But preventative care would cut into the profits of medical care providers by reducing the amount of care you need. Anyone that's making a profit off of medical care would want to increase the demand for their services, right?
I think we ought to reverse the profit motive in medical care. You pay the doctor when you're well and not when you're sick. Then the incentive is to keep you well.
The federal government run Veterans Administration Health Care System is one of the best in the country. It has among the lowest cost per patient and provides excellent care. Want to try again?
U.S. community hospitals provided $39 billion in free care in 2009, and another $36.5 billion in care for which government insurance programs did not reimburse them, an annual American Hospital Association analysis says. Both figures were notable increases from prior years, with uncompensated-care costs rising 6% and unreimbursed federal care rising 12.7%.
Divided by a US population of 310 million that's about $245 per person. Divided by the number of people using hospitals that do pay I don't even want to think about how much it is.
Now I'm sure that number is somewhat inflated but even if it's half that much it's still a lot of money.
I don't disagree that the medical industry has insanely high markups. Don't get me started on the pharmaceutical industry.
But I have to ask myself how much of that hospital markup is because of ER visits that never get paid for. Especially if it's something like a heart attack or trauma from an accident. ER's in general can't turn away people who are in desperate need of medical attention. It's about the most expensive way we can treat the indigent.
Charity does not mean "taxes". Charity means voluntary contributions.
So I suppose the fact that 20% or more of your insurance premium is due to the higher price that hospitals charge to cover uninsured people who turn to the Emergency Room when they can't afford to pay for medical care should be considered a tax?
Unless you are willing to turn away people who can't pay for needed medical care then simple statistics says the least expensive overall medical care system is one where everyone is covered.
It's all about how your Congresspeople voted: every US Citizen (except maybe those in US possessions) has one US Representative, and two Senators, who they are eligible to vote for.
The other exception to that is people who live in Washington D.C. The don't have any Senators or a Representative either.
It does to me but that's "government regulation". Cap and trade is a way to accommodate the free marketeers. It has worked quite well for SO2 emissions.
Well, not really. It's a way to accommodate for some of the markets but as we have notices, most of the manufacturing from nations regulated by the S02 emissions has moved away to markets not regulated.
I don't know about manufacturing moving away from nations with SO2 regulations but the biggest source of SO2 emissions has always been power generation (coal and high sulfur petroleum). That isn't very movable. SO2 emissions have been curtailed for a fraction of the cost that power companies said it would when the regulations were first being proposed. The benefit to the country as a whole in reduced acid rain and reduced medical costs has been far greater than the cost to industry.
But my personal preference is a straight up carbon tax levied where the coal leaves the mine and at the well head for oil and gas and at the dock for imports. I would even put a tariff on imported products for the carbon released in making and delivering them.
I'm not sure I would like that system. For one, I believe that energy is more of a utility necessary for the country then a privileged consumer good and any attack on energy is an attack on the country's infrastructure. But, if there is a tax put on it before it's moved out, then what happens when supply increased and prices drop and the price to those using it remains the same? Or worse yet, if every thing jumps in price, all industry simply raises it's prices to compensate and the people impacted are the workers who's pay hasn't caught up with the massive inflation yet.
Well, my first premise of course is that it is necessary to stop CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. The market method of doing that is to make it (eventually) prohibitively expensive to use them. Cap and trade is one method but I think a carbon tax is simpler and less subject to manipulation.
It should start very low, maybe costing me $20 for the first year then should rise every year or two so in something like 30 years it becomes too expensive to continue to use fossil fuels for most things. Wouldn't doing it that way spur innovation in ways to gain a competitive advantage by reducing your carbon footprint?
You see, it would never rise to the point that fossil fuels are too expensive to use. You have to remember, any costs put on corporations is recovered from the sale of the products. If it's applied to everyone equally right off the bat, then you are only going to see prices increase across the board as they recover that cost.
This was illustrated during the Clinton years when they put a tax on telephone service of one or two dollars per connected customer to fund access in disadvantaged and rural communities. This was a tax to the phone companies, not the people but because it hit all the phone companies at once (even in markets that have competition and several phone companies), it was just passed onto the consumer's bill as a recovery of a fee the government charges. So instead of this coming from profits as most lawmakers probably thought, it just increased costs to the consumer and the phone companies let the consumers know why.
I guess I would just say it needs to become more expensive to use fossil fuels to reduce their use. You talk as if it isn't possible to do the things we do without fossil fuels. I have more faith in our inventiveness and ingenuity.
Finally, I don't think the government should keep the money. It should be redistributed in equal amounts to all legal residents perhaps as a credit on your tax return. That would ease the burden on people who reduce their carbon use. I could see using maybe 5% of the money coll
Did you mean to say it only predicts 1.94 C of warming with plant feedback? Of course that 1.94 C of warming is for a specific time in the future or a specific level of CO2. It won't stop there if we don't do something to stop atmospheric CO2 levels from rising.
As it stands right now CO2 concentration is around 380 ppmv while methane is around 1.75 ppmv so even though methane is a more powerful GHG the effects from CO2 overwhelm it. Also, methane has an average lifetime in the atmosphere of around 10 years before it oxidizes to CO2 and 2 H2O so unless there is a steady increasing source of methane its long term effect is that of CO2. But you are right that if the melting permafrost and methane clathrate deposits really let go it would be bad news. Still the driver that makes those feedbacks let go is CO2 so that's what we need to worry about right now.
The simple answer is that warming leads to more snow until it gets too warm to snow and becomes rain. That's because colder air is dryer than warmer air so it can't hold as much water vapor to produce the snow.
You know that the paper was peer reviewed before it got published, don't you?
Peer review is only the first step in becoming accepted science. It's like a spellchecker for science. It makes sure there are no obvious errors and the science is rigorous. Then other scientists read it and the real testing of the hypothesis begins.
Guess what you moron. So far (through October) 2010 has been the warmest year on record. It is a sure thing to be in the top 3 of the instrument record regardless of what happens for the rest of the year.
Unfortunately at this point we are already committed to plenty of warming and ocean acidification. Even if human CO2 emissions went to zero tomorrow it will take 30-40 years for the warming to stop (because of the buffer the oceans provide for temperatures). It would be over 200 years before the ice on Greenland and Antarctica reached a new balance. The sooner we do something about it the less worse it will get.
I think their logic is that since there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming it can't be causing the disasters. Therefore anything that says AGW is the cause is automatically wrong.
We may not be able to say exactly how much of the Pakistan flooding was from global warming but from the fact that the current warming has increased water vapor in the atmosphere by 4% (which is a measurable effect) it's logical to expect more precipitation.
Especially when the person who's the main leader of the global warming cause is a politician who likes to pretend to be a scientist and not an actual scientist.
Al Gore isn't the leader on global warming, he's more like the spokesmodel for it.
Wouldn't if make much more sense to skip that idiocy and simply require power plants to be X much more efficient and pollute...?
It does to me but that's "government regulation". Cap and trade is a way to accommodate the free marketeers. It has worked quite well for SO2 emissions.
But my personal preference is a straight up carbon tax levied where the coal leaves the mine and at the well head for oil and gas and at the dock for imports. I would even put a tariff on imported products for the carbon released in making and delivering them.
It should start very low, maybe costing me $20 for the first year then should rise every year or two so in something like 30 years it becomes too expensive to continue to use fossil fuels for most things. Wouldn't doing it that way spur innovation in ways to gain a competitive advantage by reducing your carbon footprint?
Finally, I don't think the government should keep the money. It should be redistributed in equal amounts to all legal residents perhaps as a credit on your tax return. That would ease the burden on people who reduce their carbon use. I could see using maybe 5% of the money collect to pay for administration and to fund research.
You can't take a hand made, lip blown thermometer from 1850 and use that on a scale to show temperature growth of a fraction of a degree F over decades, but that's one gross error the "climatologists" make.
That statement is a gross error on your part. Very accurate thermometers were being made in the mid-1700's. Both Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius died before 1750. The reason they start the global temperature record in the mid-1800's is that there were finally enough temperature readings being taken worldwide to form a synthesis of global temperature.
"Where is the heat going??!!!" as our temperatures are now dropping is the wail of the "climatologist..."
You read the words "Where is the heat going?" but you didn't bother to follow up and learn the context of the question. The actual quote from the email is "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." The travesty that Kevin Trenberth is referring to is the fact that we don't have enough instrumentation and detailed measurement to accurately determine where all of the heat is going.
I see. Maybe I'm dense but can you explain how asking that question means I'm not in a position to participate in the conversation? Sounds to me like you don't have a cogent answer so you're just trying to win the argument with bluster.
But you can see by the quote from the abstract of the paper that even the authors of the paper say it merely slows projected warming. Are you saying the authors are wrong? I guess they must be (in your opinion) since they think it only modifies projected warming but doesn't say there is no global warming.
You: Surprise! A new model no[w] completely contradicts every other model.
In what way does this new model "completely contradict" existing models? It's new information. If it pans out it will be added to the existing models. It doesn't say there is no global warming. To quote the abstract:
By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6C.
It would take another 4 or 5 negative feedbacks like it to eliminate global warming.
"The coming ice age" was popularized by Time and Newsweek but an examination of peer reviewed papers published between 1965 and 1979 found over 40 on global warming and less than 10 on cooling. And some of those 10 talked about it in terms of industrial pollution, mostly aerosols, and what would happen if they continued to increase, in other words AGC (Anthropogenic Global Cooling). Most of the real "experts" obviously didn't fear the return of glaciation.
Where did you come up with "we're about 10,000 years overdue to return to a glacial period"? The last glaciation only ended between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. The Missoula Floods were happening around 13,000 yag. The information I've heard says the next glaciation could be expected to begin in around 20,000 years if you go by Milankovitch cycles. In fact the GP's 2nd link you refer to states:
These two factors, orbit and tilt, are weak and are not acting within the same timescale – they are out of phase by about 10,000 years. This means that their combined effect would probably be too weak to trigger an ice age. You have to go back 430,000 years to find an interglacial with similar conditions, and this interglacial lasted about 30,000 years
BTW, I share your frustration with the misuse of the term "Ice Age" but we're not likely to get very far.
Frank Luntz suggested to the GWB administration they use the term "climate change" in their communications because it was thought to sound less severe. I don't think that's the first time the term was ever used but it probably was a factor in it coming into more common usage.
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But preventative care would cut into the profits of medical care providers by reducing the amount of care you need. Anyone that's making a profit off of medical care would want to increase the demand for their services, right?
I think we ought to reverse the profit motive in medical care. You pay the doctor when you're well and not when you're sick. Then the incentive is to keep you well.
The federal government run Veterans Administration Health Care System is one of the best in the country. It has among the lowest cost per patient and provides excellent care. Want to try again?
AHA reports $75.5 billion in unpaid care in 2009
Dec 8, 2010 Daily News Service
U.S. community hospitals provided $39 billion in free care in 2009, and another $36.5 billion in care for which government insurance programs did not reimburse them, an annual American Hospital Association analysis says. Both figures were notable increases from prior years, with uncompensated-care costs rising 6% and unreimbursed federal care rising 12.7%.
Divided by a US population of 310 million that's about $245 per person. Divided by the number of people using hospitals that do pay I don't even want to think about how much it is.
Now I'm sure that number is somewhat inflated but even if it's half that much it's still a lot of money.
I don't disagree that the medical industry has insanely high markups. Don't get me started on the pharmaceutical industry.
But I have to ask myself how much of that hospital markup is because of ER visits that never get paid for. Especially if it's something like a heart attack or trauma from an accident. ER's in general can't turn away people who are in desperate need of medical attention. It's about the most expensive way we can treat the indigent.
Charity does not mean "taxes". Charity means voluntary contributions.
So I suppose the fact that 20% or more of your insurance premium is due to the higher price that hospitals charge to cover uninsured people who turn to the Emergency Room when they can't afford to pay for medical care should be considered a tax?
Unless you are willing to turn away people who can't pay for needed medical care then simple statistics says the least expensive overall medical care system is one where everyone is covered.
Most homosexuals are perfectly capable of reproducing, just not with their preferred partners.
It's all about how your Congresspeople voted: every US Citizen (except maybe those in US possessions) has one US Representative, and two Senators, who they are eligible to vote for.
The other exception to that is people who live in Washington D.C. The don't have any Senators or a Representative either.
Whitewater boaters in places like the Grand Canyon. But even there the satphone coverage is spotty.
Well, not really. It's a way to accommodate for some of the markets but as we have notices, most of the manufacturing from nations regulated by the S02 emissions has moved away to markets not regulated.
I don't know about manufacturing moving away from nations with SO2 regulations but the biggest source of SO2 emissions has always been power generation (coal and high sulfur petroleum). That isn't very movable. SO2 emissions have been curtailed for a fraction of the cost that power companies said it would when the regulations were first being proposed. The benefit to the country as a whole in reduced acid rain and reduced medical costs has been far greater than the cost to industry.
I'm not sure I would like that system. For one, I believe that energy is more of a utility necessary for the country then a privileged consumer good and any attack on energy is an attack on the country's infrastructure. But, if there is a tax put on it before it's moved out, then what happens when supply increased and prices drop and the price to those using it remains the same? Or worse yet, if every thing jumps in price, all industry simply raises it's prices to compensate and the people impacted are the workers who's pay hasn't caught up with the massive inflation yet.
Well, my first premise of course is that it is necessary to stop CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. The market method of doing that is to make it (eventually) prohibitively expensive to use them. Cap and trade is one method but I think a carbon tax is simpler and less subject to manipulation.
You see, it would never rise to the point that fossil fuels are too expensive to use. You have to remember, any costs put on corporations is recovered from the sale of the products. If it's applied to everyone equally right off the bat, then you are only going to see prices increase across the board as they recover that cost.
This was illustrated during the Clinton years when they put a tax on telephone service of one or two dollars per connected customer to fund access in disadvantaged and rural communities. This was a tax to the phone companies, not the people but because it hit all the phone companies at once (even in markets that have competition and several phone companies), it was just passed onto the consumer's bill as a recovery of a fee the government charges. So instead of this coming from profits as most lawmakers probably thought, it just increased costs to the consumer and the phone companies let the consumers know why.
I guess I would just say it needs to become more expensive to use fossil fuels to reduce their use. You talk as if it isn't possible to do the things we do without fossil fuels. I have more faith in our inventiveness and ingenuity.
Did you mean to say it only predicts 1.94 C of warming with plant feedback? Of course that 1.94 C of warming is for a specific time in the future or a specific level of CO2. It won't stop there if we don't do something to stop atmospheric CO2 levels from rising.
As it stands right now CO2 concentration is around 380 ppmv while methane is around 1.75 ppmv so even though methane is a more powerful GHG the effects from CO2 overwhelm it. Also, methane has an average lifetime in the atmosphere of around 10 years before it oxidizes to CO2 and 2 H2O so unless there is a steady increasing source of methane its long term effect is that of CO2. But you are right that if the melting permafrost and methane clathrate deposits really let go it would be bad news. Still the driver that makes those feedbacks let go is CO2 so that's what we need to worry about right now.
The simple answer is that warming leads to more snow until it gets too warm to snow and becomes rain. That's because colder air is dryer than warmer air so it can't hold as much water vapor to produce the snow.
You know that the paper was peer reviewed before it got published, don't you?
Peer review is only the first step in becoming accepted science. It's like a spellchecker for science. It makes sure there are no obvious errors and the science is rigorous. Then other scientists read it and the real testing of the hypothesis begins.
Guess what you moron. So far (through October) 2010 has been the warmest year on record. It is a sure thing to be in the top 3 of the instrument record regardless of what happens for the rest of the year.
Unfortunately at this point we are already committed to plenty of warming and ocean acidification. Even if human CO2 emissions went to zero tomorrow it will take 30-40 years for the warming to stop (because of the buffer the oceans provide for temperatures). It would be over 200 years before the ice on Greenland and Antarctica reached a new balance. The sooner we do something about it the less worse it will get.
I think their logic is that since there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming it can't be causing the disasters. Therefore anything that says AGW is the cause is automatically wrong.
We may not be able to say exactly how much of the Pakistan flooding was from global warming but from the fact that the current warming has increased water vapor in the atmosphere by 4% (which is a measurable effect) it's logical to expect more precipitation.
Especially when the person who's the main leader of the global warming cause is a politician who likes to pretend to be a scientist and not an actual scientist.
Al Gore isn't the leader on global warming, he's more like the spokesmodel for it.
Wouldn't if make much more sense to skip that idiocy and simply require power plants to be X much more efficient and pollute...?
It does to me but that's "government regulation". Cap and trade is a way to accommodate the free marketeers. It has worked quite well for SO2 emissions.
But my personal preference is a straight up carbon tax levied where the coal leaves the mine and at the well head for oil and gas and at the dock for imports. I would even put a tariff on imported products for the carbon released in making and delivering them.
It should start very low, maybe costing me $20 for the first year then should rise every year or two so in something like 30 years it becomes too expensive to continue to use fossil fuels for most things. Wouldn't doing it that way spur innovation in ways to gain a competitive advantage by reducing your carbon footprint?
Finally, I don't think the government should keep the money. It should be redistributed in equal amounts to all legal residents perhaps as a credit on your tax return. That would ease the burden on people who reduce their carbon use. I could see using maybe 5% of the money collect to pay for administration and to fund research.
You can't take a hand made, lip blown thermometer from 1850 and use that on a scale to show temperature growth of a fraction of a degree F over decades, but that's one gross error the "climatologists" make.
That statement is a gross error on your part. Very accurate thermometers were being made in the mid-1700's. Both Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius died before 1750. The reason they start the global temperature record in the mid-1800's is that there were finally enough temperature readings being taken worldwide to form a synthesis of global temperature.
"Where is the heat going??!!!" as our temperatures are now dropping is the wail of the "climatologist..."
You read the words "Where is the heat going?" but you didn't bother to follow up and learn the context of the question. The actual quote from the email is "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." The travesty that Kevin Trenberth is referring to is the fact that we don't have enough instrumentation and detailed measurement to accurately determine where all of the heat is going.
I see. Maybe I'm dense but can you explain how asking that question means I'm not in a position to participate in the conversation? Sounds to me like you don't have a cogent answer so you're just trying to win the argument with bluster.
But you can see by the quote from the abstract of the paper that even the authors of the paper say it merely slows projected warming. Are you saying the authors are wrong? I guess they must be (in your opinion) since they think it only modifies projected warming but doesn't say there is no global warming.
You: Surprise! A new model no[w] completely contradicts every other model.
In what way does this new model "completely contradict" existing models? It's new information. If it pans out it will be added to the existing models. It doesn't say there is no global warming. To quote the abstract:
By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6C.
It would take another 4 or 5 negative feedbacks like it to eliminate global warming.
"The coming ice age" was popularized by Time and Newsweek but an examination of peer reviewed papers published between 1965 and 1979 found over 40 on global warming and less than 10 on cooling. And some of those 10 talked about it in terms of industrial pollution, mostly aerosols, and what would happen if they continued to increase, in other words AGC (Anthropogenic Global Cooling). Most of the real "experts" obviously didn't fear the return of glaciation.
Where did you come up with "we're about 10,000 years overdue to return to a glacial period"? The last glaciation only ended between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. The Missoula Floods were happening around 13,000 yag. The information I've heard says the next glaciation could be expected to begin in around 20,000 years if you go by Milankovitch cycles. In fact the GP's 2nd link you refer to states:
These two factors, orbit and tilt, are weak and are not acting within the same timescale – they are out of phase by about 10,000 years. This means that their combined effect would probably be too weak to trigger an ice age. You have to go back 430,000 years to find an interglacial with similar conditions, and this interglacial lasted about 30,000 years
BTW, I share your frustration with the misuse of the term "Ice Age" but we're not likely to get very far.
Frank Luntz suggested to the GWB administration they use the term "climate change" in their communications because it was thought to sound less severe. I don't think that's the first time the term was ever used but it probably was a factor in it coming into more common usage.
Exactly, I call them "Sick of work days".
I think doctors would be reluctant to ignore "normal dosing practices" if there isn't a law explicitly allowing assisted suicide.