concurrently.

And how large is this machine? I'm looking at one right now that is about 3' by 3' by 6'. Which is nothing if you consider how many homes it services.

And on top of the power, it generates a storable, portable gas that can be used in modified cars, heats water, and can heat whatever buildings are hooked up to it directly.

And with tweaking, a syngas generator can make crude, gasoline, kerosene, propane, etc. Most of them are set up to produce syngas and nothing else. But you can crack that to produce anything.

Which is where the big oil companies come in because they know more about that then anyone else. We need their help. They can provide technical expertise in return for patients and licensing all of which will sunset in about 14 years after their investment.

This is something we could do that would be applicable all over the world and could make a difference without resorting to force.

We could offer these machines to the world. Offer bio engineered crops for biofuel... genetically engineered algae... We have the technology to do these things. But it requires burying the failed and counterproductive Soylent orthodoxy.

Let me get this straight

[techno-vampire]

The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW? I must admit that I'm astonished. Not by the cause of the melting, but by the fact that the discovery is being announced without any attempt to spin this as proof of AGW.

Re:Let me get this straight

[polar red]

AGW has a straightforward reasoning behind it : 1/ the greenhouse effect of CO2, which you can test for yourself: see youtube. if you have other results, warn the nobel price committee. 2/amount of CO2 released can be estimated as well, by calculating how much oil, coal has been burned the last centuries. this amount is far larger than any removal of forest cutting has been responsible for, and far greater than volcanoes.

Re:Let me get this straight

[sg_oneill]

Nobody needs to "spin proof" of AGW, any more than they need to "spin proof" of evolution, the solar centric motion of planets or anything else in science thats already proven.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Thanshin]

"Do owls exist?"

"Are there hats?"

Re:Let me get this straight

[Arty Choke]

You don't have it straight yet. That would require reading the source article, which you obviously have not done. The study shows that geothermal heat is CONTRIBUTING to the melting, not the sole cause. The warming ocean is causing the surface melt, while it appears that geothermal heat may be melting the underside, increasing instability. There is not a word in the article that contradicts AGW. Sorry to disappoint you.

Re:Let me get this straight

[riverat1]

Some parts of the Thwaites Glacier are melting because of geothermal heat, not all of it. In fact probably less than 10% is affected directly by the geothermal heat. Why should you be astonished when scientists report science?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is due to AGW and it is turtles all the way down...

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations! Your post beat the "cuethedeniers" tag being added to this story. It's not as good a prize as first-post, but it's just as tired a meme.

Extra meta points for the actual first-post on this story, "Queue the deniers". See what he did there?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

nope not even fucking close.

At this point it's all fucking spin, I've see fucking everything spun as being AGW caused, hot weather, cold weather, not finding aliens was the latest news turd applied to it.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Layzej]

The researchers mapped geothermal sources, but didn't find an increase in geothermal sources under the WAIS, Something else likely triggered the melting, but the geothermal sources may make this ice sheet more unstable than previously thought. This may explain why we hit the tipping point so much sooner than we had expected.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to say. For geothermal to be the sole cause would be a stupendous amount of energy on display from the Earth. Wow! Just wow!

Re:Let me get this straight

[bluefoxlucid]

European government bodies are currently trying to address the threat of the cooling trend on the earth, and what global cooling will mean to the global economy.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Xyrus]

The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW?

No. It isn't. Read the paper instead of making inferences from a summary that is significantly lacking in details.

Scientists knew there was geothermal heat contributing to base melting of the glacier. Most places on Earth have a tiny amount of geothermal heat flux so underneath most glaciers there some small amount of melting due to this heat. On average, the geothermal flux on Earth is about 65 milliwatts/square meter.

This paper was looking to quantify the geothermal flux under the glacier so that they could model the behavior more accurately. It turns out the the average geothermal flux under the glacier is around 120 milliwatts/square meter with some areas going as high as 200 milliwatts/square meter. This adds a little bit more base melt and thus allows the glacier to move a little bit faster.

Keep in mind, these are milliwatts we're talking about, so it certainly isn't melting a lot. But since it is base melt it is contributing to glacier movement speed. This contributes to the ice loss already occurring due to warmer temperatures.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to see some citations for this.

If you folks think that living on a warmer plamet would be a problem, put some real thought into living on a colder one.

Re:Let me get this straight

[drinkypoo]

I double-plus extra love the happy joy-joy feelings inspired when a comment dedicated solely to spin complains about spin. It's like there's a party in my colon!

Re:Let me get this straight

[dave420]

No they're not. I'm sure it gives you a great case of the smugs to think that's the case, but as it's not based on reality in any way, it reflects quite poorly on you that you believe it and believe it so vehemently that you would post it to a public forum for all to see...

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I'm not into US Politics... I'm assuming that AGW is some Fox News speak, but I don't know what it is. Care to help me out?

Re:Let me get this straight

[bluefoxlucid]

It's what the scientists believe.

Really, there's a whole lot of weirdness going on in the IPCC. They come out and claim increasing certainty in global warming, while supporting scientists ask how there can be increasing certainty when their own experiments have lower confidence. The viewpoint from the United States is distorted due to inferior technology and medieval scientific procedures; the modern world has advanced far beyond the primitive tribes of the far west.

Re:Let me get this straight

[fahrbot-bot]

"Do owls exist?"

"Are there hats?"

More importantly, as a venture capitalist. Are there hats for owls and would they wear them? What kind of hats would they prefer? What is the potential return for an early investor in this new owl hat market?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Mean the sun controls our universe? Damn, I thought it was the cow farts warming the atmosphere. So I was doing my part by eating that steak last night to lower CO2. Didn't do any good then. But we are not on a centered circle, just as the earth wobbles, so does our sun, in a rhythm. Off setting the center, even of our sun. Bulges and laughs at our puny forces. But add in the other planets and you get the idea, setting off the rise and fall of our temperatures, amounts of sunlight received by varying the distances, to the, you may now have a better idea? Damn cat farts.....

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

While a trend has shown that global temperatures are increasing, and computer modeling has shown that when all else was held constant an increase in CO2 seems to be the cause. The problem is that all else was held constant, there is way too much going on to actually say for certain what is causing this. To make things worse the temperature increase in the papers I saw was assumed to have a linear correlation, which is a highly unlikely case. Heck if we look a mere 12,000 years ago we can see definite proof of AGW, or was that an anomaly? The simple fact is that we have a relatively small sample size of roughly 100 to 200 years and from that we have made monstrous predictions. What are we comparing that to? The temperatures from 1 million years ago, or the temperatures from 100 years ago? The earth has some rather extreme temperature cycles, to make predictions like AGW makes little sense. Heck even the hockey stick graph can only be obtained when you run it through an algorithm that only produces hockey stick graphs, when the data is computed normally you get a rough sinus wave. The data may be sound, but the computation isn't. Thus far the AGW is a "spin proof", currently it's difficult to get anything that does not agree with AGW published, as it's almost seen as quack science now thanks to the spin given to AGW.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

But for the supporters of AGW (which I am not) we're talking about parts per million of CO2 change.... So one tiny change here doesn't really affect things that much but an even tinier change there will cause some horrible thing to happen? Um...

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight... a "warming ocean" that is freezing so fast as to actually INCREASE the amount of surface ice in Antarctica is causing all ice that is sitting on a volcano to melt and slide around?

Next, will you explain to me how cars go by pointing downhill and the internal combustion engine is only a contributor.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't want to talk about milliwatts, but you're ready to get all hysterical about a .55 degrees celsius global average temperature increase? Give me a break.

Re:Let me get this straight

[mrchaotica]

The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW?

If by "rather than" you mean "in addition to," then yes.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Layzej]

Contrarians have been predicting global cooling for decades. Who cares? They have been wrong for decades and will continue to be wrong. But I will one up your three nutty links with one of my own. If you are into the fringe you may also be interested these contrarians who can 'prove' that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that there is a great liberal conspiracy to keep this out of the journals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re:Let me get this straight

[Darinbob]

So many people just seem to want some excuse to do nothing. It's not just denying that humans are contributing to climate change but an implicit denial that humans can do anything about it anyway. So, geothermal warning is contributing, woo-hoo, now I don't have to drive my Hummer under the speed limit to save gas.

Similarly we're probably going to have a major earthquake in California sometime, so it makes good sense to have a earthquake preparedness kit. Would this anti-AGW reject that and claim that it's a waste of their money, or that because it's not a man made earthquake there's nothing really that can be done about it, or that seismic retrofits are a massive waste of taxpayer dollars?

Re:Let me get this straight

[Layzej]

Read the paper instead of making inferences from a summary that is significantly lacking in details.

If you look at the poster's history you would be forgiven for thinking that he intentionally submitted a misleading summary. Story should be tagged "bricko".

Re:Let me get this straight

[Darinbob]

This is actually confusing. The most common definition is Anthropogenic Global Warming. As in the theory that global warming is being caused in some degree (not 100%) by the actions of human beings (cutting down forests, digging up previously sequestered carbon to use as fuel, etc).

However some mistakenly think it stands for Anti Global Warming, or Accelerated Global Warming, things like that. Which can confuse the conversation at times.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Darinbob]

I'm astonished when reporters are reporting science.

Re:Let me get this straight

[techno-vampire]

Maybe I should have used sarcasm tags. I don't deny that the climate is changing, because I'm enough of a realist to understand that the climate is always changing. I am, however, skeptical about the cause. My personal opinion is that geothermal energy may be a factor (even, possibly a major factor) in the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, but AFAIK there's no evidence, as yet, that this is true for any other glacier.

Re:Let me get this straight

[harlequinn]

"In fact probably less than 10% is affected directly by the geothermal heat."

"In fact" and "probably" don't mix.

The paper doesn't support your assertion. If you look at Fig. 3 you'll see that almost the entire glacier has twice the average geothermal flow at 100mW/m^2 or greater (with hot spots up to 200mW/m^2).

Re:Let me get this straight

[harlequinn]

"This contributes to the ice loss already occurring due to warmer temperatures."

What will be interesting is the relative ratios of each affect (which I don't see yet quantified).

Re:Let me get this straight

[riverat1]

You're right, I didn't look at the paper first and I should have. But 100 mW/m^2 is not that far above the average for the whole Earth of 65 mW/m^2. When I said 10% I was thinking about active volcanic areas.

Re:Let me get this straight

[riverat1]

Yea, kind of like if you breath air with 270 ppm of cyanide it will kill you within minutes. Tiny amounts can matter a great deal depending on the context.

Re:Let me get this straight

[dave420]

So European government bodies are not trying to address the threat of the cooling trend on the earth. Gotcha. Thanks for clearing up your mind-puke.

Re:Let me get this straight

[dave420]

The science is in. The causes are known and quantified. At this point you are not being sceptical but cynical, and that's something entirely different.

Re:Let me get this straight

[harlequinn]

;)

You've done me a favor, I didn't even know Antarctica had volcanic areas. I've now looked it up and there are subglacial volcanoes!!!

Re:Let me get this straight

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually the earth is the center of the universe. Kind of.

More correctly: everywhere is the center of the universe. If you analyze the expansion of the universe from any point in the universe, you find everything moving away from everything else at the exact same rate. It is impossible to use this data to pinpoint the center, because you don't have a doppler effect: things don't move away from each other less as you near the supposed center, and more as you move away.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Layzej]

You are right of course, but not according to these guys. According to them God drew an X through the universe that intersects at Earth. Earth is the center of the universe and the "loony left" is doing their best to bury that fact: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re:Let me get this straight

[bluefoxlucid]

That wouldn't make any sense.

Re:Let me get this straight

[riverat1]

Mount Erebus is the southernmost known active volcano in the world.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for all the people insisting AGW is melting the ice sheet, thus demonstrating a complete ignorance of thermodynamics.

But as you wish.

There've been ice ages with 20X the CO2, and we're currently coming out of the coldest glaciation in 300 million years. It's supposed to get warmer.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Layzej]

Obviously you are part of the "loony left" conspiracy. ;)

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

U R right, a little thermal don't necessarily make all the geo

Re:Let me get this straight

[hkmwbz]

Your links are all to denialist web sites. Those are not "the scientists" at all. The actual scientists are the ones publishing actual science in actual scientific journals. And that research shows man-made warming.

No idea what you mean by "their own experiments have lower confidence." Seems like you're parroting something one of your non-scientists said.

Re:Let me get this straight

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/4/1790.full?sid=021af2c5-6604-4e66-a19f-556780a0327b

"If the relationship between biomass and glacial meltwater is consistent, this finding could represent a negative feedback for global warming."

Deniers.

The Gods

[Thanshin]

It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods, sacrifice one or two goats and all be happy about it.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods

Or Global Warming.

Re:The Gods

[Bob_Who]

It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods, sacrifice one or two goats and all be happy about it.

You have goats?

I ran out....

Re:The Gods

[Thanshin]

*Pro tip*: From a distance. Dirty, long-haired dogs are surprisingly similar to goats.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, one is not enough - it would be an insult. According to the Illiad, which is the definative guide on all matters, you need to sacrifice a hecatomb at least (100 goats) if you want to have any hope of appeasing the gods.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

Homeless don't like being called dogs

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

You have goats? I ran out....

There should be some virgins around here somewhere, this is Slashdot after all.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

*Pro tip*: From a distance. Dirty, long-haired dogs are surprisingly similar to goats.

And from inside they feel much the same too.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods

Or Global Warming.

Or Liberals and Socialists and Muslims and gay marriage and eeeeeeeeeeeeeevil Scientists.

Re:The Gods

[motorhead]

Barbecue, sliced beef and bread
  Ribs and sausage and a cold big red.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

> It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods,

Back when that was all the rage, what we can do today would have made us gods.

Re:The Gods

[Muad'Dave]

All I got out of the Illiad was that soldiers liked to grill and eat sausages and do weird stuff with thighbones.

Re:The Gods

[Thanshin]

All I got out of the Illiad was that soldiers liked to grill and eat sausages and do weird stuff with thighbones.

Well, that's way less awkward than the other way around.

Re:The Gods

[gman003]

Don't worry, you can just download an e-goat. There's a good website for it, but they keep having to change the TLD for some reason and I can't keep track of which one it is.

Re:The Gods

[asylumx]

Don't worry, your "omniscient" god doesn't know the difference ;-)

Re:The Gods

[Darinbob]

Today though we can blame it all on Google.

Re:The Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

well everyone here seems to be getting goats, guess we have enough?

Re:The Gods

[CHIT2ME]

Ummmmm! Sacrificed goats! Have you ever tried curried goat? It is delicious!!!

And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Trachman]

I am siding with those that the climate changes. In my opinion it does. If CO2 curbing means more direct taxes on me, then I am against it.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[sg_oneill]

If CO2 curbing means more direct taxes on me, then I am against it.

Then quit pissing in the commons, disconnect your power, buy a solar powered (ONLY) car, avoid anything made with , well anything.

And then, after your satisfied your not increasing the risk to me and everyone else, I think it would be ok to not have any taxes go to cleaning up your mess.

Otherwise, quit freeloading off others, denialist commie.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[riverat1]

What is not curbing CO2 means 2 or 3 times the cost of curbing it? That's what a lot of economic analyses show.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Then quit pissing in the commons, disconnect your power, buy a solar powered (ONLY) car, avoid anything made with , well anything.

And then, after your satisfied your not increasing the risk to me and everyone else, I think it would be ok to not have any taxes go to cleaning up your mess.

Otherwise, quit freeloading off others, denialist commie.

I'm a denialist commie (Well, socialist actually, but what's the difference.) who lives in a country with carbon neutral energy production.
Since I live close enough to work I don't own a car. I don't see how buying a solar powered one would help.

Now, if you are so concerned with carbon emission, how about you stop emission carbon instead of paying taxes for it. The taxes aren't used to stop the emissions anyway so in the end it is just a feel-good tax that you pay so that you can keep living you current life-style but not feel bad about it.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm a denialist commie (Well, socialist actually, but what's the difference.) who lives in a country with carbon neutral energy production.

No [r] way!

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

I like commies! They are funny in a deadly kinda way.
The only way to stop emmiting CO2 is to stop breathing. Major greenies were always against humans.
That is why commies and greenies have that much in common.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

(Well, socialist actually, but what's the difference.)

Socialist will take what you wroked for by majority vote.
A communist will just take it by force and probably shoot you for being able to make that much.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[dave420]

Translation: "I agree that CO2 is changing the atmosphere, but as I am selfish, if it inconveniences me at all to do something about it, I won't, and I will happily condemn future generations to deal with the problem as I simply can't be fucked". Lovely person.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[wonkey_monkey]

No [r] way!

Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

and that is crap math and loads of biased bollocks.

fuck off and Go live in a cave if you want to but stop trying to force the rest of us too.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[BreakBad]

Indeed. But nobody ever wants to talk about population. If simply 'curbing' CO2 is so hard, wouldn't it be easier to just have one big ass war? Sure it would be messy at first, but the long term benefits of nixing a few trillion people would be worth considering.

Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator

[belatucadros3918]

Killing a trillion people would definitely solve earth's problens

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[MancunianMaskMan]

No [r] way!

Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?

Oman that's awful!

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[morgauxo]

Why would he buy a solar powered car? Or any car at all? Is he going to drive it on the public roads?

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't want Tibet against something even worse popping up.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Jason Levine]

I agree. We need to kill a few trillion people.

Kif: "Sir." *whispers* "There aren't that many human beings."

A thought occurs. There aren't that many humans.

Lrrr: "We're willing to wait a few weeks while you shore up the numbers."

Hmm. Nine hundred and ninety three billion babies in a few weeks. We'll need an army of super virile men scoring 'round the clock! I'll do my part. Kif, clear my schedule!

Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

especially as there are no where near a TRILLION people on the planet. someone in the humanity is a cancer and must be eliminted to save the planet camp, yes?

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Then quit pissing in the commons, disconnect your power, buy a solar powered (ONLY) car, avoid anything made with , well anything.

And then, after your satisfied your not increasing the risk to me and everyone else, I think it would be ok to not have any taxes go to cleaning up your mess.

Otherwise, quit freeloading off others, denialist commie.

I'm a denialist commie (Well, socialist actually, but what's the difference.) who lives in a country with carbon neutral energy production.
Since I live close enough to work I don't own a car. I don't see how buying a solar powered one would help.

Now, if you are so concerned with carbon emission, how about you stop emission carbon instead of paying taxes for it. The taxes aren't used to stop the emissions anyway so in the end it is just a feel-good tax that you pay so that you can keep living you current life-style but not feel bad about it.

Your country is carbon neutral without some sort of subsidy system in place to create carbon credits via carbon-negative practices? I call bullshit, a big steaming "carbon-neutral" pile of it.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[GarethIwanFairclough]

No [r] way!

Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?

Oman that's awful!

I think you and Brunei will get along just fine. Honestly though, some of these puns will end up Jamaican me crazy.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[dave420]

Lots of people want to talk about population. In fact, it's a major topic. There are plenty of ways to decrease the global population without resorting to killing people. The easiest way is to increase the quality of life for people in countries which are experiencing a large population growth. Happy people whose children are likely to grow up tend to have fewer children. After a few generations of that, the population stabilises.

I know it's easy to think "too many people = we should kill some", but that's beyond childish.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

So the obvious solution is for all those who believe climate change is caused by CO2 to stop breathing.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that producing a solar car is a carbon neutral process right?

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[MichaelSimpson77]

I agree with the parent. The solutions to curbing emissions has been cap and trade, a program meant to remove more $ from citizen's pockets by increasing the amount of money they pay for energy. California has just implemented cap and trade. Electric bills are going up. Do you think that utilities eat that cost? And of course, the middle men, think Al Gore's company, takes a little bite of every cap and trade transaction. These entities have produce a "product" literally out of thin air. The cap and trade industry produces nothing. It merely has created an industry that shears the sheep by whipping them up and telling them the planet is but a few years away from catastrophe. Sadly, people are stupid and gullible. The surprising thing is, you see them here, supposedly educated logical people and it is allways the same, "But we must do something, anything!"

Given today's technology, if carbon was a real threat, don't you think money would be expended on the problems that are the problems? Case in point. I drive from stop light to stop light on my way to work. This morning, one of the lights turned red on the main road, even though there were no cars waiting on the side road. Every time the cars accelerate from the stop, they emit more carbon than a car that is maintaining a constant speed. A few of the communities, in the interest of safety, implemented, do the speed limit, hit all of the lights green strategy. When traffic ticket revenue plumented, those communities reversed course and implemented a different strategy. Most of the streets now reward a car doing 10 over with a string of green lights. So speeding is rewarded but now there is a source of revenue from the speeders. But if carbon was a real, and impending threat, don't you think we would use a network of Beagleboard Blacks to manage and measure traffic to ensure cars spend the least amount of time idling? But carbon really isn't an issue. It represents .3% of the atmosphere. Yes, point three percent. Of course, if we are to avert the next ice age, we really need to get carbon up to 4% to produce enough of a blanket to keep the glaciers at bay. I drive through a valley here in San Diego California and see the boulder left here from an ice age. I'd hate to see that amount of ice again.

As far as percentage of carbon emmisions, residential accounts for 10% of those emmisions. Expect those same residents to pay for 100% of the cost.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Iran to a good hiding place.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[sumdumass]

There are a lot of greenies who actually believe that. They think the world is over populated and less humans is a good thing. Ted Turner, the TV network tycoon who started CNN among other stations used to be very vocal about it but has toned it down a lot in the last decade or so.

Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator

[OakDragon]

We'll have to wait for future generations to generate that trillion. Then we'll have a workable solution.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[K. S. Kyosuke]

No [r] way!

Kenya imagine a worse country-name pun than that?

Oh come on, it was a pretty Benin pun at most, I've kept myself in Czech.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Darinbob]

But it really is overpopulated, and the growth rate is not leveling off. I'm not advocating that people stop breathing to solve this problem, but it is absolutely has a massive effect on the environment (and economy).

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[wonkey_monkey]

Iraq'n you should stop now.

Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator

[servant]

Especially since there are only about 7 Billion people now. A trillion sounds like cold war overkill tactics.

Re:And who will be pushing the accelerator

[sumdumass]

OF course it has an effect. Not having any humans at all will also. The problem is that technology allows more people to have less effect or less detrimental effect. It also allows us to deal with the changes which is why we don't have hundreds of thousands of people dieing in every natural disaster.

Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! A few trillion would be perfect! We could all go to Heaven and the aliens could have the planet! Bwahahahaha....Actually, about a ninety-seven percent extinction event would be pretty helpful in jump starting the human race yet.....AGAIN! Maybe someday we will get it right.

Re: And who will be pushing the accelerator

[sg_oneill]

Oh I was kinda trolling a bit with the commie jibe. My point there is that people see a carbon price as somehow "stealing" from them whilst ignoring their own impacts on others. There are no free lunches in science but a lot of supposedly "capitalist" folks seem to want one when it comes to disposing the by products of their consumption, in this case by driving up CO2 levels and putting the climate out of whack.

Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

of whether humans are the cause of global warming, we should stop pollution for it's own sake! Even if we are 0% responsible, we should still cut the amount of stuff we put into the air and water.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

this is something I can agree with

Re:Regardless

[bigwheel]

In that case, we should be focused on pollutants rather than CO2. CO2 is a trace gas that is essential to life.

CO2 is not even listed among pollutants in the Clean Air Act. It was put into that category by EPA as an executive measure, after the Supreme Court authorized them in 2007 to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... This was done for the sole purpose of furthering the global warming agenda.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

And we need to do this because, as a global community, we all need to give a damn about how one country with a mere 4.3% of the world's population defines pollutant.

Re:Regardless

[dave420]

We need to maintain a balanced amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as only a small amount of it has powerful consequences. You yourself admit it - it's a trace gas, yet essential to life. Too much or too little and it's not great for life as we know it.

Re:Regardless

[Spy Handler]

It's funny, I was watching Nat Geo and they were showing a program about dinosaurs. They described the Cretaceous world that dinosaurs lived in, and explained how life forms (both plant and animal) were able to reach such gigantic size. Highlights: higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere (higher than today even with all the man-made carbon emissions) which led to gigantic forests. Higher oxygen levels which enabled animals to grow bigger. Hotter temperatures (than today), higher humidity and rainfall.

The narrator described it as a "hot and steamy jungle paradise thriving with life". Which was ended by a gigantic asteroid strike.

An hour later the same channel (Nat Geo) showed a program on climate change and how increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere will lead to irreversible runaway global warming which will doom everyone and everything and turn the earth into a barren wasteland.

Re:Regardless

[david_thornley]

CO2 is less of a trace gas than it used to be.

Back before the Industrial Revolution, we had about 280ppm in the air. Now, it's 400, and still increasing fairly fast.

At some point, we're going to have real problems of some sort or other.

Re:Regardless

[dave420]

It's not funny, it's science. Our world, where we live, is currently not like the Cretaceous. Should it become like the Cretaceous, humanity would suffer massively, as we and our industry are simply not prepared for living in such a climate. We also don't have the luxury of the relatively-slow lead-up to the Cretaceous climate, as if we keep pumping out CO2 our climate will change very quickly indeed.

I guess it's easy to get confused if you use Nat Geo as your source for scientific learning.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Nat Geo is "denialist" now?

Cool story, bro.

Re:Regardless

[CHIT2ME]

Yeah right, CO2 is a lot like Oxygen. Put too much Oxygen into the atmosphere and see what happens! The problem is altering the atmosphere. CO2, even as a trace gas, if its' ratio in the atmosphere is altered, it will have dire consequences, just like too much Oxygen.

where is west

[YoungManKlaus]

if you stand at the pole?

Re:where is west

[PhilHibbs]

Walk towards Greenwich and turn left.

Re:where is west

[Melipone]

Oh damn you both I can't resist. It's only left if you're standing on the south pole. From the north pole it's right.

Re:where is west

[Anonymous Coward]

(psssst) Antartica is at the south pole.

Re:where is west

[tsqr]

Well, if you're precisely at the South Pole, any direction is north. Fortunately, all of Antarctica is not precisely at the pole. Western Antarctica is the part of the continent that is in the western hemisphere. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Re:where is west

[rossdee]

"Antartica is at the south pole"

No, the South Pole is in Antarctica not the other way round.
Antarctica is pretty damn big.

Re:where is west

[CHIT2ME]

That away!!!!

meaningless, unless the geothermal is new

[dltaylor]

Usually (Yellowstone, Iceland, ...) geothermal sources are present tens of thousands, if not tens of millions, of years before present. Unless this is a newly-formed hot spot, the ice sheet has survived millions of years of it. Only the OTHER (read: us) source of heat is now exposing the ice sheet to more heat than it can withstand.

Re:meaningless, unless the geothermal is new

[PhilHibbs]

The continents move over hotspots, which is why the Hawaii island chain exists. I don't know much about the Antarctic continental plate, whether it is moving or not, but it may have drifted over a hotspot some time in the last few million years.

Re:meaningless, unless the geothermal is new

[stymy]

Except that millions of years ago the poles had no ice cap.

Re:meaningless, unless the geothermal is new

[dltaylor]

When the Panama Isthmus closed about three million years ago, changing the oceanic circulation patterns, the current galcial/interglacial climate began. Antartica has had ice for over two million years.

Ya' think?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring on the geothermal heat "deniers"

It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are basically at the end of a mini ice age right now.
Earth will simply return to it's natural hot state. I for one hope I live long enough to see what was buried under the ice for all those years.
People on the coast can move or build sea walls or something.
It's not that big a deal. There is plenty of uninhabited non-coastal land.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[dltaylor]

We were at the end of the last ice age thousands of years ago (Holocene Optimum). Rather than begin the next cooling cycle, we've been adding energy to the biospere at an almost-unprecented rate, other than mass extinction events such as the PermianTriassic Mass Extinction.

Given that we started burning forests for cropland at about the middle of the Holocene Optimum, it is not true to say that the natural state is hot. On occasion, in fact, the globe has been totally iced over. Since the closing of the Panama isthmus changed global ocean circulation patterns millions of years ago, the Earth has been in a constant glacial-interglacial cycle, which is now its "natural: state.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[dave420]

Your lack of scientific literacy is astounding, as are your hand-waiving of problems which will affect many millions of people (and important cities which can't be walled in) severely hurting the global economy in the process.

You, and those who think as lazily as you, are dangerous.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[C0R1D4N]

He is presumably thinking of the Little Ice Age.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

presuming a lot there, why would the planet have a fucking "natural state".

Nothing stays the same. it's never been fucking stable and never will be.

It may have periods that are assumed to be "the natural state" but your just lying to yourself.

I'm sure Cambrian lifeforms presumed there world was stable and on going forever, but it wasn't.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, what page of the Bible is that on? Citation needed.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nature is unconcerned in our global economy. Nature is unconcerned about the millions of people it will affect.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[rossdee]

"People on the coast can move or build sea walls or something.
It's not that big a deal. There is plenty of uninhabited non-coastal land."

Sea level rise is not the biggest problem of climate change/global warming.
In recorded and pre-recorded history, the weather/climate phenomenon thst has killed the most people is drought.
While there may be some regions in the north that are able to grow more crops due to the warmer weather, most of it won't be suitable for farming.

The world won't be able to support N billion people if we let it warm by 5 degrees

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your lack of scientific literacy is astounding, as are your hand-waiving of problems which will affect many millions of people (and important cities which can't be walled in) severely hurting the global economy in the process.

You, and those who think as lazily as you, are dangerous.

You missed the point of the climate change research:

We're all dangerous.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[riverat1]

Nature is unconcerned but I think most people care.

Right ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so many degrees, so much research, so many educated morons, and yet, they still don't understand the greater issue. Climate changes are already here, over-long droughts, seasonal changes, abnormal floods, strange winters etc etc.
Stop squabbling about why it's happening and find a solution to stop it.

Unless we built power plants on Mars, it's both

[raymorris]

Quick fact: earth has warmed more than the neighboring planets have.

Mercury, Earth, and Venus have gotten warmer. What do Mercury, earth, and Venus have in common? The sun, of course. Sun cycles are probably the cause of this warning.

Earth has warmed more the other two. What's special about earth? A) our atmosphere b) humans and c) water. The additional warming of earth probably has to do with our atmosphere being more affected by the increased solar output, by water holding the heat, by human activity, or by a combination of these.

Re:Unless we built power plants on Mars, it's both

[dave420]

Nope - the sun's influence has been shown to not be as important as CO2 when it comes to global warming.

You can't use such simple, childish logic to try to establish the cause of a phenomenon in such a complicated system. You end up looking incredibly foolish, and learning nothing in the process.

Re:Unless we built power plants on Mars, it's both

[Layzej]

Neighboring planets are poor proxies for solar output, especially since we have direct measurements from the sun itself. Solar output has been dwindling since the 80's: http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...

Re:Unless we built power plants on Mars, it's both

[Anonymous Coward]

not been shown at all, just more fucking dumb presumption

Re:Unless we built power plants on Mars, it's both

[Anonymous Coward]

in response to b) we also have whales. I don't think the other planets have whales. Or chipmunks. Probably need a d) and e)

Clearly this means

[Anonymous Coward]

That all of climate science is a complete scam, and the entire scientific community is too stupid to figure it out while I, an anonymous internet commenter, have discovered the truth.

Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[dtjohnson]

Just a few days ago, global warmers were suggesting that Antarctic ice losses were doubling due to global warming. Of course, the problem with that is that the warmest temperature recorded at Amundsen-Scott South pole station during the last 12 months was -21F in January, 2014 which is not exactly bikini weather and is still 53 degrees F lower than the temperature needed to melt water. Obviously, if antarctic ice is melting, it is due to volcanic or geothermal heat inputs rather than balmy surface temperatures brought about by too much carbon dioxide.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a typical example of your logic, or are you trolling, or just hoping to fool stupid people? On a continent that's 5.4 million square miles, with 11,000 miles of coastline, you pick the stats for the far inland south pole station -- probably one of the coldest places on Earth at that altitude -- and conclude that since no melting can occur there, it can't occur anywhere on the whole continent?

Here's a little hint for you: you know that 11,000 miles of icy coastline I just mentioned? Guess what's rubbing up next to the ice? Liquid water. Get where the warmest temperatures are? Near that big mass of liquid water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

For God's sake, educate yourself. Because Fox News and El Rushbo aren't doing the job.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[Anonymous Coward]

you pick the stats for the far inland south pole station -- probably one of the coldest places on Earth at that altitude

Well duh, all the other sensors were reading warmer due to humans and therefore were placed in the wrong places and were excluded from consideration.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[dtjohnson]

Okay, then take McMurdo Station. It's on the coastline. The average 'high' temperature there in January (the warmest month) is only 31.6F...still below freezing...and that's the high temperature for the warmest month. But, if we're talking about the antarctic continental ice sheet, the Amundsen-Scott temperatures are more representative than coastal temperatures which, like temps at all coastal locations worldwide, are moderated by the presence of the ocean as an enormous heat reservoir. There is not a lot of climate data available for most of Antarctica but your boneheaded presumption that a coastal temp is more representative of ice sheet air temperatures than an interior measurement is narrow-minded and demonstrates a desire to adjust the data to fit preconceived beliefs. A more scientific approach is to ask questions and then attempt to answer them with the best data available. Is the Antarctic ice sheet melting? Satellite data has suggested that it is. Why? Your 'warmer' preconceived answer to that question is 'the melting is caused by warmer antarctic air temps due to climate warming caused by carbon dioxide' and yet there is no data at all to support that while there is some data suggesting that geothermal heat input (see TFA) is having an effect.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[Anonymous Coward]

The average 'high' temperature there in January (the warmest month) is only 31.6F...still below freezing...and that's the high temperature for the warmest month

No, that's not the "high" temperature for the warmest month. That's the average high temperature, as you yourself pointed out in the same sentence. Meaning that there are times when the temperature is higher (as in, possibly well-above freezing), and times when it is lower. As is true even for months other than January.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[Anonymous Coward]

From the first paragraph of the original article:

Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Not only being eroded by the ocean" suggests that the relatively warmer coastal waters are indeed playing a part in the erosion of the glacier. I suspect there could very well be a connexion between warmer average atmospheric temperatures and warmer average oceanic temperatures, in which case, yes, it *would* seem that considering effects at the coastline instead of the centre of the continent is more appropriate.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally someone with a brain who isn't blinded by the "experts".

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[dave420]

Someone with a brain who doesn't know that "average" and "maximum" are two different concepts... and you laud them for it? Wow.

Re:Geothermal heat isn't 'AGW-approved'

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand the difference between 'average high' and 'maximum' and yet you presume to criticize someone who does. Wow.

You mean it isn't necessarily humanity's fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurry up! Hide this data!
It's all humanity's fault!
All our fault!
LALALALALALALA!

Is the sheet Increasing or Decreasing ? FUD!

[fygment]

There was an article here in /. just a week or two ago saying that the Antarctic Sheet is perplexing to climatologists because it is _increasing_, not decreasing. So a glacier sloughs off, why would it alone contribute to sea level rises, while the rest of the sheet is growing? Show me your models, tell me its assumptions and approximations, demonstrate its predictions when there are deviations from those assumptions and approximations, and you will likely be apologising or rationalising the results so that they agree or can be seen to align is some way with whatever desired results you had in mind when you built it.

You know what? It isn't even worth looking up. Clearly there is FUD on this issue from all sides. Who cares? We humans will do what we do best: adapt.

Please humans, jump more!

[Anonymous Coward]

We are heating the Earth surface with too much contact human contact. Please jump in the air 100 times a day. It's not much to ask. And don't you dare rub your socks on the ground to shock your sister!

your theory on solar system warming? Aliens?

[raymorris]

Do you have a theory as to what is causing Earth, Mars, and Venus to warm? Certainly not invisible aliens building invisible power plants on Mars.

Re:your theory on solar system warming? Aliens?

[Layzej]

Earth is getting warmer because of radiative physics related to increased greenhouse gasses.

We don't have much more than a few data points on Martian temperatures, so it is not really possible to know whether there are any long term warming or cooling trends. Mars has no oceans and only a very thin atmosphere, which means there is very little thermal inertia. This makes Mars more susceptible to large swings in temperature. Orbital eccentricity contributes far greater changes to Martian climate than to that of the Earth because variations in Mars' orbit are five times greater than the Earth. Massive dust storms may also play a big role in changing the energy balance.

The only papers I can find on Venus indicate that it is likely cooling, but again, data points are sparse so it is inconclusive.

One thing is for certain. If they are warming, it is not because of a warming sun. We know this for sure because the sun has been cooling over the last 40 years.

Re:your theory on solar system warming? Aliens?

[dave420]

You could just go on Google and find out, but I guess it's more fun pretending to be a free-thinking awesome superhero armchair scientist fighting the AGW cabal. Playing pretend is fun!

Re:your theory on solar system warming? Aliens?

[Cro Magnon]

I don't know about Mars or Venus, but I'm sure the temp on Uranus is rising due to the gas emissions there.

Re:Cue the radical activists

[satch89450]

I will believe the science is settled when the journals that carry articles about climate stop rejecting articles that are not "in line" with the alleged settled science, especially those articles that are brought forward by scientists who don't put the word "climate" in front of "scientist" or "researcher" when they describe themselves.

"Science" is about exploring boundaries and ideas, and a "memory hole" has no place at all in science. "Science" is about evaluating the data and resulting theories, not the person bringing the data and theories forward. "Science" is about recognizing new facts and incorporating them into existing theories...or throwing out the old theories when the new facts require those theories to be stretched all out of shape to shoehorn in the new facts, much like politicians gerrymander the boundaries of voting districts to achieve a desired result.

Why have the various predictions been so drastically wrong? That says the science is not settled. If it were, the results would better match the predictions. Especially the doomsday predictions. Not to mention the flip-flops between "global warming" and "global cooling" -- how does the settled science square with those changes in view? I'm reminded of the boy crying "Wolf!"...

I agree that there are trends in temperature change that needs to be watched closely, but I disagree that there is one "magic" solution. Indeed, I look at reduced industrial CO2 emissions as only one of many things we should look to do. For example, have you considered growing grass on the roof of your house, and on the body of your car? How about roofing over car parks, and growing plants on them? Have you looked into dense, CO2-consuming flora on the top of your office building? How many trees have you planted on your property, especially large-leaf ones?

"Climate change" is not a "Someone else's problem" -- it's YOUR problem, too. Why do I see lots of talk but little personal action? Show us how to solve the problem, don't just say "you do it."

Think for 2 seconds before knee jerk

[raymorris]

You've posted the automatic, chat-bot response that you've been trained to go to whenever anyone mentions the rest of the solar system. Now take two seconds to actually think about what you just said.

I said:
by a combination of these

You replied:
Nope - the sun's influence has been shown to not be as important

Then you went on with childish attacks. Think about the phrase "not AS important". That's a comparison. That phrase means one thing is important, and the other thing is more important. In other words, a combination, precisely as I said.

"You can't use simple logic ..."
Indeed, simple logic does get in the way of parroting the party line.

Re:Think for 2 seconds before knee jerk

[dave420]

The research shows you are wrong, and yet you still post. That's why your remarks deserve nothing more than "childish" attacks as you are trying to debunk an entire field of science by writing a few childish lines of pseudologic in a slashdot post, and acting as if you are some sort of amazing free-thinker. You're not. You are wrong, and the worst thing is this: you have the tools to easily educate yourself on just how wrong you are, yet refuse to do so. You are part of the problem.

Re:Think for 2 seconds before knee jerk

[Xaedalus]

As I said to ideonexus above: if people like you are right, then I'd rather let the planet burn. Fuck you and fuck your self-righteous, pompous, "I am right so obey me stance". I *know* the science is right, but I don't care because I don't want sanctimonious pricks like you, who condescend to me and people like me on a daily basis, to impose taxes and new paradigm shifts that are going to make my life even worse off for the sake of future generations--and here's the kicker--we don't even know if those changes WILL make future generations thank us. If you can't take the time to empathize and understand my position, and talk to me from a position of humility, then fuck your position. Let's jack up the CO2 and bring on the apocalypse. I'll adapt just fine, and I'll enjoy listening to you whine about the good ol' days. Or, we'll all be dead and it won't matter. Either way, people like YOU won't be in charge and I won't have to listen to blow-hards pontificating on the superiority of science telling me how I should live my life.

Re:Think for 2 seconds before knee jerk

[dave420]

You deny existence - and are willing to guarantee the suffering of future generations - because someone talked to you in a way you don't like? Aww poor baby! Poor wittle baby! In future someone should give you a lollypop before people start talking about AGW so your precious little ego isn't hurt! Awwwww poor little guy! I had no idea you were so sensitive! So cute! Awwwwwww!

Volcanos?

[Squidlips]

I know there are some erupting under the ice. Is this contributing?

Not Geothermal

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a geothermal event causing the ice to melt away, it's a portal to the realm of the elder gods, Cthulu is rising! (Ref: At the Mountains of Madness)

GeoThermal only a small part of the glacier's melt

[mpsmps]

It's worth pointing out that the increased geothermal heat estimate only contributes a few per cent to the melting of the Thwaites glacier. It's predominately AGW and natural calving. I'm not saying this paper isn't important (we all know about the straw that broke the camel's back), just pointing out that it doesn't provide an alternate explanation to AGW for the melting of the Thwaite glacier.

Re:Is the sheet Increasing or Decreasing ? FUD!

[Anonymous Coward]

> There was an article here in /. just a week or two ago saying that the Antarctic Sheet is perplexing to climatologists because it is _increasing_, not decreasing.

Increasing in surface area but decrease in volume. This isn't complicated, but if you won't look stuff up then it is easy to say that all exaggeration is equal. Kind of like -1 and +10 are both numbers so they are really just the same thing.

off the grid

[Anonymous Coward]

Only read most of these comments but one that sticks out is the if you don't like paying taxes related to global warming then go private solar, etc, and take yourself off the grid. Problem is that if you start producing your own energy to any significant degree you'll find a new set of taxes and fines for not paying into the common funds via the old taxes. Instead of being rewarded for being part of the soution you're penalized even more harshly with the equivalent of the old taxes and a criminal record for not paying them..

AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

You seem to be conflating two closely related topics:

- Is AGW happening? -- This is a scientific question, and has been conclusively answered for a decade and more. The science now is all about dialing in the decimal points so we have a better idea of exactly what we can expect: basically - are we fucked, or are we really *really* fucked? And where is the point of no return? Anyone claiming the phenomena is still being debated by scientists is simply involved in political maneuvering.

- What should we do about it? -- This is fundamentally a political question. Science says we must reduce carbon emissions or engage in large scale geoegineering if we want to preserve a world anything like what we evolved in. How we go about doing one or both of those, or whether we prepare to adapt instead is entirely a political decision.

So, if we want to make this a scientifically grounded discussion then both extremes and the moderates must all accept that AGW is real, and from there we can begin discussing what to do about it. Anyone claiming the truth of AGW is being debated, including those calling for a "moderate" perspective on the topic, is entirely focused on denying the science for their own political ends.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

It wasn't stating that AGW is real that generated the controversy but rather the proposed solutions to it.

If you told the world "AGW is real but no one has to do anything about it" then you wouldn't be getting the blow back you're seeing now. The various factions you are dealing with are mostly undermining the validity of AGW as a proxy to attack the proposed fixes for AGW which is really what they have a problem with in the first place.

Once you understand that, you can grasp that what you really have here is a negociation between different groups. Some factions offered solutions... many of those ideas were rejected. They tried to push them anyway after they were rejected... which meant the political factions that rejected it had to prove why getting their acceptance was important or they'd have no legitimacy in that issue or other issues.

These factions you must appreciate would have no value if they were unable to get their will enforced. Who cares about republicans or democrats? who cares about labor or conservatives or liberal democrats or greens or whatever?

Well... they make you care. They must or they have no value. No reason for anyone to waste any time with them at all.

So... Lets understand that the issue of AGW itself is not really an issue of contention. Its the proposed solutions.

Are you willing to negotiate on those and arrive at win win options that are acceptable to a plurality of factions? You won't make literally everyone happy but if you can make 75 percent happy then we'll be in good standing.

If you can't do that... then you you're unfortunately going to have to struggle against their political power to get what you want. And in doing that the environmental issue will get wound up with the thousand other things those political factions are trying to do all the time and in the end your issue won't matter. It will be just one of a thousand things they bounce between while trying to get reelected. A talking point... a means to generate funding or get out the vote. Little more.

I obviously think that's a big mistake. But maybe I'm wrong and you'll overwhelm all political rivals, your politicians will be honorable, everyone will maintain political will against entrenched financial interests, and the world will be saved by your enlightened will.

I obviously don't find that very likely... but that's just my opinion.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

The problem of course, is that there are no "win win" solutions to AGW. Maintaining the global ecosystem we evolved in is going to be outrageously expensive for everyone, and it's getting more expensive every year that we do nothing. Adapting to a rapidly-altering ecosystem is liable to be far more expensive, but has the psychological advantage that it will be done in response to a very obvious and unquestionable need.

So, given that most people (and more importantly, politically-connected fossil fuel interests) will be short-term losers in any AGW moderation schemes, political opposition is inevitable. The problem is that the opposition has aligned themselves with "AGW isn't real" for quite a while, and generated significant doubt in the broader population, deeply undermining any attempt at a consensus approach to mitigation. I would welcome Republican, etc. suggestions for AGW mitigation, there is much to be desired with many of the existing proposals - but thus far they have fairly consistently denied the existence of the problem, and so long as they do so the only responsible reaction I can think of is to throw my support behind those at least proposing sorry stopgap measures.

You want a well reasoned discussion leading to effective solutions? Good for you, so do I. How do you propose we get half the political circus in this country to acknowledge the existence of an urgent problem so that we can start having the discussion? Especially when they have such cozy connections (both political and personal) with the fossil fuel industry, an industry whose near-total destruction is non-negotiable as part of any serious mitigation strategy?

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

As to there being no win win, that is your position and opinion. It is an opinion that comes with a cost that so far is not affordable... as in the check bounces... politically, economically, legally... it bounces.

You'll of course keep trying to cash it... and it will keep bouncing.

As to opposition being inevitable because fossil fuel companies suffer is not actually inevitable at all.

Fossil fuel interests alone are unable to oppose a plurality of the public. And the public will mostly support the fossil fuel interests if they see it as in their interest.

If you only hurt the fossil fuel interests and not everyone at large then the fossil fuel interests can be isolated and do little to harm your efforts.

What is more they could be very useful in switching over to a carbon neutral system if we switch to fuels generated from plants or other sources that draw from our atmosphere directly rather then from sequestered fossil fuels.

There's no reason to cut them out at all. They have enormous technical capability and industrial capital that can be turned to these issues.

Rather then trying to destroy people you can work towards solutions that profit everyone.

This is one of the consequences of the political groups taking over the environmental lobbies because they care more about attacking political enemies then they do about actually protecting the environment.

Oil companies don't want to hurt the environment more then anyone else. Its just a consequence of where their product comes from.

Consider that most oil companies don't own the oil fields they're tapping. They lease them and pay a fee for what they take out of the ground. As such they have very little capital sunk into the actual land itself. Their capital investment is in machinery, distribution, refining, etc. Well, that can be turned to other purposes.

Have you ever seen a deep sea oil rig? They're amazing. They have teams of men that go deep below the sea to weld pipes etc living at extreme pressures for weeks. They live in pressurized capsules that allow them eat and sleep at that pressure and then the capsules are depressurized slowly in shifts.

Its effectively a commercial space program. When you see the suits they wear the nature of their work, the conditions. It looks very much like a space operation with EVA's etc. Only its at the bottom of the sea rather then in outer space.

These remarkable industries with good people that have made very impressive technical accomplishments. Don't label them as evil and dismiss everything they've done or try to utterly annihilate their industry wholesale. That's unfair to them and a breach of our common civil duty to each other.

Is there a problem with their industry? Yes. But they're not the enemy. What would you do if they just stopped making fuel tomorrow? Your car wouldn't work. Your plane wouldn't fly. The heat in your house would go out.

Be reasonable. This is a complex issue that needs to be solved in an adult manner. Not attacked mindlessly for the petty profit of one political interest or another.

As to how I propose to get somewhere, I start by making it clear I'm not going to run roughshod over people. Part of the reason you're getting so much resistance is that people are afraid of you. They think if given a little room to work you'll just do whatever you want, screw everyone that gets in your way, consult no one, get the permission of no one, and then say it was all in the name of the greater good.

People don't like that. So there is an effort to contain you. Part of that is undermining the legitimacy of AGW itself. Think of it as a layered defense.

Now frankly, you don't seem like the sort to respect people's interests and rights in these matters. You seem to think you have the right idea and that you therefore should just go forward from here in a straight line and slap anyone that gets in your way aside like they're nothing.

And that means people going to put barriers before you.

If y

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

First off, I think you're mischaracterizing me - I actually tend to lean Libertarian on issues not directly involving the corruption of social justice or the long-term survival of our society. And I've specifically told you I don't care much for the solutions currently gaining traction - they are almost unanimously ineffective and overly expensive, but they're marginally better than simply ignoring the problem completely which the opposition is primarily advocating.

As for win-win solutions - there was a time when we could profitably have pursued such, but that time was decades ago when we first realized we had a looming problem. We could have invested heavily in fusion, solar, etc. so that by now they were cheaper than coal and oil. Even a fraction of a percent of the annual military budget would have been enough to vastly accelerate technological progress. Hell, even a decent slice of the subsidies channeled into the oil industry would have done wonders. Instead we did as close to nothing as the lobbyists could arrange, and we are now faced with the fact that we need to get off fossil fuels very quickly, and we have no truly cost-competitive alternate energy source available, though solar is getting close. As such any shift from fossil fuels will represent a short-term loss for pretty much everyone as prices increase across the board. Certainly we could focus more on efficiency, but that more efficient technology would be even cheaper if powered by energy from fossil fuels. That's not politics, that's physics.

It will take decades to roll out a new energy infrastructure, decades that we can ill afford if we want to maintain the global climate. Even if we had a cheaper energy source today it would still be an expensive challenge because a great deal of existing technology would need to be replaced - we would essentially be replacing perfectly good power plants whose capital costs were expected to gain returns for decades to come with brand new alternatives. When the alternatives are also more expensive on a per-joule basis that only makes things worse. Had we gotten serious a few decades ago we could have been replacing power plants with low-carbon alternatives as they were retired, gently phasing out fossil fuels by the simple expedient of not building any more fossil fuel plants at a minimal incremental cost. As it is though we're still building fossil-fuel power plants at a phenomenal rate, and all those power plants represent wasted resources, because we can't allow them to operate to anywhere near the end of their projected lifetimes.

As it happens I care quite a bit about what happens to the vast majority of people, it's just that we're now faced with a situation between bad and worse - we can all pay the price today, or we can all pay a much *much* higher price tomorrow. The most even-handed solution I think I've heard of so far would be to impose a significant carbon tax on all fossil fuels, and then distribute those taxes equally to the populace on a regular basis. No new regulations to be abused. No new overreaching bureaucracies. Just an immediate increase in the price of almost all consumer goods, with a corresponding increase in the money people have available to buy them, so that on average most consumers have approximately the same buying power as before, and everyone, at every level of society, has an immediate self-interested motivation to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used in their supply chain to get cheaper prices.

As for the fossil fuel industry - they are going to be losers, there's no way around that - they just have too much capital sunk in things that won't be useful for anything except fossil fuel extraction. Land aside, there are oil wells and coal mining equipment, obviously. But also prospecting maps and lucrative government subsidies. Those are all sunk costs made with the expectation of a long-term payoff, and their value all but disappears if we move away from fossil fuels. Even your "space program" stuff doesn't actually translate - some o

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

We disagree as to the futility of compromise. By all means... go out and try to force people... have fun with that little mission. You could count me as a supporter if you were willing to look for mutual options but if you're not I'll at best be a spectator and at worst an element of opposition.

Just what is... I don't think we're going to get anywhere by pushing people around and intentionally ruining people. I think the means are the ends. And if you go about doing that sort of thing you're going to create an authoritarian regime which is hardly what I'd call libertarian.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

How do you compromise on a viable solution with someone who doesn't believe there is a problem? Cut CO2 emissions 50%? That would still raise no end of outcries among the deniers, and is not enough to make much difference anyway - at best it buys us a few more years to make real progress before the climate gets completely out of our control.

I would be happy to compromise on any potentially viable solution. Delighted in fact. A viable compromise would stand head and shoulders above anything currently being attempted. And I would rather not force anyone to do anything, hence my preference for something like a carbon tax&rebate program that would motivate people to find a solution without trying to legislate what that solution should look like. and without hurting most people's wallets. If we're smart about it we can find solutions that don't hurt most people much, and open the door for new growth and opportunity. Unfortunately I haven't heard any suggestions as to how the fossil fuel industries can be saved - and they are closely allied with the Republican party in this country - both through political graft and family ties. And so long as they are controlling the agenda of the the party on this front, and their lies about the nonexistence of AGW are being believed by almost half the population, I don't see any hope of meaningful compromise. Nor do I see any way to cut CO2 emissions to near zero by the end of the century without ruining their industry. I truly wish I did, it would make this whole issue far more tractable - but they have invested heavily in profiting from an energy source that we must phase out of use, and those investments are almost entirely sunk costs which I see no way of recouping.

If you have any ideas how to seek such a compromise I'd love to hear them. I hate to consider forcing through a solution, and have precious little confidence it can even be done. And it's too late for gradual compromise - we likely only have a few more decades in which to break our carbon addiction before we're committed to radical climate change due to the same runaway natural processes that have devastated the Earth several times in the last half-billion years.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

I'm tired of repeating myself.

One last time.

The only reason you're getting people deny AGW is because they don't like your solutions to AGW and they think you're going to take the validity of AGW to force policies on them that they don't want.

So they undermine AGW so it undermines your proposed solution to AGW.

Do you understand? If your solutions were no big deal there would be no big blow back over AGW. Most people wouldn't care because it wouldn't effect them.

But when you say you're going to do something drastic then people are going to react to protect themselves.

So for the last time. Your solutions and your tone in negotiations triggered this situation.

Your solutions were too expensive, too punitive, and your tone made people feel powerless and disenfranchised. You gave people no voice or power over the situation.

They were browbeaten and told that they had no right to an opinion or any right to change policy. So they reacted to take all your authority and credibility away.

That is what happened.

If you want to walk this whole thing back and start over... you can do that. But you're going to have to show some respect and some patience.

If you refuse to do that then you really can't expect people to respond to you any differently then they are... they're going to shut you down, shout you down, and cripple anything you try to do by any means.

Just the consequences of your policy.

End of story.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

Not MY policies. And I understand completely. The problem is physics doesn't care. Fine - let's scrap all the existing political plans to mitigate AGW. We're still left with a few basic, unavoidable facts:

We have to start phasing out fossil fuels yesterday if we want to avoid radical climate change.
We currently have no cost-competitive energy sources to move to - so energy costs will inevitably increase if we phase out fossil fuels
The fossil fuel industry will collapse if we phase out fossil fuels, and they've been investing heavily to maintain the stasus quo.

Do you contest those facts? Do you see any way we could sugar-coat them? I don't.

And there were precious few alternative solutions ever proposed to be brow-beaten, can you name any? One side proposed solutions, and the other side denied the existence of the problem, said the solutions would be too expensive anyway, and did everything they could to gut the solutions that made it through the political meat grinder anyway. So real solutions kept getting kicked down the road, and kept getting more extreme and expensive as the urgency and severity of the problem continued to increase. And thus the deniers gained ever more fuel in their emotional argument that the solution would be too costly, and thus the problem doesn't exist.

Certainly the rank and file opposition were beautifully manipulated, but it was done by the opposition, not the people calling for a solution. The populace was told that there was no problem, that it was all a liberal power grab. No realistic policy counter-proposals were allowed to reach the negotiating table, and so the illusion that it was an us-versus-them political issue was maintained. It's not like there was any lack of solutions within the Republican sphere, they were just never given voice by anyone with actual power within the party or given any media attention.

The solution will hurt - that became inevitable the moment we decided not to invest substantially in alternative energy. Trying to pin that pain, and the opposition is generates, on anyone other than those who made sure that alternative energy research wasn't funded is disingenuous at best. And it wasn't the folks looking for solutions to AGW that prevented that.

So you tell me - what is the appropriate way to compromise with someone when a gun is being held to your heads, and yet they loudly and repeatedly deny the existence of the gun while painting you as a power-mongering idiot whenever you make any suggestion that the gun be lowered?

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

As to things we must do...

1. While fossil fuels must be phased out the speed with which we must do it is debatable.

Even under your cap and trade concept we'd continue to burn fossil fuels possibly in great quantities. So lets not goal post move the situation into unreasonableness.

What we need to do is burn less of them over time and have that rate of burn reach zero. The speed with which we reach zero is an issue of contention with some likely wanting it to be immediate which is impossible and some wanting it to be never which is counter productive.

I think we can come up with ways to make the process pretty painless so long as we are sensitive to that concern.

You run into the problems mostly by not taking care to avoid them.

As to collapse of the fossil fuel industry, you don't really understand what they do apparently. I'm not insulting you... I'm just noting that you don't understand that they're very complicated companies with diverse skill sets.

They have extensive chemical processing capabilities that can be turned to other products pretty easily. Consider that much of our industry relies on hydrocarbon byproducts of some kind. Plastics etc all come from the petroleum industry. So no... you will not destroy them by phasing out fossil fuels. They will dominate the bio fuel industry that comes after and continue to dominate many segments of the chemical industry.

What's more their skill in heavy engineering is almost unparalleled. The extreme projects they've undertaken largely unnoticed are a marvel of the modern world. That sort of skill can be applied to other projects such as tunnel construction etc.

As to contesting facts... I don't contest facts. I contest interpretations of facts which are opinions about facts.

I believe you'd would agree I am allowed to contest opinions? Yes? Good.

As to alternative solutions, there are many things we can do... the primary challenge is getting a portable energy source. Gasoline is very portable and energy dense.

I frankly don't think we can improve on it for the foreseeable future which is why I think the real solution here is to produce carbon neutral biofuels that can replace gasoline.

The economics of that currently are uncompetitive but there are some unconventional ideas that might lower the costs. As I said previously we might try decentralizing the fuel production system which would cut transport costs and most of the middle men out of the equation. All of that might be enough make the fuel cheap enough. Augment that with cheap nuclear power to supply the grid and that should keep us going for generations which is enough time to come up with other technologies assuming we're not totally happy with the above.

As to the costs going up, radically, I don't think there is any evidence of that. We have a standing problem which is getting worse but I'm not sure there is any evidence to say that we're at a fever pitched crisis either.
As to this fairytale that only the evil opposition has been manipulating... you do know you've got Al Gore pushing your side right? You know he's a politician right? I'm just checking. The point is that you have plenty of propagandists on your own side so lets not go spinning fairytales.

As to the solution hurting, I don't think it has to hurt.

I think we can avoid the pain if we're considerate in our policies.

We don't need to damage people. We need to give them better options. In many cases this will mean governments or corporations giving up control of things to individuals or local communities.

We have a lot of really exciting technologies that can make a difference. I cited previously small scale SynGas generators which are extremely viable in rural areas producing power, gas for heating, and even gas for driving cars if you're so inclined. And the SynGas generators run on waste hydrocarbons. You can burn wood chips or wood pellets in them. And you can make wood pellets from almost anything. Saw dust, corn husks, leaves, gras

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

Again - you're putting words in my mouth - cap-and-trade is not MY policy - I consider it stupid and minimally effective at a high cost. That it was implemented is thanks in large part to the opposition gutting more effective suggestions.

I'm all for self-generated power, though I have my doubts that we could supply enough wood to substantially take up the slack without dangerously accelerating deforestation. Agricultural waste possibly, but we're beginning to understand that not tilling it back into the soil presents it's own serious problems. Bottom line though, I don't care what takes up the slack - we're in agreement that there's lots of options. Hell in many places, grid-tied (battery free) private solar can already be installed for roughly the same 10-year amortized cost as buying power from the electric company, and with a little luck it will last 30-40 years bringing it down to a fraction of the cost. Of course with widespread adoption batteries need to be included in the system somewhere, and that starts complicating things, but that's a discussion for another day.

But by and large all the alternatives will be more expensive *today* than fossil fuel based energy, and most people are lousy at considering amortized costs. Which is why large companies accustomed to amortizing everything are rapidly beginning to adopt solar, but less so private individuals. And unless I'm much mistaken Syngas, wood pellets, etc. are not realistic options in the city where air quality is a concern, and most people these days live in cities. Not to mention they are considerably less convenient than natural gas, and most people are lazy.

As for the exact rate at which we need to cut carbon emissions, you are correct - we're not *exactly* sure, but we have some pretty good guidelines. Limiting global warming to 2*C seems to be the broadly accepted safe limit to avoid having runaway global warming end the current interglacial period, though as we watch environmental changes there are increasing worries as to whether even that might be too much. And we're pretty sure that somewhere in the 4* to 6* range is pretty much a guarantee that we will lose all control over further warming short of some frankly terrifying geoengineering projects. In 2000 I believe the projection was that to limit warming to 2* we needed to cut global CO2 emissions by 1-2% per year - difficult but realistically achievable. Thanks to the fact that we've instead been increasing CO2 emissions geometrically we now need to cut something like 5% per year, with another 0.5% added for every additional year we delay taking serious action. (I could be off on the details, it's been a while since I looked, but I think those numbers are roughly correct). If we're content to aim for 4* we can shave off a percentage point or two from those numbers, but we'd all better start praying regularly that we don't trigger runaway effects.

As for dismissing runaway warming concerns as alarmist - take a look at the paleontological record. The planet has engaged in runaway warming several times in the last few hundred million years, and it was never pretty. Humanity will survive, I have no doubt of that, but there's a very real possibility that only a few percent of us will make it through - after all most people in the world are surviving on less than a few dollars a day. You can't afford to build an arcology on that, you have to make do with whatever living you can scratch out of the local soil.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[riverat1]

It wasn't stating that AGW is real that generated the controversy but rather the proposed solutions to it.

When you get right down to it the only possible solution in the long run is to quit increasing the level of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere. Anything else is just a short term band-aid. I'm happy to listen to anyone's proposed solution to the problem but there's no getting around that basic fact.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

Look at the earth ships. its a style of home being built in New Mexico by an eccentric architect.

The idea is that the house is entirely self contained. It provides its own power. Its own water. Its own heat. Totally grid independent. It recycles water four times within itself including black water... and can produce enough food for a family of four.

These things are only expensive because we rarely do them. But we have the technology. We can compartmentalize things. Decentralize.

The big problem is the cities. They cannot be ecologically balanced. Especially the big ultra urban cities. They're relics of a pre information age society. We don't need that kind of density any more. The ideal urban environment should be suburban. That allows enough space for people to self generate. Urban centers require massive centralization of resources which is inefficient.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

That CO2 must be reduced is vague. How much does it have to be reduced. How quickly. What means are applied to do that. What punishments are employed to enforce the rules. What technological changes are employed to aid the effort.

The details matter.

I mean... I could promise to sit on the couch and drink beer and reduce my personal CO2 emissions which though irrelevant to global emissions would lower total CO2 emissions by an extremely tiny amount... So mission accomplished right? CO2 emissions reduced.

Obviously not. You need to flesh out your idea and the past ideas when fleshed out tended to be utterly unacceptable.

That is what you have to work on. Make the idea something that doesn't ruin people and we can probably sign off on it. If you're dead set on destroying people though it shouldn't come as any surprise that people are going to try to defend themselves.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[riverat1]

In the long run it must be reduced to essentially zero net emissions of CO2 and the faster that happens the less severe the effects will be.

My preferred method of making it happen is a carbon tax. It should start out very low but increment a bit every year until in 30 or 40 years time it would be cost prohibitive to use fossil fuels. The proceeds should be returned in equal shares to all legal residents of the country. That way the people with lower carbon usage would be rewarded and people with higher carbon usage would be penalized.

That would impose a price on carbon and let the market sort out the best ways to achieve the reductions.

I'm not worried about the CO2 you exhale or that's in your beer because that's carbon that is already in the carbon cycle and we can't do much about it. It's adding new carbon to the active carbon cycle that is the problem.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

The carbon tax is a non starter.

Next idea.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

I've actually stayed in one for a few days, it was quite nice. If I had several million dollars I might have consider buying it.

And while Earth ships are a lovely idea, you can't build that way except in the desert - build something like that in west Oregon and it wouldn't last five years.

As for cities, as dismaying as it is to hear, as a rule city dwellers have something like 20-30% lower carbon footprint per capita (IIRC) compared to rural regions, as it turns out it's actually much more efficient to concentrate goods and services. I'm not happy with that, but you can't argue against the data - energy use too benefits from economies of scale. And if cities were designed a little better their impact could be reduced even further - widespread green (living) roofs and decent public transportation both hold the promise of reducing energy consumption even further (green roofs stabilize the temperature, reducing both heating and especially cooling costs, as well as encouraging local cloud formation and rainfall - plants are no stranger to weather manipulation)

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

As to earth ships, they adapt the building style to the location. They've built them in jungles and deserts... they can build them anywhere. Part of the point of them is to have them harmonize with the local environment. So every one is built to fit its climate.

As to city dwellers being more efficient, I'd love to see the research on that because its obviously crap.

Many rural communities supply many of the things they use. They often provide their own meat, milk, produce, as well as other staples.

Cities import literally everything. Its pretty much impossible for that to be more sustainable.

I suspect that what they did to reach that number is they counted all the pollution in rural areas caused by producing goods for export and then didn't pass that pollution on to the cities when they imported. That's the same fallacy that many people believe in when they think the US has radically reduced its CO2 when what we've done in most cases is simply export our pollution to china. Its still our pollution if we import those goods.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[riverat1]

It may be difficult but I don't think it's impossible. What's your idea?

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

Non-coercive policies that transform industries by replacing existing practices with more sustainable ones without punishing people or being so inflexible as to realize that in some cases there are not any other alternatives.

Here's my point. You can't force people to accept this... you're not strong enough to do it.

So any policy that relies upon you forcing people is unrealistic.

What you need are policies that people choose to follow without being force or that benefit them.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

Cities are not more self-sustainable, no argument there. But we're not talking self-maintenance, we're talking per-capita energy use. A person living in a city tends to be responsible for less total energy usage than someone in a rural setting: The distance traveled by the average person in an average day is lower. Living spaces tend to be smaller per person, and often share multiple walls with other structures, reducing heating and cooling costs. Products get shipped to stores in the city in larger lots (less handling), and tend to be purchased by people living near those stores, so total item transportation costs are lower. Water, gas, and electricity infrastructure is far denser, resulting in less total infrastructure per person, and fewer per-capita losses due to inefficiencies and damage. Even the resources a rural community supplies for itself tend to be produced in more energy-intensive ways that what consolidated agribusiness monstrosities can provide, and the evidence is in the rural stores - just check the price tag for the factory-farmed swill compared to the real thing, even in places where the real thing has minimal transportation costs.

Can't say I'm happy with it, but from everything I've heard that's how it works out. Wish I could remember some identifying details of the studies, but Google will have to be your friend there. On the bright side it means that as the global population urbanizes we can expect some "free" efficiency gains, and it leaves more room for those of us that don't care for living in a hive.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[riverat1]

Good luck with that. The changes to our physical world wrought by global warming will in the not too distant future become so great that people will be forced to change their ways whether they like it or not.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

So alarmists have been saying for over a hundred years.

They always say "in ten years..."... and then when that doesn't happen they just say it again... "in ten years..."...

The predictions and models have not accurately predicted what has actually happened. They're almost always wild exaggerations.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

Per capita energy use must include the energy cost of all imported goods and services. When you factor that in cities can't possibly be using less energy.

That's just silly.

As to infrastructure, in rural areas most of it is provided locally as opposed to imported from a great distance. Water, food, and power tend to come from a close by source where as in cities it is brought in from a great distance.

Again, show me the research. I'm calling bullshit on this one.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[riverat1]

No, the predictions and models have generally been conservative. Too many people fail to pay attention to the time scale placed on those predictions. Too many people fail to understand what statistics and uncertainty mean to those predictions and the effects of natural variations on short time scales. If you go back and analyze what the IPCC WG 1 reports have said about what will happen and pay attention to the time scales involved you will find that in general they are quite conservative.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

That would depend - how much energy do you suppose the average product takes to transport, compared to how much it takes to produce from raw materials in the first place? And while rural areas may produce much of their own food, you can't deny that that is only a small portion of most people's consumption. Meanwhile the materials to build and maintain much larger houses, inefficient small-scale farm equipment, etc. represent considerable imported energy costs.

At any rate it's not an issue I care enough to debate more than idly. On the other hand, if you have any thoughts whatsoever on how we might work to breach the manufactured gulf around AGW deniers so that we can begin a real dialog on how best to confront the urgent challenges facing our species, now *that* is an issue I'd be happy to discuss in depth.

It's been a pleasure.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

I've been around for awhile, sir. I've listened to these things in as much detail as anyone. They've made a lot of bogus predictions.

Day after Tomorrow type bullshit. You want to claim they've got a clean record? Fine.

Then we go back to the politics and you can suck wind.

If you want to get anywhere on this issue you're going to have to put your horseshit away so we can have a real discussion. If all you've got for me is "this" then you're not having a scientific discussion. You're testing political strength versus political strength. That's not a fight you're doing well in at this point.

Here is the issue. You're forcing this stuff on people. That has failed. Internationally and domestically. The attempt to force it has failed.

So... your two options besides that are giving up or trying to actually convince people.

Those are your options.

I assume you're going to keep trying to force people... beat your head bloody on that wall if you want. But it accomplishes nothing.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

Yawn... okay... I'll just instantly win this argument.

What do things cost in the city versus what they cost in rural areas?

More or less?

Things in cities especially dense cities cost more then they cost pretty much anywhere else on earth.

Now you could say the income people earn is higher so people can just charge more. However, those sellers exist in a competitive market where they're constantly trying to out compete each other.

Market forces should drive the price down close to what it actually costs especially for plentiful goods supplied by many suppliers. Gasoline, potatoes, flour... whatever. And all of it is more expensive in cities.

If your logic about efficiency were accurate then the cost in cities should be lower and the denser the city the lower the costs should be... yet they're not.

The costs are higher.

Before you respond to this actually think the argument through a bit. Don't just grasp for the first straw to contract me but actually go through the economic and logistical logic a bit to construct a rational argument.

Cities are only efficient for people... not goods. They are a hold over from a time when travel and communication was so impractical that it was better to pack everyone into one place rather then try to coordinate things over a wider area.

However, today we have airplanes, cars, and the internet. We don't need these cities anymore.

The explosion of the Suburban sprawl was a direct result of the automobile. It made commuting possible.

Telecommuting remains problematical for many businesses that can't manage employees properly via remote. However, that is a managerial issue that will be dealt with over time mostly by business schools once they realize they need to teach prospective managers how to manage employees through the internet.

Cities as we know them especially cities like New York, London, and Chicago are unnecessary, inefficient, and really a hold over from a less sophisticated age.

We don't need them anymore.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[riverat1]

I'd much rather discuss science. Perhaps you could point out some of those predictions that you think were bogus with proper cites to back yourself up so I know what you're talking about. Then we can talk about science.

I'm not trying to force anything on anyone. I'd much rather convince them that the science behind global warming is solid and they should take what scientists say about it seriously. But there are some people who will never be convinced so in some respects they will be forced to accept things they don't believe are necessary.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

The science isn't the issue though. Its a distraction from the real problem here and a misrepresentation of the issue to suggest that this is a scientific discussion.

What you have are serious political, economic, logistical, engineering, and social issues.

And you have to decide how you're going to solve that.

Now you have a pretty good idea of what your end point is for the whole thing.

So lets call that point Z and then we have where ever we are right now which we can call point A.

The general idea so many people have is to draw a straight line between point A and point Z and then use the power of all the global governments together to compel billions of people to follow that line. Failing to do so means those governments use their power to punish people. A government can't make you throw things away in the trash. What they can do is fine you, put you in prison, or shoot you. They can punish you.

So basically this idea you're pushing is that we go from point A to point Z by using the collective force of these governing bodies which are more conventionally employed to stop murders or wars.

Those same governments are not however even remotely unified. There is great diversity of opinion even within the governments themselves leading to at least thousands of political organizations to say nothing of the billions of people that are ultimately represented by these governments in one fashion or another.

Suggesting that you can compel those billions to go from point A to point Z by using the force of governments that you don't control and can't compel is irrational.

You're basically trying to get to the moon by flapping your arms. And so far, ever time I've pointed this out, the people pursuing this foolish waste of time just say they're not flapping their arms hard enough.

The entire policy is overly simplistic and frankly childish and lazy.

It is very typical for politicians to get confused by issues they don't understand and attempt to over simplify things. They look at something complicated and often being 70 year old lawyers that have lived in a capital city for most of their lives they tend to have a very limited understanding of the world. They understand laws usually but the world is a great deal more complex then that.

What I am instead suggesting is that we solve our problem in much the same way we created it.

Governments did not create the coal industry.

Governments did not create the automobile.

I don't really think governments will solve the problem either. Its too big for them.

If you want to solve this issue you need to think like a 21st century man. Not like a 20th century man.

All these political solutions are very 20th century. Think viral solutions. Think of about self sustaining propagating grass roots change. Think about ways you can change the system by getting the system to change itself. To evolve. To adapt. Not because you've gotten 10,000 G-Men to show up with M16s and tactical armor to compel compliance... but because they want to do it on their own.

Forget trying to draw a straight line. Instead focus on the process itself. Put down the sword of Alexander... The Gordian Knot sometimes needs to just be patiently unraveled by hand.

I can think of dozens of ways to do this and there's no reason to not do all of them at the same time. The expenses would be voluntary and so not something anyone could claim as hardship. You do it or you don't. But you work to make sure the costs are bearable and you try to build in as many side benefits as possible so people choose to do it.

You can make doing it cool.
You can make doing it increase someone's social status in society.
You can make doing offer increased control for those people that do it because the technology might be more sustainable or offer the ability to supply its needs with local industry instead of imported industry.

Just go through a list of things.

I think it goes without saying that any business or commu

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

I've got to tell you, while I lived in the city I never noticed much that was more expensive, aside from fresh organic produce. And quite a bit that was cheaper. Well, unless you're comparing the high-end, limited market stuff rarely available in rural areas to the lower-end stuff that's typically the best you can find in rural areas.

My own observations aside, I can think of a one-word explanation for significant price differences: rent. Price per cubic inch of commercial space is dramatically higher in the city, and that will obviously have a dramatic effect on the price of things where that is a considerable part of the price.

>cities ... are a hold over from a time when travel and communication was so impractical that it was better to pack everyone into one place rather then try to coordinate things over a wider area.

I don't understand how you can make this claim at the same time as arguing that cities require *more* transportation than rural areas. Most goods are *not* made in rural areas.

The only thing produced in rural areas are food and raw materials (wood, ores, etc) - and the vast majority of such natural resources are produced in areas with negligible populations - personal farms and the hub communities they spawn only produce a few percent of total food supplies anymore. Meanwhile manufactured goods are mostly produced in or near cities.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

As to rent being more expensive, that alone is showing you the inefficiency. You're packing people too tightly in to an unreasonably limited space.

And for what? The logistical problems involved with keeping a city of high density functional are absurd.

Consider the cost of mass transit as amertized over the whole population including all the subsidies. Its not cheap. Most people think its cheap because they don't pay the full price at the toll booth or the ticket machine. Most of it is taken in taxes which are also a lot higher in cities.

Then look at how many service workers you have per capita. Garbage men. Police men. Fire fighters. Other various flavors of public employee... per capita you have more overhead in a city then you do in a rural community.

You have to count that overhead against the cities if we're talking about efficiency. In rural areas you don't need it. In cities you do. That MUST count against cities.

When you factor the rent which is a consequence of population density. Factor the taxes which are a consequence of population density leading to logistical problems that are absorbed by the city government. And then factor in the cost of goods and services what you can see very clearly is that it is dramatically less efficient.

Do not get me wrong. There are pluses to the city. But those pluses are all about people being closer together and therefore being able to collaborate, work, interact more quickly because they don't need to travel great distances.

THAT is the virtue of cities.

But that virtue is in many ways obsolete now. Outmoded. We have the internet and airplanes. The big PRO cities have offered to justify their expense has been greatly diminished while their CONs are if anything getting worse.

Per capita murder rate... cities are much worse then rural communities. Per capita rape... per capita assault... per capita robbery... Cities lose the crime stat across the board.

They also tend to lose when comparing k-12 education stats and most of the health, safety, and education stats.

There is a reason people like to move to the suburbs when they have a family rather then staying in the city. Its not just getting more space. Its a totally different environment and culture.

The most reasonable thing for most of our population to do is to decentralize away from the cities. Either going to a huge urban sprawl or just peppering the vast empty places in the US with a home every mile or so. Every one of those homes could have its own green house sufficient to provide leafy greens to a family of four all year round. Every house could provide a significant amount of the fuel needed to keep the home heated and powered. Water could come from well water in most cases. Sewage treatment etc could be handled on site with no net emissions of CO2.

This is something we could do. Now if you're poor and have nothing then obviously you're going to be on some sort of subsidy. But even then why pack the poor and jobless into cities with high costs of living and out of control crime? Better to ship these people off to rural communities where their total lack of skills can be put towards fetch and carry labor until they've developed some skills. Furthermore, that sort of community is far more wholesome for many of these people. Rather then being surrounded by gangs and trash covered streets, they'd be out in a more natural environment where they'd be hugely out numbered by people that actually work for a living. There would be no gangs... and if they tried anything cute gun ownership in such communities is about 100 percent... so it would be a very quick education.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

I won't argue against the fact that cities are disgusting places deeply damaging to the human spirit, with a myriad of symptoms related to that fact. I agree completely. But urban sprawl is even worse - it combines virtually all the downsides of a city with those of rural living, while incorporating precious few of the benefits of either, and is devastating to the regional ecosystems.

As for high rent being proof of inefficiency, that's ridiculous. If anything it's proof of efficiency - a given unit of volume can generate far more economic activity in a city than in the country, and so the incremental value increases proportionally.

And yes - the benefits to cities are almost all related to packing humans closer together. Among those benefits is drastically less per-capita infrastructure, much less per-capita radiating surface to be offset by heating/cooling, and considerably lower per-capita transportation requirements. (not to mention viable mass transit, not that that's effectively implemented in the US) All of which translates to less per-capita energy consumption. And where CO2 emissions are concerned, per-capita energy consumption is pretty much the only relevant factor.

Even transporting goods into cities is far more efficient than transporting them into rural areas - most cities sit at railroad hubs, and transporting goods by rail is *far* more efficient than by any other means (by something like a factor of 5-10, IIRC). Rural areas on the other hand tend to get negligible railway imports - the minimum volumes necessary for modern rail transport to be cost effective mean that only major population hubs can take much advantage of them for imports. Fortunately there seems to be some impressive automation on the horizon that promises to eventually restore the profitability of small-volume rail cargo, but that's likely decades away from being cost effective enough for most rural communities, and thus not relevant to cutting CO2 emissions in a timely fashion.

I'd love to see humanity spread out again into small communities that can keep in touch with their world, interconnected by efficient transportation networks - but to do so without drastically increasing per-capita energy consumption will require technology that we don't yet possess. I'm all for developing that technology, but for today we can't spread out without drastically increasing our carbon footprint. You can build a ranch house that's as energy-efficient as a city apartment - it can even have a dramatic advantage if good solar design is incorporated, but doing so can easily increase the up-front costs by 50% or more, and so it rarely gets done even if it will easily pay for itself within a few decades.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

As to the rent argument. While it is true you're being more efficient with space that does not mean you're being more efficient with resources.

Your argument about efficiency is ultimately reliant on circular logic.

You're saying that you're more efficient because you're denser and you've defined efficiency as density.

That's invalid logic.

As to packing people together generating less CO2, again you've provided no reason for that to be true.

Just because you're using mass transit doesn't mean you're using less energy per capita. The trains and subways and buses were not designed for energy efficiency and that is not their point. They were designed for space efficiency and cargo capacity. NOT energy efficiency.

When you add up all the maintenance costs that go into maintaining those systems, including the subsidies that come from taxes... its not nearly as efficient as you'd think.

As to things being more efficiently delivered into cities... then they'd be cheaper in cities. They're not. You're wrong on this one by simple economics. I'm not arguing this one with you because its basically 1+1=2. You either agree or you're wrong. I'm sorry.

As to rural communities having a larger carbon footprint then cities... you've offered no reason to conclude that. Its just something you keep repeating without justification.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

No, I've defined efficiency as per-capita energy consumption. It just happens that current technology offers considerably better returns on energy expenditures in high density areas.

As for maintenance - it takes pretty much the same amount of maintenance for 1000 feet of water pipe regardless of whether that pipe feeds one house or ten apartments. Ditto roads - the primary degradation mechanism in most climates is weathering, not usage, and thanks to denser traffic that road serves a lot more people in the city. Electricity - yeah, you need a bit more copper to serve 100 houses than one, but the maintenance is the same, and with shorter runs you have fewer losses to line impedance.

As for things in cities being more expensive - to hell with economic theories, they're rarely worth the paper their printed on - give me a concrete example. I've seen precious few.

I've given you lots of reasons that cities tend to have a smaller carbon footprint, per capita, than rural communities. Perhaps you should re-read what I've written. I've even given you a few more in this post with regards to maintenance. Shall I repeat the high points in condensed form?

- Less energy spent on heating and cooling, per person, due to smaller thermal envelopes.
- Less energy spent on transporting goods thanks to shorter in-city distances, and the ability to use far more efficient transportation technology (rail) for importing them.
- Less energy spent moving people around thanks to shorter distances and the viability of mass transit. (granted that last part is less relevant to US cities, but those are mostly an anomaly)
- Less energy spent installing and maintaining infrastructure for each person, thanks to much heavier usage and the fact that damage is due primarily to aging and weathering rather than usage.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

There's no economic theory required. The cost is a reflection of labor and resources required to deliver a good or service plus a profit to reward the people that actually provide it.

If the prices are higher then there are two things that can cause the price to be higher.

1. The costs are actually higher which would mean less efficient because it would require more labor or more resources.

2. More profit taking or profit margin. There are theories regarding this point but I'll refrain from doing that because you're apparently allergic to economic theory... which I would point out renders you incapable of having this discussion. But I'll try to humor you anyway.

Point is... if its variable 1... aka resources... you're not more efficient. And even if its variable 2 you're still not more efficient because your system is leaking resources to middle men or facilitators.

So no. Even with that absurd attempt to dismiss all economic theory as a last ditch attempt to save a utterly doomed argument... you still lose.

Checkmate.

*takes the opponent's king*

Good day, sir.

I'll let Wonka break it down... because its awesome. :)
http://heeereswilly.ytmnd.com/

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

>If the prices are higher then there are two things that can cause the price to be higher

And if crows are pink then pigs can dance. I repeat - give me some concrete examples of goods that are more expensive in the city. All the theory in the world is worthless if it has no data to support it, and I have seen precious few goods that are actually more expensive in the city, but quite a few that are cheaper.

I have no problem with the theory, passed microeconomics with flying colors, but you appear to be basing your reasoning on the false premise that goods are more expensive in the city.

As for the efficiency of cities, would you care to refute *any* of the bulletted points I made in the previous post?

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

Also, just to clarify
> And even if its variable 2 you're still not more efficient because your system is leaking resources to middle men or facilitators.

You're not leaking resources, you're leaking money, which has lost nearly all connection with physical goods in the last several decades as the machinations of the financial sector have become responsible for the vast majority of economic activity. And neither money nor resources correlate well with CO2 emissions - only energy consumption does so.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

I see... so the farmer living on a rural plot of land that grows the food you eat is the problem... and the solution is packing more people like sardins into concrete hives?

I tried... I really did... but you're not using your brain so its impossible to reason with you. You're not thinking anything through.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

Gasoline... cross reference the price of it in any major city versus the suburban and rural periphery.

Food... both in grocery stores and restaurants.

Clothing... from underwear to pants to shirts to socks to whatever.

Pretty much any service is going to be more expensive as well... from a hair cut to a night at the movies.

Generally everything is more expensive.

The exception might be ipads or something else imported from asia. But if its producable locally you're going to be closer to the source in a rural area and the costs are going to be lower. What's more you go through less regulatory and tax bullshit in a rural area. A big part of the cost of things in cities is the taxes.

A city sales tax all by itself is going to make things more expensive. And most cities have sales taxes. Guess what rural areas do not have? A localized sale tax. You'll pay the state sales tax of course but there is no city sales tax.

And why does the city charge a sales tax? To pay for the higher overhead of the increased density.

You can agree I assume that cities have higher taxes right? Alright... given that the cities have higher taxes and don't seem to be functional unless they do... why do they need the money if they're more efficient?

Because they're not.

Here's another way to prove you're wrong. Lets say the US suddenly became extremely poor. By your logic, we'd save money by concetrating more of our population in the cities. But that wouldn't happen. You'd get an outflow of people out of the cities because they wouldn't afford the rent and the higher cost of living in the cities. They'd move out to the country where its cheaper.

I know you don't like associating Money with Resources... but they are associated... its earned by producing and buys through spending goods and services. Both of those concepts relate to all sorts of inputs that relate to CO2 production.

Is the match up 1 to 1? No... because its more about scarcity then anything. But as a general rule if something costs a lot more it took more energy to produce it... either in raw materials or in labor.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

No, I don't blame the farmer, but he's no longer relevant. The days of the family farmer growing the nation's food are long gone. Today it's a handful of people and massive robotic infrastructure - and the robots can produce X amount of food with far less energy consumption than supporting the number of people and small-scale farming equipment necessary to do the same job.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

Wait wait... if you don't blame the farmer then what are we talking about here?

What do you think the person on the rural property is doing that is making their energy usage so much higher?

Is it because they own and drive a car/truck? Is that it?

Because if that is it... that's pretty thin... and extremely in error.

What else? They get their water from onsite wells usually so that's going to be more efficient then whatever you're doing.

What else? Home heating? Many of these homes are heated with wood or wood pellets... which means they're carbon neutral. Wood is effectively nature's biofuel. The wood was produced by absorbing atmospheric carbon and burning it just releases the same back to the atmosphere to be reabsorbed by another plant. Its the original renewable fuel.

So what other thing are they doing that is causing so much carbon?

Nothing. Your whole argument is based on NOTHING. You're just repeating the same position over and over again mindlessly without substantiating it.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

Gasoline - I've always found it more expensive in rural areas, unless the rural station happened to be along a major gasoline shipping route, or the urban one in a major traffic confluence (i.e. higher rent and more room for gouging)
Food - seems to be roughly the same, though I don't eat out much so I might be wrong on that front.
Clothing, ditto.
Same for your basic barber shop.

Ah, one thing that might be throwing you off, especially if looking at statistics: cities have far more high-end "boutique" stores and restaurants than rural areas, where they will be rare or nonexistent. To do an honest comparison you have to discard any such markets and only compare like to like - the boutiques are after all also servicing the surrounding rural areas where the wealth density is insufficient to support them. The Albertson's, K-mart, or Dennys in a rural area will be approximately the same cost as in the city.

As for taxes - well the first thing that springs to mind is corruption. Bigger and more continuous city projects, combined with considerably less oversight and accountability to citizens translates to far more generous kickbacks and "contract milking", both of which require a commensurate increase in tax revenue. And while corruption is certainly an *economic* inefficiency, it has very few energy costs associated with it. Again - in today's economy money has become largely disconnected from resources, something like 80+% of US GDP is due to financial maneuvering. If you want to look at energy efficiency you have to look at energy consumption, nothing else. Even other resources are only relevant to CO2 emissions in terms of the actual CO2 emissions associated with getting them out of the ground and transported to wherever they're used.

And I think you're wrong about people fleeing the cities in response to a nationwide wave of poverty - if that began to happen rents would drop precipitously in response: the economic activity enabled by the space would be much diminished, and thus the free-market value would be far lower. Just look at property values in Detroit, which was hit by a far more localized wave of poverty. Sure, it might take a few decades to stabilize, and banks might choose to bulldoze some abandoned properties on their books in an attempt to shore up the value of others, but sooner or later equilibrium would be reached.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

We're comparing energy consumption. A vanishingly small percentage of people do serious farming anymore - some boutique farms and hobby farms to continue to qualify for property tax relief for the family farm, but unless you are farming several square miles you are not relevant to the modern agricultural market in this country.

But just *living* in the country is far more energy intensive than living in the city. Yes, if they heat with local wood it's carbon neutral - but propane is becoming ever more popular, and we'd be hard pressed to satisfy the demand for wood if that became the primary heating fuel for the nation. And air conditioning is electric. As is refrigeration and lighting. Maybe some of their water comes from a well - but rural also includes small towns, which hold far more people than are scattered around in sprawling freeholds. And that car or truck consumes far more gas traveling around a rural area where everything is far more spread out. Not to mention the amount of pavement per person is far higher.

But you know what, seems like you're at least as willfully deaf as you accuse me of being and we're arguing in circles, so I'm dropping this topic. We had a decent discussion going for a while there though. Until next time.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

As to gasoline, that's statistically unsupportable... here you go:
http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_gas...

You can see the pattern pretty clearly there. Look at the top 6 major cities in the country and look at their gas prices.

As to various service providers and food providers... you've apparently never lived in New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago. I don't know where you live but it isn't one of America's major cities or you'd know better.

As to taxes and corruption... it doesn't matter what your excuses for it is... its inefficiency.

As to what mode of living is more efficient. You really quite stubborn. Lets look at poorer countries to give you another example. These are societies that do not have resources to waste. How do they mostly live... in big cities where you say they'll save money and resources through centralization... or mostly in rural communities which you say is wasteful?

Obviously in rural communities. Why? Its more efficient and always has been.

Good day.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

You've provided no evidence or even a rational to support your claim that its more energy intensive.

What I've found in rural communities is that they tend to heat their homes either with natural gas which is how most homes in big cities are heated by the way.

Or they tend to rely on some off grid method of heating.

Currently, wood pellets (made from saw dust and field dross) and natural gas are the cheapest form heating in the United States.

You used to get a lot of people in the north east using "heating oil" which was a waste petroleum product. However, the price of heating oil has gone up so much that it's not very practical. Most of those households have shifted over to wood pellets.

Furthermore, there are rural homes that don't need to be heated because they exist in moderate climates.

Does your claim of more energy base itself entirely on heating a rural home with fossil fuels? Because if that's what you're basing it on you're making two mistakes. One, most of those homes are no more fueled by fossil fuels then the urban homes. Which would make their environmental impact about equal. Or they're actually using carbon neutral fuels thus making them superior.

And before you talk to me about how much less fuel a tiny appartment is going to use versus a house... consider that there is a lot of communial space in a city that must be counted on a per capita basis.

All those office buildings. All those malls. All those shops. Every thing in a city that uses energy must be calculated on a per capita basis. And then compare that to everything that uses power in a rural environment on a per capita basis.

Cities use FAR more energy. What is more, much of the energy in a rural environment is to produce export products which cannot count against the local carbon debt of that area but rather must be applied to the carbon debt of which ever place is importing the products... mostly cities.

If you'd like to put the rural environment on the spot... you'd have to show them as importing more then they export.

They don't... this is over.

You are officially the black knight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Immerman]

You're not listening: let me explain this one last time in regard to heating:
Rural homes are considerably larger per person, and tend to be freestanding rather than sharing walls with other dwellings. Final result - rural dwellings have *much* greater external surface area per person, and so require much greater energy consumption per person to maintain the same internal temperature range. Why are you refusing to understand that?

Lots of communal space in the city? Go ahead and divide the amount of such space in the city by the number of people - compare to the amount of such space in rural communities divided by the number of people there - I'd be very surprised if cities came out with much more. My reasoning - such spaces in the city tend to be *packed* with people, while they tend to be comparatively empty in rural areas.

Also the *only* efficiency that matters for climate change is energy efficiency - corruption is irrelevant.

I'm not trying to argue that cities are a panacea for humanities problems - just that moving people out of them wouldn't magically solve them either. And I haven't even begun to look at carbon consumption of industry - the way I see it industry, rural or urban, counts against everyone in proportion to their consumption, regardless of where they live. And if anything I suspect rural areas consume slightly more "stuff" - urbanites have nowhere to put it.

Re:AGW science versus politics

[Karmashock]

And you're not thinking it through.

I've actually look at where this fallacy came from because you appear to be quite convinced of this notion despite clearly not thinking about it at all yourself.

So I looked at who mislead you and I figured it out.

There were a bunch of studies that were done that looked that per household energy bill of people in cities versus people in rural areas.

They showed that people in apartments and condos spend less on heating their homes etc then do rural households on average.

Quite true. However, that rather excludes a good deal of the city. The shops, the office buildings, the various public spaces.

I mean, the street lights alone would have a big impact. Do you know how many rural streets are lit all year round? Try just about none ever. You're running on sun and star light in those areas.

Anyway, it took me a bit to figure out why you were so confused and now I got it.

Its too bad you're incapable of thinking for yourself and instead will just glom onto the first report you see and take it as holy scripture. But that's clearly what you did.

I'm sorry that we have nothing more to share at this point. You're not thinking this issue through at all and you can't hold a debate with a non-interactive entity. You're basically a tape recorder when you do this... You probably won't believe me or understand that for some time. But I hold out hope that one day you'll have the introspection to see that is exactly what you've allowed to happen.

As to corruption not mattering to efficiency... then every third world country would be an economic giant. A large portion of the wealth of such nations flows directly into corruption. Which leads to systemic poverty. Not only does corruption matter. Everything matters. Its this cherry picking of data is getting you into trouble.

Everything is relevant.

Your self-righteousness turns me off

[Xaedalus]

I don't care how right you are, it's your self-righteous and smug tone that inclines me to vote against you. Your science-only stance ignores the impact that the policies such science would propose has on my life. And it's aggravated by your "I'm holier than thou because I'm smarter than you, so do as I say" tone. And hundreds of millions of people agree with me. I'd rather let the planet burn than let you be right and let people like you tell me how to live my life. If you can't come down to my level with empathy and understanding, then to hell with you.

Re:Your self-righteousness turns me off

[ideonexus]

I don't care how right you are, it's your self-righteous and smug tone that inclines me to vote against you.

This is sarcasm, right? You're presenting an unfair caricature of a climate skeptic to discredit them, yes?

Re:Your self-righteousness turns me off

[Xaedalus]

No, I'm not kidding. I'm not being sarcastic. Your tone of superiority, your shrieking alarm, your condescending disregard for the impact that the changes would have on ordinary people make me say "fuck you". Yes, the science is valid, and yes, this is happening. But if the cost of implementing such changes means that I have to put up with a lifetime of people like you, who smugly and with great self-righteousness, tell me that my entire life has to change drastically for the worse (when it's all I or anyone can do to merely stay afloat in this world with its myriads of issues and influences beyond our control), and that in order to assure that we as a species survive we must cede control over to people like you, then I'd rather die. Or adapt and live through the wars and whatever chaos comes. If you can't come to everyone in humility, understanding the challenges we face, and work together towards compromise, then you're not worth listening to.

Re:Your self-righteousness turns me off

[ideonexus]

To be clear, as I was on the other thread, I did not make any statements about severity, or propose any solutions, or even suggest anything needed to be done about Global Warming. All I did was state the scientific consensus, and that was all I needed to send you into a frothing, irrational rage.

Re:Your self-righteousness turns me off

[Xaedalus]

Re-read everything you posted--look at the smugness, the satisfaction of being right that you convey. Then ask yourself why it is that despite all that evidence, you still face disagreement. It's not because those who disagree with you are stupid or evil, it's because the way you communicate indicates that you're a self-righteous tool. You and others like you always have to be right, no matter what. God help you if you're ever wrong about anything. You're damn right I got into a frothing, irrational rage over your words. People like you wreck the world for the rest of us because of your arrogant belief in scientism, and your self-righteous conviction that you're always right. Only you're either refusing to acknowledge that you posted with the intent to be seen as 'right', or you're truly oblivious to your own tone and actions. And now you hide behind a veneer of rationality and emotionless logic, expecting me to feel ashamed? No--if nothing else, you're going to remember this: the more you cling to being right, the more alone you will be.

that explains it

[raymorris]

At first I was thinking "what the bell I'd wrong with this guy? He can't even read what he just posted? Is he stoned or what?" Then I saw your username. Happy 420, dude.

Too bad you don't have the same integrity

[Anonymous Coward]

I must admit that I'm astonished. Not by the cause of the melting, but by the fact that the discovery is being announced without any attempt to spin this as proof of AGW.

I see you are perfectly willing to spin this, though.

Wouldn't it be great if observed facts could simply exist, without being force-fitted into pre-existing ideologies or petty political agendas?

But I guess extremism is the flavor of the day, and common sense ain't so fucking common any more.

The only fact that really matters...

[B33rNinj4]

Fact: Global warming exists. Fact: The ice sheet is melting due to an increase in geothermal heat in the surrounding area. Fact: The ice sheet is also being eroded by the ocean, probably from a rise in water levels. Half-Life 3 confirmed.

Settled Science

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen the light:

Carbon dioxide is the primary driver of temperature and climate.
The effects of the Sun and the orbit of the Earth around the Sun are secondary drivers of temperature and climate.
All of the 120 or so models are correct, including Mann's hockey stick of doom. Even the average of these models is correct.
The Arctic is ice free during the summer melt season.
Sea levels have continued to rise at unprecedented rates.
Hurricanes have increased in both number and intensity.
Climate refugees now outnumber war refugees.
Snow in winter is now a rare occurrence.
The atmospheric sensitivity to co2 is 1.5 C-to-4.5 C.
The life span of co2 in the atmosphere is 30-95 years but the effects may last between 500-1000 years due to over-saturated sinks.
Only 3-9% of scientists disagree with everything stated above.

Re:Settled Science

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok then, so tell us, what that actually means over the next 1000 years. In detail please. I'll even let you do it at a country by country level if it will make it easier.
Don't just say some places will be flooded or uninhabitable. Be specific about years. Be specific about temperatures. Be specific about wind speeds. etc
Considering we still struggle to predict exactly what the weather is going to be like next week, I struggle to see how we can do anything more than generalise about exactly what the effects of AGW (as opposed the components which aren't) will be.

profitable

[daninaustin]

Renewables are only profitable if they are subsidized.

Re:profitable

[polar red]

newsflash : 1/all other forms of energy are also subsidized. 2/renewables are the only forms of energy that are becoming cheaper. 3/in my country, subsidies have been nearly completely removed, but renewables are still growing.

Re:profitable

[drinkypoo]

Renewables are only profitable if they are subsidized.

Oil is only profitable if it is subsidized. Besides all the usual subsidies to oil companies, there's also being permitted to ignore externalities. For example, the EU requires companies to deal with their waste, which most of them are handling by making it highly recyclable. If the refineries were required to deal with the inherent waste of selling their product, it would cost vastly more than it does today.

What's really pathetic is that I don't even advocate doing anything other than charging the cost of externalities. Instead of permitting the petrochemical companies to push them off onto everyone alive, I propose that they should have to pay them. For example, when you buy fuel, the cost should include the cost of fixing the carbon. If the fuel was produced carbon-neutrally, then there won't be any cost for that. This is a way in which a tariff can be applied equally to all fuels and yet drive people towards carbon-neutral fuels.

Man-made global warming hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

How did man heat up all that land under the ice!?!?!?!?

Slip slidin away....

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to point out that these are man made volcanoes dug out by the indentured workers of the Koch brothers. If you disagree with me then you are a racist or a white man from the South. Wait, that's redundant.

Re:Let me get this straight - Owls

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do owls exist?"

"Are there hats?"

I've heard of those "owls", but have no proof they actually exist. Sure there are (doctored?) pictures on the internet, but has anyone really seen any for really. Nobody has ever been able to show me an own when asked. This is just another attempt by 'biologists' to get financing for their useless field of study.

Re:GeoThermal only a small part of the glacier's m

[Anonymous Coward]

And now the Faux News Quote:

It's worth pointing out that the increased geothermal heat contributes to the melting of the Thwaites glacier. It's predominately natural calving. I'm saying this paper isn't important (we all know about the alternate explanation to AGW for the melting of the Thwaite glacier.

Derp derp derp Obama's Fault!

Re:Cue the radical activists

[riverat1]

Why have the various predictions been so drastically wrong?

That's like asking "When did you stop beating your wife?" In order to say whether the predictions (really projections in most cases) are right or wrong you have to understand the science well enough to know what is possible in the first place. Most people saying the predictions are wrong don't have that level of understanding.

Maybe, I don't know, cut back on the ganja?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, I don't know, cut back on the ganja?

Seriously: The only way to answer your questions is to perform a full audit of your finances, a full evaluation of your skills and personality, medical condition(s) [maybe the ganja is justified, IDK] know where you live, who your friends, relatives and other contacts are etc. etc. etc.

The general and complex answer to your question is that we need to set taxes to implement policy. (My argument is neutral as to what that policy should be) One example is to increase taxes to reduce fossil fuel consumption (tricky in any case since taxes in the US will not reduce consumption in say, China. They may actually increase it. The net effect, however, may be to reduce consumption. Needs to be evaluated. Policy and Economics are complex.)

If those taxes directly or indirectly cause some people to fall below a poverty or sustainability level then the appropriate action is to subsidize such people directly. That is also complex, but reality is complex.

Otherwise your attitude makes implementing any policy impossible, because policy (taxes, laws, regulations) always affects and even creates some winners and some losers, including at extreme points.

Re:Is the sheet Increasing or Decreasing ? FUD!

[riverat1]

I think you're confusing Antarctic sea ice with the Antarctic ice sheet. The maximum sea ice extent has grown somewhat recently but the ice sheet has been losing ice.

OT: Frames!

[Fuzzums]

Wow. I haven't seen that in a looong time. A website that uses frames ;)