I'm having trouble inferring a policy proposal from this argument. Should we stop fishing now, to make absolutely sure that the population doesn't hit this point? Or are you saying we're already past the point of no return, and should treat the oceans like one giant going out of business sale?
There are many different collections of fish in the world, controlled by various (or no) governments, and subject to different amounts of overfishing. Some are in desperate states, some are not. Some may have reached the point you describe, but most have not.
One approach your post does seem to suggest, though, is that some populations might be saved by both stopping fishing and actively weeding out predators. I've never been a big fan of using one drastic ecological intervention to right another, but it might be a reasonable approach in some situations.
Fish aren't exactly brilliant tacticians when it comes to avoiding humans.
But let's admit that the argument you're putting forth is reasonable: It's far easier to catch fish when they're abundant. Your implied conclusion--that the incentives to overfish will be gone before the fish themselves are--is not. It is possible that the demand will always be enough to ensure that the demand for the fish will outstrip their capacity to breed and replenish themselves (especially since each fish caught reduces that ability).
There is a certain population tipping point, below which the population can only breed at less than the replenishment rate. How does simple supply and demand guarantee that this point won't be hit?
Nah, I see your point. While higher price will invariably reduce demand, the demand may always be enough to encourage overfishing of tuna (at least until the species is too sparse to maintain itself even under ideal conditions).
Example: Free market economics alone hasn't been enough to protect the African Elephant. If you took away those burdensome, meddling, bureaucratic government controls that protect the remaining ones, there is still enough demand for new, genuine ivory to doom the species.
Dude 1: If we keep doing what we're doing, we could run out.
Dude 2: But you're stupid! People can change their behavior!
Dude 1: Indeed. I think the solution might come in the form of an international body to recommend fishing quotas for major-
Dude 2: Your 2048 claim is bollocks! It assumes that people don't change their behavior! Your claim is unscientific!
Dude 1: Indeed. The 2048 claim assumes that the current overharvesting will continue, and demonstrates the importance of immedi-
Dude 2: Look at me! I'm Dude 1, and I don't know how to do science! I eat crayons!
Hmm... I'm not sure why that was fun to write. But if there was a point to be made back there, it's that I don't see anybody in your article disagreeing with the findings of the study. Admittedly, the '2048' result seems politically motivated. For that reason alone, it's not good science*. But I think the authors of the study would be surprised to hear that they think fisheries cannot remain productive if they're well managed.
* They're not saying much that the scientific community didn't already know, and I would argue that the claim was very helpful in injecting the dire state of our fisheries into the public consciousness.
You understand that you're trying to justify the short-term, wasteful destruction of the resources that drive our economy (a stupid and supremely shortsighted act) by appealing to a "long-term" view that spans millions of years.
Nor do I see how wiping ourselves out and making room for the chipmunks to take over will benefit anyone except the descendants of chipmunks.
Finally, I think too many people equate "evolution" with "progress." There is no reason to believe that the mammals which took over the dinosaur niche had anything to recommend themselves over the dinosaurs besides, "We're here now, and you're not." If we value the complexity and variety of organisms, then what we have today is not demonstrably better than the biodiversity that was destroyed by the comet. If we value intelligence, there is no reason to believe that some species of dinosaurs wouldn't have achieved it. If we value ourselves, then destabilizing our own ecosystem is a poor way of showing it.
His argument is that destruction of species is a good thing, because it spurs evolution. It isn't.
Are you claiming that, if the world's most productive fisheries collapse, only Japan will really care? You might want to push the following onto that stack: Hawaii, Canada, Australia (whose fisheries have already collapsed), and, well, just about every country with a coastline (or any country that trades with a country with a coastline).
Unfortunately, we do get a lot of food from the oceans right now. Since we only have to catch the fish instead of raising them, it's like getting all that food free. Once that gravy train runs out, we'll have to significantly increase our agricultural output to make up the shortfall. Please read that as, "Our economy will have to work harder to obtain the same amount of food."
Fisheries are a renewable resource, if you harvest from them at a sustainable rate. Think of it as having a bank account with a million dollars in it. If you live solely on the interest, it can be a huge boon, providing you many more dollars over the years than are actually in the account. But if you start spending it irresponsibly on hookers, coke, and Alienware systems, you wake up one day and find that the account is at $1072.38. Instead of providing you ten thousand dollars a year, it can now only provide you ten. Of course, you can leave it alone and it will "recover", but that process won't be complete until long after you're dead.
It galls me when people like yourself talk about how we don't need to worry about destroying resource X, because when it runs out we'll move to resource Y. Especially when that resource could be eternally productive, if people would just agree to live off the interest, instead of sucking it dry. We'll all be worse off when the fish are gone.
I sense and share your frustration. I think too many people have too little respect for the conclusions of science, especially when those conclusions would cause them to question their overconsuming lifestyle, religious beliefs, or the morality of their moneymaking ventures. Worse, many of these people have managed to get themselves elected to the Senate. Environmental science touches all three, so people who would never think to question the results of something abstract (like, say, the idea that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy) immediately go into defensive mode when presented with something like the collapse of fisheries or global warming.
But that's the way democracy crumbles. It takes years for ideas like this to really enter the public consciousness and start affecting behavior. So when the discussion is "over" in the scientific community, the battle over public policy is just beginning. So I would say that, yes, the evidence needs to be presented afresh to skeptical audiences, over and over again. Sneering about idiots rejecting the conclusions of science might energize the base (read: me), but actually enable people with real doubts to dismiss the entire environmental movement as a bunch of crackpots.
I understand that. But that doesn't mean that publicly-financed elections don't help.
With the current system, not only can corporations get influence with the candidates, they can also help the candidates get influence with the voters. Once that stops, and the playing field becomes more flat, investing in incumbents is no longer as useful to corporations. First reason, it's far less likely that the incumbent will be there in the future, because they can't build up a huge, scary warchest that will deter challengers from trying to mount serious campaigns. Second reason, the incumbent has to be more responsive to the people, since he can't expect to win by simple oversaturation of the media. Finally, since the incumbents no longer rely on corporate money (whether given directly or funneled through party channels) to keep them in power, they can afford to vote their conscience.
Also, it should be noted that successful incumbents spend a great deal of their time soliciting campaign contributions. That's time that could better be spent studying actual issues.
I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, or that it would put an end to corporate influence-peddling. I'm also not saying that the things you describe don't need to be cleaned up in their own right. But it's a useful start.
The handling of political gifts isn't necessarily linked to campaign financing. Pete Ashdown could take all sorts of private jets to all sorts of tropical islands (and I strongly encourage him to do so. He looks like he could use some sun) but that wouldn't help him pay for TV time or lawn signs.
I'm sorry to hear that. But given that it is a one-issue election, anyone who doesn't desperately believe that Iraq is just a few short years from vibrant democracy should vote for Ashdown over Hatch. Ashdown's position on the Iraq war is, "send the Iraqis to the polls again, and this time ask them if they want us to stay." Hatch's has been, "Stay the course! The president says we must stay the course! You anti-war nutcakes are going to get us all killed by terrorists!" I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote.
There are states where publicly financed elections exist. They don't have the disastrous moochery you describe. I believe it's because the candidates have to demonstrate a certain level of public support for their candidacy before they're eligible for public finances.
A number of states and cities have started to use public financing of campaigns. The main method, generally called Clean Money, Clean Elections, gives each candidate who chooses to participate a certain, set amount of money. In order to qualify for this money, the candidates must show a broad base of support by collecting a specified number of signatures and small (usually $5) contributions. The candidates are NOT allowed to accept outside donations or to use their own personal money if they receive this public funding. This procedure has been in place in races for all statewide and legislative offices in Arizona and Maine since 2000, where a majority of officials were elected without spending any private money on their campaigns. Connecticut joined them by passing a Clean Elections law in 2005, along with the cities of Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The point is, you have to be a reasonably serious candidate to get the funds. 700 seems a bit excessive.
Yeah, the Founding Fathers would really get behind the idea of "one dollar, one vote."
So long as anyone is able to use any resources at their disposal to petition the government and the electorate, we're going to live in a society where government is inundated with the messages that the rich want them to hear. So long as anyone is able to self-finance a campaign, we're going to elect a boatload of multi-millionaires, who will be very receptive to those messages.
Yes, sapping the money out of politics is going to require taking some freedoms away from some people, but it does so in the service of greater freedom for a greater number of people.
I've looked at his "facts" and it's obvious that he's trying to make things less clear to the average reader. The fact that a certain level of greenhouse gases are beneficial has jack squat to do with the (actually relevant) fact that the gases are increasing, and that those increases will have negative effects. Saying that greenhouse gases don't "trap" heat, but simply delay its return to outer space? Doublespeak of the worst sort, because the ultimate effect of that "delay" is to raise atmospheric temperatures.
Your source--the one you claimed was going to set the record straight on climate change--is a pack of lies. No need to be all whiny just because I can look at your beloved emperor and see that he has a hairy ass.
Look, Pete is a tech guy. When he heard about Hatch's brilliant idea of letting the RIAA "blow up computers" to protect their profits, it seems to have been something of a transformative moment for him. It was a giant slap-across-the-face-with-a-mackarel, showing him just how corrupt and out of touch our Senator-for-Life is.
But Ashdown's goal isn't to enable music piracy. My impression is that he wants to replace Hatch with someone who is far more informed about technology issues, far less entrenched, and able to use technology to connect with voters and wake America up to the possibilities of true representative democracy. He has plenty of ideas on a wide variety of issues; just check out his wiki. It strikes me as one of the most comprehensive political platforms I've ever seen from a politician). I disagree with him on some of them, but I'm absolutely psyched about his desire for transparency in government and draining the money out of the political process. His promise to publish his daily schedule online is a breath of fresh air.
Pete has my vote in November, and the vote of anyone else I can talk into voting for him.
Your complaint seems years out of date to me. Can you describe the process your friends were using to install software?
I can't remember the last time I actually had to compile an application for Ubuntu myself. Most everything worth using (and a lot of stuff that isn't) is in the repositories. While I generally use the command line to install my programs, the 'Add/Remove Programs' dialog is easy to find and easy to manage. I would say that, for Ubuntu, it requires less expertise to install a given application than it does for Windows. Knowing what to install requires more knowledge, but I think that's true for Windows as well.
One suggestion I'd give the Ubuntu folks is to provide a crutch for non-repository packages. Example, go to a website, download the.deb file to your desktop, drag and drop the.deb to some folder, and it automatically installs the package and keeps it in some sort of local repository.
If you can't see the difference between trying to minimize the amount you pay for bulk coffee, and trying to minimize the amount you pay for the hard work of another human being, you're really not worth the bother. It should be obvious to anyone with the tiniest shred of a soul.
Take a wild guess, read my mind, and if you can both guess my reasoning and explain your contrary reasoning in a way that doesn't make you look like the Great American Sadist, we'll talk again.
Junkscience.com is written by a guy who works for the Cato Institute and the CEI, rightwing thinktanks that have never met an environmental regulation that they've liked. The author has never published anything in a peer-reviewed journal.
The website also spends most of its time tackling non-issues. SHOCKING REVELATION!!! WITHOUT THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT, WE'D ALL FREEZE TO DEATH! SHOCKING REVELATION! CLIMATE CHANGE HAPPENS WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN! Other times, he's off muddying the waters with his explanations. Like when he talks about how heat isn't really "trapped," but simply delayed in its journey back into space. Or when he goes after the blanket analogy because greenhouse gases don't deter heat transfer by convection.
You people who claim that "global warming might be good" ignore one very important fact: change itself is bad for the economy.
Let's say you live in a highly mountainous region with a great deal of snowfall. You figure you can make money by building a ski resort. Ten years later, before you've fully recouped your investment, your area warms up, the snowpack disappears, and you're left trying to figure out how to attract people to your resort now that the primary draw is gone.
Or let's say you have a large amount of land in Germany. You've heard two predictions: that global warming will turn Germany into a garden paradise, or it will turn the country into a desert. If it becomes a garden paradise, you would do well to plant citrus trees now to reap the new bounty. If its fate is to become a wasteland, your best bet is to sell the land for whatever you can get for it. What do you do?
Or say that in thirty years, Siberia becomes a breadbasket and the U.S. Midwest becomes a desert. Suddenly, we find ourselves with a lot of useless tractors, silos, and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, in order to take advantage of this bounty, Russia has to build the infrastructure and learn all the new skills that our farmers already knew. There's no chance of this happening, because after the permafrost melts it will take decades for the land to become productive farmland, but it still illustrates my point.
Every time you have to retool the economy to take advantage of these new "opportunities", you have to pay a certain cost. It is much easier to run any economic endeavor if you know that the climate is stable over the long haul. You folks talk about growing oranges in Alaska. But what if Alaskans don't know how to grow oranges, and the people in Florida don't want to move?
You don't mean "better," you mean "willing to work for less." Or, to put it more precisely, "unable to demand more."
The fault lies with corporations for their attitude of "labor is a commodity, and our job is to pay as little for it as possible," and for the government for being unwilling to demand environmental and worker safety standards from our trade partners.
I'm sorry if you find it so absurd and offensive that, after seeing a dictator plunge a democratic country into totalitarianism, purge ten million people, and launch a war of conquest, people might be a little concerned about it happening again.
While I see all sorts of disturbing, totalitarian crap from this administration, I don't think it will be the next Third Reich. If nothing else, they haven't shown the competence to pull off such a feat. But Bush, like Hitler, has demonstrated that he finds any check on his power to be repugnant (see: signing statements, "unitary executive," secret prisons, questioning the patriotism of his detractors). Like Hitler, he feels a need for broad powers to fight an evil and tenacious enemy. That's why he wants everyone to think of him as a wartime president, even when war has not been declared, and even when the nature of the enemy is such that we cannot ever claim that the war has been won.
Those who say comparisons to Hitler are always wrong, or at least always in poor taste, often say that Hitler's crimes against humanity were so unprecedented in scale and intent that such comparisons can only poison reasoned debate. The problem with that is, by that criteria nothing Hitler did during his rise to power warranted a comparison with Hitler either. We want to pretend that such people as Hitler are abberations, entirely cut off from the human condition. Nonetheless, he happens. "Never again" was supposed to be a call to arms, not a statement of certainty or complacency.
Human nature being what it is, another Hitler is destined to rise. The difference is, the next one will have nukes. But even if this is not that time or place, our country has been edging towards totalitarianism for a while now. If dropping the H-word a few times could do anything to stem the tide, to remind us of the fragility of democracy, then I say go to it, and be happy in your work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having trouble inferring a policy proposal from this argument. Should we stop fishing now, to make absolutely sure that the population doesn't hit this point? Or are you saying we're already past the point of no return, and should treat the oceans like one giant going out of business sale?
There are many different collections of fish in the world, controlled by various (or no) governments, and subject to different amounts of overfishing. Some are in desperate states, some are not. Some may have reached the point you describe, but most have not.
One approach your post does seem to suggest, though, is that some populations might be saved by both stopping fishing and actively weeding out predators. I've never been a big fan of using one drastic ecological intervention to right another, but it might be a reasonable approach in some situations.
Fish aren't exactly brilliant tacticians when it comes to avoiding humans.
But let's admit that the argument you're putting forth is reasonable: It's far easier to catch fish when they're abundant. Your implied conclusion--that the incentives to overfish will be gone before the fish themselves are--is not. It is possible that the demand will always be enough to ensure that the demand for the fish will outstrip their capacity to breed and replenish themselves (especially since each fish caught reduces that ability).
There is a certain population tipping point, below which the population can only breed at less than the replenishment rate. How does simple supply and demand guarantee that this point won't be hit?
You mean the sharks would start eating... us? :)
Nah, I see your point. While higher price will invariably reduce demand, the demand may always be enough to encourage overfishing of tuna (at least until the species is too sparse to maintain itself even under ideal conditions).
Example: Free market economics alone hasn't been enough to protect the African Elephant. If you took away those burdensome, meddling, bureaucratic government controls that protect the remaining ones, there is still enough demand for new, genuine ivory to doom the species.
Dude 1: If we keep doing what we're doing, we could run out.
Dude 2: But you're stupid! People can change their behavior!
Dude 1: Indeed. I think the solution might come in the form of an international body to recommend fishing quotas for major-
Dude 2: Your 2048 claim is bollocks! It assumes that people don't change their behavior! Your claim is unscientific!
Dude 1: Indeed. The 2048 claim assumes that the current overharvesting will continue, and demonstrates the importance of immedi-
Dude 2: Look at me! I'm Dude 1, and I don't know how to do science! I eat crayons!
Hmm... I'm not sure why that was fun to write. But if there was a point to be made back there, it's that I don't see anybody in your article disagreeing with the findings of the study. Admittedly, the '2048' result seems politically motivated. For that reason alone, it's not good science*. But I think the authors of the study would be surprised to hear that they think fisheries cannot remain productive if they're well managed.
* They're not saying much that the scientific community didn't already know, and I would argue that the claim was very helpful in injecting the dire state of our fisheries into the public consciousness.
You understand that you're trying to justify the short-term, wasteful destruction of the resources that drive our economy (a stupid and supremely shortsighted act) by appealing to a "long-term" view that spans millions of years.
Nor do I see how wiping ourselves out and making room for the chipmunks to take over will benefit anyone except the descendants of chipmunks.
Finally, I think too many people equate "evolution" with "progress." There is no reason to believe that the mammals which took over the dinosaur niche had anything to recommend themselves over the dinosaurs besides, "We're here now, and you're not." If we value the complexity and variety of organisms, then what we have today is not demonstrably better than the biodiversity that was destroyed by the comet. If we value intelligence, there is no reason to believe that some species of dinosaurs wouldn't have achieved it. If we value ourselves, then destabilizing our own ecosystem is a poor way of showing it.
His argument is that destruction of species is a good thing, because it spurs evolution. It isn't.
Are you claiming that, if the world's most productive fisheries collapse, only Japan will really care? You might want to push the following onto that stack: Hawaii, Canada, Australia (whose fisheries have already collapsed), and, well, just about every country with a coastline (or any country that trades with a country with a coastline).
Unfortunately, we do get a lot of food from the oceans right now. Since we only have to catch the fish instead of raising them, it's like getting all that food free. Once that gravy train runs out, we'll have to significantly increase our agricultural output to make up the shortfall. Please read that as, "Our economy will have to work harder to obtain the same amount of food."
Fisheries are a renewable resource, if you harvest from them at a sustainable rate. Think of it as having a bank account with a million dollars in it. If you live solely on the interest, it can be a huge boon, providing you many more dollars over the years than are actually in the account. But if you start spending it irresponsibly on hookers, coke, and Alienware systems, you wake up one day and find that the account is at $1072.38. Instead of providing you ten thousand dollars a year, it can now only provide you ten. Of course, you can leave it alone and it will "recover", but that process won't be complete until long after you're dead.
It galls me when people like yourself talk about how we don't need to worry about destroying resource X, because when it runs out we'll move to resource Y. Especially when that resource could be eternally productive, if people would just agree to live off the interest, instead of sucking it dry. We'll all be worse off when the fish are gone.
I sense and share your frustration. I think too many people have too little respect for the conclusions of science, especially when those conclusions would cause them to question their overconsuming lifestyle, religious beliefs, or the morality of their moneymaking ventures. Worse, many of these people have managed to get themselves elected to the Senate. Environmental science touches all three, so people who would never think to question the results of something abstract (like, say, the idea that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy) immediately go into defensive mode when presented with something like the collapse of fisheries or global warming.
But that's the way democracy crumbles. It takes years for ideas like this to really enter the public consciousness and start affecting behavior. So when the discussion is "over" in the scientific community, the battle over public policy is just beginning. So I would say that, yes, the evidence needs to be presented afresh to skeptical audiences, over and over again. Sneering about idiots rejecting the conclusions of science might energize the base (read: me), but actually enable people with real doubts to dismiss the entire environmental movement as a bunch of crackpots.
I understand that. But that doesn't mean that publicly-financed elections don't help.
With the current system, not only can corporations get influence with the candidates, they can also help the candidates get influence with the voters. Once that stops, and the playing field becomes more flat, investing in incumbents is no longer as useful to corporations. First reason, it's far less likely that the incumbent will be there in the future, because they can't build up a huge, scary warchest that will deter challengers from trying to mount serious campaigns. Second reason, the incumbent has to be more responsive to the people, since he can't expect to win by simple oversaturation of the media. Finally, since the incumbents no longer rely on corporate money (whether given directly or funneled through party channels) to keep them in power, they can afford to vote their conscience.
Also, it should be noted that successful incumbents spend a great deal of their time soliciting campaign contributions. That's time that could better be spent studying actual issues.
I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, or that it would put an end to corporate influence-peddling. I'm also not saying that the things you describe don't need to be cleaned up in their own right. But it's a useful start.
The handling of political gifts isn't necessarily linked to campaign financing. Pete Ashdown could take all sorts of private jets to all sorts of tropical islands (and I strongly encourage him to do so. He looks like he could use some sun) but that wouldn't help him pay for TV time or lawn signs.
I'm sorry to hear that. But given that it is a one-issue election, anyone who doesn't desperately believe that Iraq is just a few short years from vibrant democracy should vote for Ashdown over Hatch. Ashdown's position on the Iraq war is, "send the Iraqis to the polls again, and this time ask them if they want us to stay." Hatch's has been, "Stay the course! The president says we must stay the course! You anti-war nutcakes are going to get us all killed by terrorists!" I'm pretty sure that's a direct quote.
Ah, here we go:
The point is, you have to be a reasonably serious candidate to get the funds. 700 seems a bit excessive.
Yeah, the Founding Fathers would really get behind the idea of "one dollar, one vote."
So long as anyone is able to use any resources at their disposal to petition the government and the electorate, we're going to live in a society where government is inundated with the messages that the rich want them to hear. So long as anyone is able to self-finance a campaign, we're going to elect a boatload of multi-millionaires, who will be very receptive to those messages.
Yes, sapping the money out of politics is going to require taking some freedoms away from some people, but it does so in the service of greater freedom for a greater number of people.
I've looked at his "facts" and it's obvious that he's trying to make things less clear to the average reader. The fact that a certain level of greenhouse gases are beneficial has jack squat to do with the (actually relevant) fact that the gases are increasing, and that those increases will have negative effects. Saying that greenhouse gases don't "trap" heat, but simply delay its return to outer space? Doublespeak of the worst sort, because the ultimate effect of that "delay" is to raise atmospheric temperatures.
Your source--the one you claimed was going to set the record straight on climate change--is a pack of lies. No need to be all whiny just because I can look at your beloved emperor and see that he has a hairy ass.
I saw it, and I realized just how well he understands the Slashdot demographic. I like it!
Look, Pete is a tech guy. When he heard about Hatch's brilliant idea of letting the RIAA "blow up computers" to protect their profits, it seems to have been something of a transformative moment for him. It was a giant slap-across-the-face-with-a-mackarel, showing him just how corrupt and out of touch our Senator-for-Life is.
But Ashdown's goal isn't to enable music piracy. My impression is that he wants to replace Hatch with someone who is far more informed about technology issues, far less entrenched, and able to use technology to connect with voters and wake America up to the possibilities of true representative democracy. He has plenty of ideas on a wide variety of issues; just check out his wiki. It strikes me as one of the most comprehensive political platforms I've ever seen from a politician). I disagree with him on some of them, but I'm absolutely psyched about his desire for transparency in government and draining the money out of the political process. His promise to publish his daily schedule online is a breath of fresh air.
Pete has my vote in November, and the vote of anyone else I can talk into voting for him.
[snip whine about how de facto standards aren't actually standards]
How often do you get a document that has even cosmetic issues when opened in OpenOffice?
Your complaint seems years out of date to me. Can you describe the process your friends were using to install software?
.deb file to your desktop, drag and drop the .deb to some folder, and it automatically installs the package and keeps it in some sort of local repository.
I can't remember the last time I actually had to compile an application for Ubuntu myself. Most everything worth using (and a lot of stuff that isn't) is in the repositories. While I generally use the command line to install my programs, the 'Add/Remove Programs' dialog is easy to find and easy to manage. I would say that, for Ubuntu, it requires less expertise to install a given application than it does for Windows. Knowing what to install requires more knowledge, but I think that's true for Windows as well.
One suggestion I'd give the Ubuntu folks is to provide a crutch for non-repository packages. Example, go to a website, download the
"Reverend, I... I think I'm coveting my own wife!"
Are you really this foolish?
If you can't see the difference between trying to minimize the amount you pay for bulk coffee, and trying to minimize the amount you pay for the hard work of another human being, you're really not worth the bother. It should be obvious to anyone with the tiniest shred of a soul.
Take a wild guess, read my mind, and if you can both guess my reasoning and explain your contrary reasoning in a way that doesn't make you look like the Great American Sadist, we'll talk again.
Junkscience.com is written by a guy who works for the Cato Institute and the CEI, rightwing thinktanks that have never met an environmental regulation that they've liked. The author has never published anything in a peer-reviewed journal.
The website also spends most of its time tackling non-issues. SHOCKING REVELATION!!! WITHOUT THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT, WE'D ALL FREEZE TO DEATH! SHOCKING REVELATION! CLIMATE CHANGE HAPPENS WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN! Other times, he's off muddying the waters with his explanations. Like when he talks about how heat isn't really "trapped," but simply delayed in its journey back into space. Or when he goes after the blanket analogy because greenhouse gases don't deter heat transfer by convection.
The site is a bogus shill.
You people who claim that "global warming might be good" ignore one very important fact: change itself is bad for the economy.
Let's say you live in a highly mountainous region with a great deal of snowfall. You figure you can make money by building a ski resort. Ten years later, before you've fully recouped your investment, your area warms up, the snowpack disappears, and you're left trying to figure out how to attract people to your resort now that the primary draw is gone.
Or let's say you have a large amount of land in Germany. You've heard two predictions: that global warming will turn Germany into a garden paradise, or it will turn the country into a desert. If it becomes a garden paradise, you would do well to plant citrus trees now to reap the new bounty. If its fate is to become a wasteland, your best bet is to sell the land for whatever you can get for it. What do you do?
Or say that in thirty years, Siberia becomes a breadbasket and the U.S. Midwest becomes a desert. Suddenly, we find ourselves with a lot of useless tractors, silos, and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, in order to take advantage of this bounty, Russia has to build the infrastructure and learn all the new skills that our farmers already knew. There's no chance of this happening, because after the permafrost melts it will take decades for the land to become productive farmland, but it still illustrates my point.
Every time you have to retool the economy to take advantage of these new "opportunities", you have to pay a certain cost. It is much easier to run any economic endeavor if you know that the climate is stable over the long haul. You folks talk about growing oranges in Alaska. But what if Alaskans don't know how to grow oranges, and the people in Florida don't want to move?
Question the first: Can you name an industrialized country where one is not required to have a medical degree to practice medicine?
Question the second: If not, then how can our especially poor showing among industrialized countries be blamed on a practitioner's monopoly?
You don't mean "better," you mean "willing to work for less." Or, to put it more precisely, "unable to demand more."
The fault lies with corporations for their attitude of "labor is a commodity, and our job is to pay as little for it as possible," and for the government for being unwilling to demand environmental and worker safety standards from our trade partners.
I'm sorry if you find it so absurd and offensive that, after seeing a dictator plunge a democratic country into totalitarianism, purge ten million people, and launch a war of conquest, people might be a little concerned about it happening again.
While I see all sorts of disturbing, totalitarian crap from this administration, I don't think it will be the next Third Reich. If nothing else, they haven't shown the competence to pull off such a feat. But Bush, like Hitler, has demonstrated that he finds any check on his power to be repugnant (see: signing statements, "unitary executive," secret prisons, questioning the patriotism of his detractors). Like Hitler, he feels a need for broad powers to fight an evil and tenacious enemy. That's why he wants everyone to think of him as a wartime president, even when war has not been declared, and even when the nature of the enemy is such that we cannot ever claim that the war has been won.
Those who say comparisons to Hitler are always wrong, or at least always in poor taste, often say that Hitler's crimes against humanity were so unprecedented in scale and intent that such comparisons can only poison reasoned debate. The problem with that is, by that criteria nothing Hitler did during his rise to power warranted a comparison with Hitler either. We want to pretend that such people as Hitler are abberations, entirely cut off from the human condition. Nonetheless, he happens. "Never again" was supposed to be a call to arms, not a statement of certainty or complacency.
Human nature being what it is, another Hitler is destined to rise. The difference is, the next one will have nukes. But even if this is not that time or place, our country has been edging towards totalitarianism for a while now. If dropping the H-word a few times could do anything to stem the tide, to remind us of the fragility of democracy, then I say go to it, and be happy in your work.