Oh, I completely agree that human fire suppression policies have contributed by increasing fuel load (I live in Australia; the subject comes up frequently here). This is definitely a significant factor.
That does not mean that climate is not also a factor, or even that climate is not the dominant factor. See my sibling post for links to relevant studies.
Heh, now you accuse me of not providing links to support the claims I didn't make:-)
But if you like. A couple of studies (of many) predicting increases in wildfires due to climate change:
* Gonzalez et al 2010: Global patterns in the vulnerability of ecosystems to vegetation shifts due to climate change
* Moritz et al 2012: Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity
And a study (one of many) showing that climate is the dominant factor in the size of the wildfires we've been seeing:
* Littell et al 2009 Climate and wildfire area burned in western US ecoprovinces:
We demonstrate that wildfire area burned (WFAB) in the American West was controlled by climate during the 20th century (1916-2003)....For 1977-2003, a few climate variables explain 33-87% (mean = 64%) of WFAB, indicating strong linkages between climate and area burned.
By contrast, Mr Watts' "facts" are also nothing more than unsubstantiated declarations and assumptions, just like yours. A few random examples from your link:
* "This [CO2] percentage increase means nothing. Human CO2 emissions didn’t begin to rise significantly until after 1945": Keyword is 'significantly' - he claims the rise is not significant, but provides no justifications for this assumption, other than that the atmospheric percentage is "about as close to nothing as you can get" (it's a really small-looking number). No citations given.
* "...there is no way that this miniscule amount [of atmospheric CO2] can have any significant effect on climate." Another unsubstantiated declaration in his "facts" list. No citations given for this claim.
* "CO2 also lags short-term warming [historical graph] showing that warming causes rise in CO2, not the other way around if CO2 was the cause." - Incorrectly assumes that CO2 must either be a cause or an effect, but could never be both. No citations given for this "fact", either.
* "...global climate marches in lock step with sun spots, length of the sun spot cycle, and intensity of the solar magnetic field... total solar insolation (TSI) correlates very well with climate". Once more, he just claims this as a fact, with (wait for it) no citations given.
* "HadCRUT4 temperature curve showing that 56% of the warming since 1895 occurred prior to 1945"... according to his arbitrarily-drawn red lines. The HadCRUT4 temperature graph may well be accurate, but (of course) he provides no citation for any peer-reviewed source for his claimed "56% of warming" cut-off point (looks to me like the red line that claims to show this is just drawn to the peak of the biggest short-term fluctuation he can find, without regard to averages or trends or anything).
I could easily go on, but I have work to do. If Watts' unbacked assertions are what you consider "facts", then it's no wonder you usually don't bother to link to them.
Sure. Look at the IPCC AR5 WGII report, it discusses benefits as well as costs.
It's just that the costs and risks appear to greatly outweigh the benefits, or the benefits are long-term enough that the short-term costs of adaption will outweigh them for a very long time.
Love how your claims are "truth" by simple declaration, and others' are of course merely claims, even when they're agreeing with a peer-reviewed study.
Why don't you try and rebut the actual study, if you're so sure it's wrong? Or at least attempt toprovide a modicum of evidence to make your own claims look a little less like yet another soapbox rant.
Based on many studies covering a wide range of regions and crops, negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts (high confidence).
Climate-related hazards exacerbate other stressors, often with negative outcomes for livelihoods, especially for people living in poverty (high confidence)... Observed positive effects for poor and marginalized people, which are limited and often indirect, include examples such as diversification of social networks and of agricultural practices.
At present the world-wide burden of human ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors and is not well quantified. However, there has been increased heat-related mortality and decreased cold-related mortality in some regions as a result of warming (medium confidence)
IPCC AR5 WGII Summary for Policy Makers, emphasis mine. So yeah, there are recognised positive effects, they're just outweighed by the many negative effects. Sorry the news wasn't better, but there you go.
It's easy to make actual historical data support your view when you quote it so selectively.
* The very first link, for example, not only hides all the warming before his carefully-chosen 1998 cutoff year, but also fails to mention the continued warming in ocean temperatures (where most of the energy ends up).
* The next link doesn't even have a source for his data.
* We are then told about a single data point (2014) in a single metric (arctic sea ice area) as if it's supposed to be particularly significant
* And finally a single paragraph from a single local newspaper from 1974, apparently intended to represent the alleged global scientific viewpoint of the times, and a quote from a single meteorologist admitting he doesn't know how climatologists can predict climate.
I honestly have no idea why you think this is convincing. It's no wonder he's never produced any peer-reviewed papers; the reviewers would tear his methodology to shreds.
Planes and most boats will require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future
Or they could use hydrogen, burned or in fuel cells. Solar and wind need country-sized scale to smooth out variations, and storage to make up the difference, but we have many different technologies for that. The rest is just a question efficiency. And if the generating capacity gets cheap enough, even that becomes unimportant.
Not sure about Germany's 2030 plan, but this Stanford study outlines a path to 100% renewable energy in the US by 2050, for less cost than business-as-usual.
Right, so you think these 97% of climate scientists' deliberately lying about global warming "ensures their jobs"? You consider risking reputation and any prospect of future employment to be "self-preservation"?
Scientists are occasionally proved wrong, but are rarely sacked for it - it's part of the process of science after all. But try and find me a scientist who was found to be deliberately falsifying their data, and not immediately cast out of the entire scientific community. It's the one thing that a scientist can do that ensures their career demise.
And you want us to think that the vast majority of climate scientists are not only doing this, but are doing it out of "self preservation"??
Yeah, a citation's definitely gonna be needed for that one.
Agricultural subsidies are around $20 billion every year. Fortune 500 companies totalled $63 billion in subsidies (top 100 here, no solar to be found) of which a single company (Boeing) totalled $13 billion ($8.7B in a single deal), while the automobile industry (including Ford and GM, but also Fiat, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen) got over $12 billion. AT&T and Verizon together collected $26 billion in tax breaks between 2008-2010, while Exxon Mobil got another $4B. Fossil fuel industries have received over $500 billion dollars in tax breaks and direct incentives, 70% of all energy subsidies over the last 60 years, while wind and solar got just 9%.
So tell me again how Solyndra's $0.5B in loan guarantees are so "titanic".
Other than learning from it, yes, historical non-anthropogenic global warming is indeed irrelevant to us today. The past teaches us about the present, but doesn't affect us directly. It's still beyond me why you're so hung up about this.
And thanks for so clearly demonstrating my point about wilful blindness. Not what you wanted to hear? Must be drivel, and just to be sure let's call it political too.
Climate change: A theory about very complex system to model with the most famous proponent being a politician [with vested interests and suspect behaviour]. Of course there will be some doubters.
Thank you for summing up the core of the problem: too many people think celebrities are more believable than science, when it comes to being told what to think.
If Al Gore had "discovered" climate change, and was the only significant person promoting the theory with little convincing evidence, then people would certainly be right to doubt. But when Gore is only one notable figure of many that's echoing what the huge majority of climatologists have been telling us for decades, and when those climatologists have reams of peer-reviewed studies summarising multiple lines of evidence to back up their conclusions, then who gives a flying fuck about Gore?
Sadly, the answer is "the public", or more specifically, that sector of the public that don't want to accept any responsibility and would rather reframe the debate to be about celebrities and their credibility. Same goes with vaccines - much of the focus is on McCarthy instead of the evidence. Plus of course the Bible itself is probably the biggest celebrity ever, in a way.
Solution? Dunno. Stop clicking on every damn story with a celebrity in it, maybe, and perhaps then "news" outlets might not give such weight to their opinions. Won't help people face facts, but it will reduce the noise levels at least.
Richard Alley's decision to disregard previous non-anthropogenic-global-warming
It hasn't been disregarded in the slightest. We've looked at all the known causes of past (non-anthropogenic) warming, evaluated their current effects by means of multiple independent lines of observations, and determined that none of them could be causing the warming that we're seeing today.
That leaves either a natural cause of warming that we've never seen happen before in the entire historical record (and that we can't even conceive of), or human causes. And since the calculated effects of human causes rather neatly fill the large gap between calculated natural causes and observed changes, it's only logical to conclude that humans are indeed the majority responsible party. These observations and calculations have been checked and confirmed in multiple ways by multiple parties. In the continued absence of any significant evidence to the contrary, very few climatologists still harbour any doubts.
Only the under-informed and willfully blind are still insisting that the evidence couldn't possibly be real, preferring instead to think that all the major science academies and nearly all the climatologists are all in some astonishingly huge global conspiracy to defraud the general public somehow. As your comments clearly show, these denialists appear utterly convinced that the "climate conspirators" are willing to risk their reputations, careers and continued employment by apparently spreading lies so obvious even laymen can see through them, just to help assure their continued employment (the overwhelming irony of this apparently escapes them). And simultaneously, these same denialists curiously refuse to consider the far more obvious elephant in the room of massive multinationals with trillions of dollars of future income at stake, not even acknowledging the possibility of the debate being deliberately skewed by such strongly vested interests...
"Willfully blind" does not suffice to describe such people.
There is climate change due to larger natural forces that, so far, we are all helpless against: it's called weather.
This is Slashdot of course, but did you realise the whole point of TFA is that the climate change we're seeing is not ordinary weather? That the chances of what we're seeing being naturally-caused are 1% at best?
I will remain skeptical of the plumber who comes knocking on my door claiming I have leaky pipes
And when hundreds of plumbers from all over the city tell you the same, and show you photos of the leaks? What if they're actually right - are you prepared to risk paying considerably more for a whole new bathroom (and possibly your neighbours' as well)?
And of course, to complete the analogy there'd have to be a huge multinational water-supply industry that has a vested interest in you thinking that there's nothing you can do about the leaks, or your water bill...
Pretending (against all evidence) that climate change is mostly due to "larger natural forces" that we're helpless against, is not going to make those changes go away. We can already see them beginning, it's very clear they will get worse, and we will have to deal with them one way or another.
Only by accepting responsibility, then tackling the effects we are ourselves causing, can we minimise the upcoming costs. Thankfully, independent studies have repeatedly shown this IS possible and effective, particularly if we act sooner rather than later, and in fact is significantly cheaper than allowing the worst of the changes to occur then trying to adapt.
Inventing a tsunami as an excuse for doing nothing when the plumber is telling you your bathroom is flooding because your pipes are leaking, is just foolish. When that flooding will spread to apartments below you as well, inaction verges on criminal.
I agree that China's emissions are a major concern (much less so for India), but that does not absolve the US' own responsibilities as the second-largest emitter (not to mention its past contributions too). When the US and others have cleaned up their own acts, more pressure can be brought to bear on China to follow suit (though at least it is making a start). To wait for others to act first is Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale.
the massive amount of money necessary for it would be available from the sale of [STEP's] byproduct, elemental coal
I think you're jumping more than a few guns there. The process has only just been experimentally demonstrated, the "elemental coal" of which you speak is a coating of solid carbon on an electrode, and even that needs a reaction temperature of over 750C (which implies significant solar concentration). We know nothing about engineering challenges scaling this up outside the laboratory, or what sort of costs or return it might involve. In fact, most of the attention so far seems to be on producing cement with it (still good for reducing emissions).
It sounds like STEP could one day be a useful part of our energy mix, but it's far from being a magic bullet, and it's certainly not going to attract major investment for a while yet.
All these renewable energies appear to be offered in the form of electricity, and cars do not yet run on that except for some very slippery-through-the-air, very expensive cars that most of us can't afford.
You might want to take another look at the electric car industry; there's rather more there than just Tesla Motors, and much more on the way. Every major manufacturer is working on electric vehicles, and some have been working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles too (such as this Silverado). Again, we're not talking about turning off the oil today, but phasing it out as electric cars become more widespread (plug-in hybrids are a perfect intermediate stage).
bring industry back to the USA
I'm sure most Americans would agree with you there, but how to do that is not nearly so clear, and is the subject of much debate. Reducing income taxes usually means reducing services too, which many citizens and companies depend on, so it's not a clear-cut answer. Shifting to consumption taxes tends to hit poorer communities hardest, so that's a problem too. Personally I think full automation would be a good approach, but that's a different discussion. In any case, it's at best tangential - from the perspective of CO2, there's little point moving industry back to the US until the US takes a clear lead in reducing its own per-capita emissions.
It might be considered illogical if you still didn't accept that anthropogenic warming was significant, and that the majority of observed warming was due to natural causes.
But since TFA's whole point was that it's not due to natural causes (as has been demonstrated many times elsewhere too) - that human activities must be the majority cause of the present warming - then in that context his quote makes perfect sense. Study of the past gives us insight into how various natural causes work, but in this case does not change our current responsibility.
You want us to "believe" the unpublished musings of a computer scientist on his personal webpage, rather than the reams of paleoanthropological evidence. That's not our DNA speaking, that's one guy trying to justify his religion by speculating well outside his field.
Sorry, but we're not as practiced at taking these sort of unsupported claims on "faith".
The IEEE would not say, however, whether it had contacted the authors or editors of the suspected SCIgen papers, or whether submissions for the relevant conferences were supposed to be peer reviewed.
So yeah, most of that has got nothing to do with scientific peer review at all, only IEEE's own internal review process (if any).
16 faux papers got published by Springer, which claimed that they did do peer review, which - if true - might support your claims. Though 16 failures out of many thousands of papers reviewed over five years is actually not far off a 99.9% success rate anyway...
Let me get this straight: You're saying that, because it was warmer in the past, which we definitely didn't cause... we cannot possibly prevent warming today - even if we're the ones causing it?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say, but the irony of you calling the GP's article "illogical" is startling.
Nobody is suggesting we turn off all fossil fuels RIGHT NOW (that would be a strawman). What is being suggested is that we phase out fossil fuel dependencies and phase in a mix of the many carbon-neutral energy technologies (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal etc etc) over the next few decades, rather than pretending we don't need to do anything, ever.
That STEP link you quoted elsewhere is interesting, though "pre-industrial carbon levels in 10 years" sounds wildly optimistic without throwing massive amounts of cash at it to develop it at huge scale.
You seem to think that a carbon tax would kill the economy. Carbon price legislation has been proposed in the US at least four times, and has accordingly been studied by the Congressional Budget Office as well as the EPA, EIA, and others (see citations), and concluded the impact would be less than 1% on GDP, compared to business as usual - without even considering the additional economic impact of climate change on the BAU scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
It's got graphs! It must be true!!1!
Oh, I completely agree that human fire suppression policies have contributed by increasing fuel load (I live in Australia; the subject comes up frequently here). This is definitely a significant factor.
That does not mean that climate is not also a factor, or even that climate is not the dominant factor. See my sibling post for links to relevant studies.
Heh, now you accuse me of not providing links to support the claims I didn't make :-)
But if you like. A couple of studies (of many) predicting increases in wildfires due to climate change:
* Gonzalez et al 2010: Global patterns in the vulnerability of ecosystems to vegetation shifts due to climate change
* Moritz et al 2012: Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity
And a study (one of many) showing that climate is the dominant factor in the size of the wildfires we've been seeing:
* Littell et al 2009 Climate and wildfire area burned in western US ecoprovinces:
We demonstrate that wildfire area burned (WFAB) in the American West was controlled by climate during the 20th century (1916-2003)....For 1977-2003, a few climate variables explain 33-87% (mean = 64%) of WFAB, indicating strong linkages between climate and area burned.
By contrast, Mr Watts' "facts" are also nothing more than unsubstantiated declarations and assumptions, just like yours. A few random examples from your link:
* "This [CO2] percentage increase means nothing. Human CO2 emissions didn’t begin to rise significantly until after 1945": Keyword is 'significantly' - he claims the rise is not significant, but provides no justifications for this assumption, other than that the atmospheric percentage is "about as close to nothing as you can get" (it's a really small-looking number). No citations given.
* "...there is no way that this miniscule amount [of atmospheric CO2] can have any significant effect on climate." Another unsubstantiated declaration in his "facts" list. No citations given for this claim.
* "CO2 also lags short-term warming [historical graph] showing that warming causes rise in CO2, not the other way around if CO2 was the cause." - Incorrectly assumes that CO2 must either be a cause or an effect, but could never be both. No citations given for this "fact", either.
* "...global climate marches in lock step with sun spots, length of the sun spot cycle, and intensity of the solar magnetic field... total solar insolation (TSI) correlates very well with climate". Once more, he just claims this as a fact, with (wait for it) no citations given.
* "HadCRUT4 temperature curve showing that 56% of the warming since 1895 occurred prior to 1945"... according to his arbitrarily-drawn red lines. The HadCRUT4 temperature graph may well be accurate, but (of course) he provides no citation for any peer-reviewed source for his claimed "56% of warming" cut-off point (looks to me like the red line that claims to show this is just drawn to the peak of the biggest short-term fluctuation he can find, without regard to averages or trends or anything).
I could easily go on, but I have work to do. If Watts' unbacked assertions are what you consider "facts", then it's no wonder you usually don't bother to link to them.
So says the guy who hasn't read the study and has no idea what the climatologists are actually saying.
Sure. Look at the IPCC AR5 WGII report, it discusses benefits as well as costs.
It's just that the costs and risks appear to greatly outweigh the benefits, or the benefits are long-term enough that the short-term costs of adaption will outweigh them for a very long time.
Love how your claims are "truth" by simple declaration, and others' are of course merely claims, even when they're agreeing with a peer-reviewed study.
Why don't you try and rebut the actual study, if you're so sure it's wrong? Or at least attempt toprovide a modicum of evidence to make your own claims look a little less like yet another soapbox rant.
News to me.
Based on many studies covering a wide range of regions and crops, negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts (high confidence).
Climate-related hazards exacerbate other stressors, often with negative outcomes for livelihoods, especially for people living in poverty (high confidence)... Observed positive effects for poor and marginalized people, which are limited and often indirect, include examples such as diversification of social networks and of agricultural practices.
At present the world-wide burden of human ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors and is not well quantified. However, there has been increased heat-related mortality and decreased cold-related mortality in some regions as a result of warming (medium confidence)
IPCC AR5 WGII Summary for Policy Makers, emphasis mine. So yeah, there are recognised positive effects, they're just outweighed by the many negative effects. Sorry the news wasn't better, but there you go.
It's easy to make actual historical data support your view when you quote it so selectively.
* The very first link, for example, not only hides all the warming before his carefully-chosen 1998 cutoff year, but also fails to mention the continued warming in ocean temperatures (where most of the energy ends up).
* The next link doesn't even have a source for his data.
* We are then told about a single data point (2014) in a single metric (arctic sea ice area) as if it's supposed to be particularly significant
* And finally a single paragraph from a single local newspaper from 1974, apparently intended to represent the alleged global scientific viewpoint of the times, and a quote from a single meteorologist admitting he doesn't know how climatologists can predict climate.
I honestly have no idea why you think this is convincing. It's no wonder he's never produced any peer-reviewed papers; the reviewers would tear his methodology to shreds.
Official NASA site - has video as well as current position.
Grey for me right now, which presumably means the ISS is out of signal. Perhaps better in 15 mins when it passes over Japan..
Planes and most boats will require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future
Or they could use hydrogen, burned or in fuel cells. Solar and wind need country-sized scale to smooth out variations, and storage to make up the difference, but we have many different technologies for that. The rest is just a question efficiency. And if the generating capacity gets cheap enough, even that becomes unimportant.
Not sure about Germany's 2030 plan, but this Stanford study outlines a path to 100% renewable energy in the US by 2050, for less cost than business-as-usual.
Right, so you think these 97% of climate scientists' deliberately lying about global warming "ensures their jobs"? You consider risking reputation and any prospect of future employment to be "self-preservation"?
Scientists are occasionally proved wrong, but are rarely sacked for it - it's part of the process of science after all. But try and find me a scientist who was found to be deliberately falsifying their data, and not immediately cast out of the entire scientific community. It's the one thing that a scientist can do that ensures their career demise.
And you want us to think that the vast majority of climate scientists are not only doing this, but are doing it out of "self preservation"??
Solar is one of most subsidized industries.
Yeah, a citation's definitely gonna be needed for that one.
Agricultural subsidies are around $20 billion every year. Fortune 500 companies totalled $63 billion in subsidies (top 100 here, no solar to be found) of which a single company (Boeing) totalled $13 billion ($8.7B in a single deal), while the automobile industry (including Ford and GM, but also Fiat, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen) got over $12 billion. AT&T and Verizon together collected $26 billion in tax breaks between 2008-2010, while Exxon Mobil got another $4B. Fossil fuel industries have received over $500 billion dollars in tax breaks and direct incentives, 70% of all energy subsidies over the last 60 years, while wind and solar got just 9%.
So tell me again how Solyndra's $0.5B in loan guarantees are so "titanic".
Other than learning from it, yes, historical non-anthropogenic global warming is indeed irrelevant to us today. The past teaches us about the present, but doesn't affect us directly. It's still beyond me why you're so hung up about this.
And thanks for so clearly demonstrating my point about wilful blindness. Not what you wanted to hear? Must be drivel, and just to be sure let's call it political too.
Turns out, there already exists such a thing. ARA will use UniPro, a layered, low-power, scalable bus protocol capable of up to 24Gbps.
Climate change: A theory about very complex system to model with the most famous proponent being a politician [with vested interests and suspect behaviour]. Of course there will be some doubters.
Thank you for summing up the core of the problem: too many people think celebrities are more believable than science, when it comes to being told what to think.
If Al Gore had "discovered" climate change, and was the only significant person promoting the theory with little convincing evidence, then people would certainly be right to doubt. But when Gore is only one notable figure of many that's echoing what the huge majority of climatologists have been telling us for decades, and when those climatologists have reams of peer-reviewed studies summarising multiple lines of evidence to back up their conclusions, then who gives a flying fuck about Gore?
Sadly, the answer is "the public", or more specifically, that sector of the public that don't want to accept any responsibility and would rather reframe the debate to be about celebrities and their credibility. Same goes with vaccines - much of the focus is on McCarthy instead of the evidence. Plus of course the Bible itself is probably the biggest celebrity ever, in a way.
Solution? Dunno. Stop clicking on every damn story with a celebrity in it, maybe, and perhaps then "news" outlets might not give such weight to their opinions. Won't help people face facts, but it will reduce the noise levels at least.
Richard Alley's decision to disregard previous non-anthropogenic-global-warming
It hasn't been disregarded in the slightest. We've looked at all the known causes of past (non-anthropogenic) warming, evaluated their current effects by means of multiple independent lines of observations, and determined that none of them could be causing the warming that we're seeing today.
That leaves either a natural cause of warming that we've never seen happen before in the entire historical record (and that we can't even conceive of), or human causes. And since the calculated effects of human causes rather neatly fill the large gap between calculated natural causes and observed changes, it's only logical to conclude that humans are indeed the majority responsible party. These observations and calculations have been checked and confirmed in multiple ways by multiple parties. In the continued absence of any significant evidence to the contrary, very few climatologists still harbour any doubts.
Only the under-informed and willfully blind are still insisting that the evidence couldn't possibly be real, preferring instead to think that all the major science academies and nearly all the climatologists are all in some astonishingly huge global conspiracy to defraud the general public somehow. As your comments clearly show, these denialists appear utterly convinced that the "climate conspirators" are willing to risk their reputations, careers and continued employment by apparently spreading lies so obvious even laymen can see through them, just to help assure their continued employment (the overwhelming irony of this apparently escapes them). And simultaneously, these same denialists curiously refuse to consider the far more obvious elephant in the room of massive multinationals with trillions of dollars of future income at stake, not even acknowledging the possibility of the debate being deliberately skewed by such strongly vested interests...
"Willfully blind" does not suffice to describe such people.
There is climate change due to larger natural forces that, so far, we are all helpless against: it's called weather.
This is Slashdot of course, but did you realise the whole point of TFA is that the climate change we're seeing is not ordinary weather? That the chances of what we're seeing being naturally-caused are 1% at best?
I will remain skeptical of the plumber who comes knocking on my door claiming I have leaky pipes
And when hundreds of plumbers from all over the city tell you the same, and show you photos of the leaks? What if they're actually right - are you prepared to risk paying considerably more for a whole new bathroom (and possibly your neighbours' as well)?
And of course, to complete the analogy there'd have to be a huge multinational water-supply industry that has a vested interest in you thinking that there's nothing you can do about the leaks, or your water bill...
Pretending (against all evidence) that climate change is mostly due to "larger natural forces" that we're helpless against, is not going to make those changes go away. We can already see them beginning, it's very clear they will get worse, and we will have to deal with them one way or another.
Only by accepting responsibility, then tackling the effects we are ourselves causing, can we minimise the upcoming costs. Thankfully, independent studies have repeatedly shown this IS possible and effective, particularly if we act sooner rather than later, and in fact is significantly cheaper than allowing the worst of the changes to occur then trying to adapt.
Inventing a tsunami as an excuse for doing nothing when the plumber is telling you your bathroom is flooding because your pipes are leaking, is just foolish. When that flooding will spread to apartments below you as well, inaction verges on criminal.
I agree that China's emissions are a major concern (much less so for India), but that does not absolve the US' own responsibilities as the second-largest emitter (not to mention its past contributions too). When the US and others have cleaned up their own acts, more pressure can be brought to bear on China to follow suit (though at least it is making a start). To wait for others to act first is Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale.
the massive amount of money necessary for it would be available from the sale of [STEP's] byproduct, elemental coal
I think you're jumping more than a few guns there. The process has only just been experimentally demonstrated, the "elemental coal" of which you speak is a coating of solid carbon on an electrode, and even that needs a reaction temperature of over 750C (which implies significant solar concentration). We know nothing about engineering challenges scaling this up outside the laboratory, or what sort of costs or return it might involve. In fact, most of the attention so far seems to be on producing cement with it (still good for reducing emissions).
It sounds like STEP could one day be a useful part of our energy mix, but it's far from being a magic bullet, and it's certainly not going to attract major investment for a while yet.
All these renewable energies appear to be offered in the form of electricity, and cars do not yet run on that except for some very slippery-through-the-air, very expensive cars that most of us can't afford.
You might want to take another look at the electric car industry; there's rather more there than just Tesla Motors, and much more on the way. Every major manufacturer is working on electric vehicles, and some have been working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles too (such as this Silverado). Again, we're not talking about turning off the oil today, but phasing it out as electric cars become more widespread (plug-in hybrids are a perfect intermediate stage).
bring industry back to the USA
I'm sure most Americans would agree with you there, but how to do that is not nearly so clear, and is the subject of much debate. Reducing income taxes usually means reducing services too, which many citizens and companies depend on, so it's not a clear-cut answer. Shifting to consumption taxes tends to hit poorer communities hardest, so that's a problem too. Personally I think full automation would be a good approach, but that's a different discussion. In any case, it's at best tangential - from the perspective of CO2, there's little point moving industry back to the US until the US takes a clear lead in reducing its own per-capita emissions.
It might be considered illogical if you still didn't accept that anthropogenic warming was significant, and that the majority of observed warming was due to natural causes.
But since TFA's whole point was that it's not due to natural causes (as has been demonstrated many times elsewhere too) - that human activities must be the majority cause of the present warming - then in that context his quote makes perfect sense. Study of the past gives us insight into how various natural causes work, but in this case does not change our current responsibility.
You want us to "believe" the unpublished musings of a computer scientist on his personal webpage, rather than the reams of paleoanthropological evidence. That's not our DNA speaking, that's one guy trying to justify his religion by speculating well outside his field.
Sorry, but we're not as practiced at taking these sort of unsupported claims on "faith".
The IEEE would not say, however, whether it had contacted the authors or editors of the suspected SCIgen papers, or whether submissions for the relevant conferences were supposed to be peer reviewed.
So yeah, most of that has got nothing to do with scientific peer review at all, only IEEE's own internal review process (if any).
16 faux papers got published by Springer, which claimed that they did do peer review, which - if true - might support your claims. Though 16 failures out of many thousands of papers reviewed over five years is actually not far off a 99.9% success rate anyway...
Let me get this straight: You're saying that, because it was warmer in the past, which we definitely didn't cause... we cannot possibly prevent warming today - even if we're the ones causing it?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say, but the irony of you calling the GP's article "illogical" is startling.
Nobody is suggesting we turn off all fossil fuels RIGHT NOW (that would be a strawman). What is being suggested is that we phase out fossil fuel dependencies and phase in a mix of the many carbon-neutral energy technologies (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal etc etc) over the next few decades, rather than pretending we don't need to do anything, ever.
There have been numerous major studies about this. For example, the Stern Review makes it clear that the costs of inaction easily outweigh the costs of transitioning our energy supply, and more recently this Harvard Univesity study concludes that not only can the US switch to 100% renewable energy by 2050, it can do so while spending less than business-as-usual.
That STEP link you quoted elsewhere is interesting, though "pre-industrial carbon levels in 10 years" sounds wildly optimistic without throwing massive amounts of cash at it to develop it at huge scale.
You seem to think that a carbon tax would kill the economy. Carbon price legislation has been proposed in the US at least four times, and has accordingly been studied by the Congressional Budget Office as well as the EPA, EIA, and others (see citations), and concluded the impact would be less than 1% on GDP, compared to business as usual - without even considering the additional economic impact of climate change on the BAU scenario.