No, you're missing the point. In an inflationary universe, two points that once could causally influence each other can inflate so that they never again can do so. In the early universe, we could have seen what it was that affected those distant galaxies. Now we can't. That's the whole point of inflationary theory, that there were huge parts of the universe which once were in causal contact with us but now aren't. Whatever was out there isn't still affecting those galaxies; if it was, you might have a point.
my main objection is that in the 90-some years since it's inception, very little actual evidence has been produced to support it, yet so many people treat it as established fact.
It's not "fact", but it is pretty well established by now, on the basis of the numerous independent phenomena it can explain as well as the failure of the many alternatives which have been advanced.
On the off chance that we may not know everything about gravity, or the composition of the entire universe, a little diffidence wouldn't hurt.
It's possible that dark matter is really modified gravity, but by now you have to go through really extreme contortions to get a gravitational theory to do that (e.g., the Bullet Cluster results mentioned by someone else). People apply Occam's Razor and say that it's dark matter unless better evidence comes along.
As for the composition of the entire universe, it's the fact that we don't know the composition of the universe which leads us to postulate dark matter: there appears to be something missing. Whatever it is that we don't know, is what we call "dark matter".
I don't think that would be sufficient to explain the hugely exponential expansion necessary to explain inflation. Something similar has been proposed to explain the much slower accelerating expansion currently produced by dark energy (here), but my recollection is that it was promptly disproven by several rebuttal papers for reasons I can no longer remember (but see here).
I suppose that, if a large mass was once observable but now is not (i.e. it tugged on some galaxies, then inflation happened), the theory in the article might make a certain amount of sense.
Yes, that's the idea here: the distant galaxies are still experiencing left-over motion due to a tug from matter long ago, which has by now expanded beyond our ability to see. This is a feature of the accelerating expansion due to inflation. Objects which were once within our causal horizon can be far, far away from it now. All we see is what effects remain from when they were near us.
But the timescale of inflation (fractions of a second after the Big Bang) doesn't really leave a lot of time for that to happen.
There was time for objects to gravitationally influence each other, if they were very close. Then they got blown far apart by the extremely rapid inflation. That's the whole point of inflationary theory: that objects used to be able to interact with each other (explaining the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe), but now they can't.
It sounds much more plausible to my ears that either (a) there is a previously-undiscovered conglomeration of dark matter in that direction, but it still lies within our observable bubble;
The authors claim the velocity is too large to explain this way.
the galaxies in question are at high velocity but no longer accelerating, indicating leftover momentum from an ejection, collision, or some other high-energy event in the early universe.
They're too far apart to all be affected by a single cosmic event, unless it was in the very early universe when they were very close together (i.e., pre-inflation). That's what this theory proposes. The idea is that this all happened before there were galaxies or even atoms, just a plasma of high energy particles. During inflation some particles got tugged more in one direction than another if different regions of space were inflating at different rates, giving them a peculiar velocity relative to the average Hubble flow. After inflation, atoms, gas, stars, galaxies, etc. condensed from them, retaining the primordial peculiar velocity.
First, the region that these clusters are supposedly moving towards are pretty close to being in line with the heart of the Milky Way. What this means is that the attractor object may simply be obscured by our own galaxy.
It's not just the lack of an attractor object, it's the unusual velocities.
Second, the motion is not unusually large for superclusters.
They argue otherwise: "If produced by gravitational instability within the concordance LambdaCDM model, the motion would require the local Universe out to ~ 300h^1 Mpc to be atypical at the level of many standard deviations of the model", and argue that even a 100 km/sec motion due to local gravitation alone would be excluded by observations. I confess that I don't know enough cosmology to understand why. Either you expect smaller motions in the earlier universe or else there are additional constraints at work (they mention having to explain why the dipole is approximately constant with depth). I'd have to do more background reading to understand what's going on here, but the point is that they say they have reason to believe that the motion is unusually large.
What really bothers me here is the claim that these bodies are still experiencing forces from the long departed rest of the universe.
I don't think they are. From my reading of the paper, it sounds like this motion is left over from the inflationary phase.
The only explanation I can see is that this speed (or flow) was caused by a gravitational tug that happened around the time of inflation.
That's exactly what they're proposing: that the "dark flow" is the leftover imprint of "pre-inflationary remnants". They argue that if different parts of the universe inflated at different rates, that would introduce a bias, visible today, in the motions of in-between bodies. After inflation those remnants would today be far outside the causal horizon of the distant galaxies they once influenced, and certainly outside of ours.
If we are observing far-away galaxies being affected by the stuff too far away for us to observe directly, maybe we are observing the stuff outside our bubble indirectly?
Yes, that's the idea being proposed here.
Also, maybe we can also "observe" the stuff outside our bubble via the effects of "spooky action at a distance"?
No. It's hard enough to maintain coherent quantum entanglement over terrestrial distances (I think the record is a few kilometers, with a lot of work and careful engineering), let alone across and beyond the observable universe.
The speed of gravity is the speed of light. But the point is that matter outside the observable universe can't influence us, but it can potentially influence things farther away from us. In inflationary theory, matter that we could once see could have expanded so fast that we can't see it any more, but other things we can see might have remained longer within its realm of influence. We might be able to see the after-effects in the early universe (even though the very distant matter might by now have passed beyond the direct influence of even distant objects we can see).
Instead of some mysterious new force from outside the universe, the two papers are based on an analysis of the Cold Dark Matter theory which has been around for some time.
Read the papers again. The first paper doesn't mention dark matter at all: it's talking about "pre-inflationary remnants" outside our cosmological horizon (observable universe). The second paper is talking about the same thing, although it does mention dark matter (to note that other than the peculiar flow, the matter behaves according to the CDM model).
Your description of the observable universe is right, but I don't think it conflicts with what the article says. You're also right about the last point: the authors are hoping that matter outside the other side of the observable universe has left its gravitational imprint on matter near the boundary.
But I look forward to anything that seems to pin down the concept of 'dark matter'.
This new theory isn't an alternative to dark matter.
I'm not drinking his dark matter kool-aid until I can get a better explination for it than 'its invisible, supermassive, unobservable, and so totally there'.
You believe neutrinos exist, right? How hard is it to believe that there's something else like a neutrino out there, but heavier?
Dark matter-like particles have been predicted for decades. Within the Standard Model, there's the axion which is supposed to solve the strong CP problem in QCD. In the supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, there is the neutralino. In fact, most theories beyond the Standard Model naturally require some heavy scalar particle which could be a dark matter candidate.
Modifying gravity doesn't appear to consistently explain all the gravitational behavior we observe. The other alternative is modifying the source of gravity, i.e. there's something out there we can't see for some reason. And that does account for the gravitational behavior we observe.
we have no means of determining the extent of this "bubble".
Effectively, we can: we can't see past the surface of last scattering where the cosmic microwave background radiation originates.
Therefore, claiming that there could be "giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe" just outside this bubble seems somewhat... convenient.
Well, the chaotic inflationary theory has long predicted such structures should exist at all scales outside the observable universe. Anyway, we see matter near the boundary of the observable universe. There are almost certainly large structures outside the boundary too. We see some of that matter moving in a way it ordinarily wouldn't according to the usual cosmological expansion. It's not that big a leap to hypothesize that it's being pulled by something on the other side of what we can observe.
It's not a small leap, either — obviously it's hard to compile statistics on how these boundary clusters are moving, and thereby infer anything really solid about possible unseen gravitational sources. But it's not completely ad hoc. The explanation involves something that has been suggested by theory in the past for independent reasons, and observationally there don't appear to be any nearby sources of matter that could explain why the motion is so far from the Hubble flow. I suppose you could postulate a bunch of dark matter right near the boundary, but since (as you say) the cosmological horizon isn't some special physical place, but is just the region beyond which light hasn't reached us, that would be weird.
This should be taken with the usual grain of salt: it's a brand new paper and in a year or two could potentially be explained in a much more mundane way. I'd personally give it less than a 50% chance of being right. But it's not a priori ridiculous either. As another poster said, I hope that Cosmic Variance covers the result... a real expert second opinion would be valuable.
But it DOES show that the majority of the so-called "evidence" for CO2-based warming that has been shoved in your face by so many sources so far is, in fact flawed.
No. First, ice cores are neither the majority nor the strongest evidence of CO2-based warming; that comes from physics and modern observations. Second, it's not flawed either: the glacial-interglacial temperature/CO2 data strongly supports CO2-induced warming. The lead of temperature was predicted long ago by Milankovitch theory; it doesn't somehow contradict the greenhouse effect. And the amount of temperature change visible in the record cannot be explain without appealing to the extra warming induced by the CO2 feedback.
In fact, sunspot activity has a STRONGER CORRELATION to temperature than CO2 ever did
Not during the recent warming period post 1970 or so, where it is either uncorrelated or even anti-correlated with temperature, which is one of many reasons why that warming is not attributable to solar activity. Not to mention the fact that the solar forcing trend is far too small in magnitude to account for the warming: regardless of what you think of CO2, solar activity is not the explanation. Try Foukal et al.'s Nature paper from 2006 to begin with.
Old news, from BEFORE I posted those links, and which has nothing at all to do with the current thread.
Examples from this thread where you mention your old post which you insisted they Google for, or else go and Google the original information in the links themselves, rather than simply telling them where your post was: here, here, here, here, here.
Once again, you state "I reminded you" and "I posted", yet I have not seen ANY of those reminders OR any of those posts you claim.
Because you're an idiot who can't keep track of who you're talking to or what you're talking about.
This isn't really hard. If I say "I reminded you in my last comment", any person of near-human intelligence would look at my last comment, where I reminded you that "When it finally became clear that you would never actually do that, I picked one point at random and pointed to you a number of citations which refute it. And you STILL refused to discuss the science."
This would be a clue to read the posts before that.
I don't really want to get into the environmental movement and what its motivations may be. I think the more interesting question is what should be done about global warming. Regardless of what you think about the politics, a carbon tax remains an economically effective policy instrument. Counting on technological progress is not enough: if you believe in the free market, you should want the economic incentives to align with the right technologies. The problem is right now they don't.
If one accepts that CO2 emissions have environmental costs, the market is not yet aware of these extra costs. It is a negative externality leading to inefficiency. To correct the market distortion, it is necessary to internalize the externality by putting a price on it. That way, technologies which reduce carbon emissions become more economically competitive, as they should if carbon-intensive technologies have hidden environmental costs. And not just technological progress; as long as there is a price on carbon which reflects its true costs, the economic incentive is there to minimize carbon emissions by whatever means are more efficient. That might be simple conservation measures, or greater deployment of existing but underutilized technologies. It can be some mix of technologies, like low emission vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, alternative energy, improved building codes, etc. As long as there's some uniformly imposed price, the market will ideally find the optimal mix of solutions, since everyone wants to pay less and make more.
Taxation may be a dirty word among the general public, but it's long been accepted by mainstream economists as one of the most effective mechanisms by which to correct externalities: look up Pigovian tax. The main alternative is a permit trading scheme. See Weitzman's famous paper on price vs. quantity controls, and Pizer's climate-specific followup. The taxes don't have to be pocketed by the government; usually they are part of a revenue neutral tax shift (add one tax, cut another), or a tax-and-dividend plan (return the proceeds as rebates to the public).
Now, the developing world is a big problem. But I don't think it's necessary to "freeze them in time" and arrest their development. Rather, the developed world can view it as an opportunity to foster low-carbon technologies for sale in the developing world. That's not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will help a lot if we ever decide to get serious about it.
Probably the world's leading economist on climate economic policy is Bill Nordhaus. He's recently published a new book intended for the public, A Question of Balance. It's a really good place to start regarding what an effective policy to insure against climate change may be.
More seriously, as I noted elsewhere in this thread, the reason why volcanic CO2 emissions are not present in the Mauna Loa data set is because such emissions are detected by the instrument, but are flagged as such and removed before being entered into the data set.
Charles Keeling became famous 50 years ago for his careful efforts at calibration and bias removal in these kinds of measurements. The first thing you do is site the instrument at a location on Mauna Loa where the prevailing winds do not come from the volcano. Since you can't rely on that — at night with light winds the gas can be trapped in a thermal inversion and carried downslope to the instrument — you also set up an anemometer to detect whether there is wind coming from the volcano. And even without the wind data, CO2 from the volcano is easily distinguishable from background CO2 because it's (a) bursty in time, (b) much more variable in magnitude, and (c) shows a higher mixing ratio with the ambient air. There's actually more to it than that, but that's the "first line of defense" against contaminated data.
Indeed, it's only within the last 10-15 years that people have started to use this discarded "nuisance" data to go back and determine what the volcanic emissions were. Before that, people just used the clean background data for global CO2 levels and ignored the removed volcanic contribution. Some relevant papers are Ryan, Chem. Geol. 177, 201 (2001), Keeling et al., Tellus 28, 6 (1976), and Thoning, Tans, and Komhyr, JGR 94, D6 (1989).
If they measure CO2 next to volcanos it obviously has something to do with global warming, or else they simply would take measurements elsewhere.
That's wrong, for two reasons I pointed out elsewhere.
'AC did not say what the poster refuted' == Straw man.
Sorry, the AC clearly gave an example of something upon which the theory of global warming was supposed to depend. It is not a straw man to point out that the theory does not actually depend on volcanic activity or even the results of measurements made on volcanoes.
No. The conclusions remain unchanged even if you take Mauna Loa out of the data set. And the Mauna Loa data set is itself independent of volcanic activity.
Boy, you'll go to any length to try to nitpick your way into being right, won't you?
If you say, "When it comes to global warming, they'll believe anything", then explicitly say "for example", and proceed to give an example of CO2 measured next to volcanoes, the obvious implication is that the CO2 measured next to volcanoes has something to do with global warming. Otherwise you're attempting to claim that the poster gave an example that had nothing to do with what said poster was explicitly giving an example of.
Give up man, it's pathetic. Admit that the AC didn't know what he/she was talking about and move on.
The original poster was explicitly attempting to use the volcanic measurement of CO2 to cast doubt upon global warming. The other poster was correct in noting that this is a logical fallacy, since the conclusions of that theory do not depend upon volcanic measurement of CO2.
It's not a straw man. The poster was correctly pointing out that CO2 measurements are not based on a single measurement site on a volcano. So even if you think the volcanic site is being contaminated, that has nothing to do with the measurements of CO2 made everywhere else which show the same trend, and therefore the original poster's premise (that global warming research conclusions rest on volcanically contaminated measurements) is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're missing the point. In an inflationary universe, two points that once could causally influence each other can inflate so that they never again can do so. In the early universe, we could have seen what it was that affected those distant galaxies. Now we can't. That's the whole point of inflationary theory, that there were huge parts of the universe which once were in causal contact with us but now aren't. Whatever was out there isn't still affecting those galaxies; if it was, you might have a point.
my main objection is that in the 90-some years since it's inception, very little actual evidence has been produced to support it, yet so many people treat it as established fact.
It's not "fact", but it is pretty well established by now, on the basis of the numerous independent phenomena it can explain as well as the failure of the many alternatives which have been advanced.
On the off chance that we may not know everything about gravity, or the composition of the entire universe, a little diffidence wouldn't hurt.
It's possible that dark matter is really modified gravity, but by now you have to go through really extreme contortions to get a gravitational theory to do that (e.g., the Bullet Cluster results mentioned by someone else). People apply Occam's Razor and say that it's dark matter unless better evidence comes along.
As for the composition of the entire universe, it's the fact that we don't know the composition of the universe which leads us to postulate dark matter: there appears to be something missing. Whatever it is that we don't know, is what we call "dark matter".
The Higgs is unstable. Dark matter has to be stable to still be around since the Big Bang.
However, depending on what dark matter is, it's possible that the LHC will see it as well as the Higgs.
I don't think that would be sufficient to explain the hugely exponential expansion necessary to explain inflation. Something similar has been proposed to explain the much slower accelerating expansion currently produced by dark energy (here), but my recollection is that it was promptly disproven by several rebuttal papers for reasons I can no longer remember (but see here).
I suppose that, if a large mass was once observable but now is not (i.e. it tugged on some galaxies, then inflation happened), the theory in the article might make a certain amount of sense.
Yes, that's the idea here: the distant galaxies are still experiencing left-over motion due to a tug from matter long ago, which has by now expanded beyond our ability to see. This is a feature of the accelerating expansion due to inflation. Objects which were once within our causal horizon can be far, far away from it now. All we see is what effects remain from when they were near us.
But the timescale of inflation (fractions of a second after the Big Bang) doesn't really leave a lot of time for that to happen.
There was time for objects to gravitationally influence each other, if they were very close. Then they got blown far apart by the extremely rapid inflation. That's the whole point of inflationary theory: that objects used to be able to interact with each other (explaining the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe), but now they can't.
It sounds much more plausible to my ears that either (a) there is a previously-undiscovered conglomeration of dark matter in that direction, but it still lies within our observable bubble;
The authors claim the velocity is too large to explain this way.
the galaxies in question are at high velocity but no longer accelerating, indicating leftover momentum from an ejection, collision, or some other high-energy event in the early universe.
They're too far apart to all be affected by a single cosmic event, unless it was in the very early universe when they were very close together (i.e., pre-inflation). That's what this theory proposes. The idea is that this all happened before there were galaxies or even atoms, just a plasma of high energy particles. During inflation some particles got tugged more in one direction than another if different regions of space were inflating at different rates, giving them a peculiar velocity relative to the average Hubble flow. After inflation, atoms, gas, stars, galaxies, etc. condensed from them, retaining the primordial peculiar velocity.
First, the region that these clusters are supposedly moving towards are pretty close to being in line with the heart of the Milky Way. What this means is that the attractor object may simply be obscured by our own galaxy.
It's not just the lack of an attractor object, it's the unusual velocities.
Second, the motion is not unusually large for superclusters.
They argue otherwise: "If produced by gravitational instability within the concordance LambdaCDM model, the motion would require the local Universe out to ~ 300h^1 Mpc to be atypical at the level of many standard deviations of the model", and argue that even a 100 km/sec motion due to local gravitation alone would be excluded by observations. I confess that I don't know enough cosmology to understand why. Either you expect smaller motions in the earlier universe or else there are additional constraints at work (they mention having to explain why the dipole is approximately constant with depth). I'd have to do more background reading to understand what's going on here, but the point is that they say they have reason to believe that the motion is unusually large.
What really bothers me here is the claim that these bodies are still experiencing forces from the long departed rest of the universe.
I don't think they are. From my reading of the paper, it sounds like this motion is left over from the inflationary phase.
The only explanation I can see is that this speed (or flow) was caused by a gravitational tug that happened around the time of inflation.
That's exactly what they're proposing: that the "dark flow" is the leftover imprint of "pre-inflationary remnants". They argue that if different parts of the universe inflated at different rates, that would introduce a bias, visible today, in the motions of in-between bodies. After inflation those remnants would today be far outside the causal horizon of the distant galaxies they once influenced, and certainly outside of ours.
If we are observing far-away galaxies being affected by the stuff too far away for us to observe directly, maybe we are observing the stuff outside our bubble indirectly?
Yes, that's the idea being proposed here.
Also, maybe we can also "observe" the stuff outside our bubble via the effects of "spooky action at a distance"?
No. It's hard enough to maintain coherent quantum entanglement over terrestrial distances (I think the record is a few kilometers, with a lot of work and careful engineering), let alone across and beyond the observable universe.
The speed of gravity is the speed of light. But the point is that matter outside the observable universe can't influence us, but it can potentially influence things farther away from us. In inflationary theory, matter that we could once see could have expanded so fast that we can't see it any more, but other things we can see might have remained longer within its realm of influence. We might be able to see the after-effects in the early universe (even though the very distant matter might by now have passed beyond the direct influence of even distant objects we can see).
Instead of some mysterious new force from outside the universe, the two papers are based on an analysis of the Cold Dark Matter theory which has been around for some time.
Read the papers again. The first paper doesn't mention dark matter at all: it's talking about "pre-inflationary remnants" outside our cosmological horizon (observable universe). The second paper is talking about the same thing, although it does mention dark matter (to note that other than the peculiar flow, the matter behaves according to the CDM model).
Your description of the observable universe is right, but I don't think it conflicts with what the article says. You're also right about the last point: the authors are hoping that matter outside the other side of the observable universe has left its gravitational imprint on matter near the boundary.
But I look forward to anything that seems to pin down the concept of 'dark matter'.
This new theory isn't an alternative to dark matter.
I'm not drinking his dark matter kool-aid until I can get a better explination for it than 'its invisible, supermassive, unobservable, and so totally there'.
You believe neutrinos exist, right? How hard is it to believe that there's something else like a neutrino out there, but heavier?
Dark matter-like particles have been predicted for decades. Within the Standard Model, there's the axion which is supposed to solve the strong CP problem in QCD. In the supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, there is the neutralino. In fact, most theories beyond the Standard Model naturally require some heavy scalar particle which could be a dark matter candidate.
Modifying gravity doesn't appear to consistently explain all the gravitational behavior we observe. The other alternative is modifying the source of gravity, i.e. there's something out there we can't see for some reason. And that does account for the gravitational behavior we observe.
we have no means of determining the extent of this "bubble".
Effectively, we can: we can't see past the surface of last scattering where the cosmic microwave background radiation originates.
Therefore, claiming that there could be "giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe" just outside this bubble seems somewhat... convenient.
Well, the chaotic inflationary theory has long predicted such structures should exist at all scales outside the observable universe. Anyway, we see matter near the boundary of the observable universe. There are almost certainly large structures outside the boundary too. We see some of that matter moving in a way it ordinarily wouldn't according to the usual cosmological expansion. It's not that big a leap to hypothesize that it's being pulled by something on the other side of what we can observe.
It's not a small leap, either — obviously it's hard to compile statistics on how these boundary clusters are moving, and thereby infer anything really solid about possible unseen gravitational sources. But it's not completely ad hoc. The explanation involves something that has been suggested by theory in the past for independent reasons, and observationally there don't appear to be any nearby sources of matter that could explain why the motion is so far from the Hubble flow. I suppose you could postulate a bunch of dark matter right near the boundary, but since (as you say) the cosmological horizon isn't some special physical place, but is just the region beyond which light hasn't reached us, that would be weird.
This should be taken with the usual grain of salt: it's a brand new paper and in a year or two could potentially be explained in a much more mundane way. I'd personally give it less than a 50% chance of being right. But it's not a priori ridiculous either. As another poster said, I hope that Cosmic Variance covers the result ... a real expert second opinion would be valuable.
Urectum.
Let me be clear here: when I say "anti-correlated", I mean "correlated oppositely from the trend necessary to explain the warming".
But it DOES show that the majority of the so-called "evidence" for CO2-based warming that has been shoved in your face by so many sources so far is, in fact flawed.
No. First, ice cores are neither the majority nor the strongest evidence of CO2-based warming; that comes from physics and modern observations. Second, it's not flawed either: the glacial-interglacial temperature/CO2 data strongly supports CO2-induced warming. The lead of temperature was predicted long ago by Milankovitch theory; it doesn't somehow contradict the greenhouse effect. And the amount of temperature change visible in the record cannot be explain without appealing to the extra warming induced by the CO2 feedback.
In fact, sunspot activity has a STRONGER CORRELATION to temperature than CO2 ever did
Not during the recent warming period post 1970 or so, where it is either uncorrelated or even anti-correlated with temperature, which is one of many reasons why that warming is not attributable to solar activity. Not to mention the fact that the solar forcing trend is far too small in magnitude to account for the warming: regardless of what you think of CO2, solar activity is not the explanation. Try Foukal et al.'s Nature paper from 2006 to begin with.
Old news, from BEFORE I posted those links, and which has nothing at all to do with the current thread.
Examples from this thread where you mention your old post which you insisted they Google for, or else go and Google the original information in the links themselves, rather than simply telling them where your post was: here, here, here, here, here.
Once again, you state "I reminded you" and "I posted", yet I have not seen ANY of those reminders OR any of those posts you claim.
Because you're an idiot who can't keep track of who you're talking to or what you're talking about.
This isn't really hard. If I say "I reminded you in my last comment", any person of near-human intelligence would look at my last comment, where I reminded you that "When it finally became clear that you would never actually do that, I picked one point at random and pointed to you a number of citations which refute it. And you STILL refused to discuss the science."
This would be a clue to read the posts before that.
I don't really want to get into the environmental movement and what its motivations may be. I think the more interesting question is what should be done about global warming. Regardless of what you think about the politics, a carbon tax remains an economically effective policy instrument. Counting on technological progress is not enough: if you believe in the free market, you should want the economic incentives to align with the right technologies. The problem is right now they don't.
If one accepts that CO2 emissions have environmental costs, the market is not yet aware of these extra costs. It is a negative externality leading to inefficiency. To correct the market distortion, it is necessary to internalize the externality by putting a price on it. That way, technologies which reduce carbon emissions become more economically competitive, as they should if carbon-intensive technologies have hidden environmental costs. And not just technological progress; as long as there is a price on carbon which reflects its true costs, the economic incentive is there to minimize carbon emissions by whatever means are more efficient. That might be simple conservation measures, or greater deployment of existing but underutilized technologies. It can be some mix of technologies, like low emission vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, alternative energy, improved building codes, etc. As long as there's some uniformly imposed price, the market will ideally find the optimal mix of solutions, since everyone wants to pay less and make more.
Taxation may be a dirty word among the general public, but it's long been accepted by mainstream economists as one of the most effective mechanisms by which to correct externalities: look up Pigovian tax. The main alternative is a permit trading scheme. See Weitzman's famous paper on price vs. quantity controls, and Pizer's climate-specific followup. The taxes don't have to be pocketed by the government; usually they are part of a revenue neutral tax shift (add one tax, cut another), or a tax-and-dividend plan (return the proceeds as rebates to the public).
Now, the developing world is a big problem. But I don't think it's necessary to "freeze them in time" and arrest their development. Rather, the developed world can view it as an opportunity to foster low-carbon technologies for sale in the developing world. That's not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will help a lot if we ever decide to get serious about it.
Probably the world's leading economist on climate economic policy is Bill Nordhaus. He's recently published a new book intended for the public, A Question of Balance. It's a really good place to start regarding what an effective policy to insure against climate change may be.
You could go over to the talk.origins web site and read their FAQs, like Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale, Age of the Earth, and Isochron Dating.
More seriously, as I noted elsewhere in this thread, the reason why volcanic CO2 emissions are not present in the Mauna Loa data set is because such emissions are detected by the instrument, but are flagged as such and removed before being entered into the data set.
Charles Keeling became famous 50 years ago for his careful efforts at calibration and bias removal in these kinds of measurements. The first thing you do is site the instrument at a location on Mauna Loa where the prevailing winds do not come from the volcano. Since you can't rely on that — at night with light winds the gas can be trapped in a thermal inversion and carried downslope to the instrument — you also set up an anemometer to detect whether there is wind coming from the volcano. And even without the wind data, CO2 from the volcano is easily distinguishable from background CO2 because it's (a) bursty in time, (b) much more variable in magnitude, and (c) shows a higher mixing ratio with the ambient air. There's actually more to it than that, but that's the "first line of defense" against contaminated data.
Indeed, it's only within the last 10-15 years that people have started to use this discarded "nuisance" data to go back and determine what the volcanic emissions were. Before that, people just used the clean background data for global CO2 levels and ignored the removed volcanic contribution. Some relevant papers are Ryan, Chem. Geol. 177, 201 (2001), Keeling et al., Tellus 28, 6 (1976), and Thoning, Tans, and Komhyr, JGR 94, D6 (1989).
Well there's a devastating scientific rebuttal if I've ever seen one. You should write it up as a comment to Nature Geosciences.
If they measure CO2 next to volcanos it obviously has something to do with global warming, or else they simply would take measurements elsewhere.
That's wrong, for two reasons I pointed out elsewhere.
'AC did not say what the poster refuted' == Straw man.
Sorry, the AC clearly gave an example of something upon which the theory of global warming was supposed to depend. It is not a straw man to point out that the theory does not actually depend on volcanic activity or even the results of measurements made on volcanoes.
No. The conclusions remain unchanged even if you take Mauna Loa out of the data set. And the Mauna Loa data set is itself independent of volcanic activity.
Boy, you'll go to any length to try to nitpick your way into being right, won't you?
If you say, "When it comes to global warming, they'll believe anything", then explicitly say "for example", and proceed to give an example of CO2 measured next to volcanoes, the obvious implication is that the CO2 measured next to volcanoes has something to do with global warming. Otherwise you're attempting to claim that the poster gave an example that had nothing to do with what said poster was explicitly giving an example of.
Give up man, it's pathetic. Admit that the AC didn't know what he/she was talking about and move on.
The original poster was explicitly attempting to use the volcanic measurement of CO2 to cast doubt upon global warming. The other poster was correct in noting that this is a logical fallacy, since the conclusions of that theory do not depend upon volcanic measurement of CO2.
It's not a straw man. The poster was correctly pointing out that CO2 measurements are not based on a single measurement site on a volcano. So even if you think the volcanic site is being contaminated, that has nothing to do with the measurements of CO2 made everywhere else which show the same trend, and therefore the original poster's premise (that global warming research conclusions rest on volcanically contaminated measurements) is wrong.