our civilization's advancement has been tied to our declining levels of agression throughout history, especially in the last 200 years
By what measure? Seems to me that the 20th century was the bloodiest in all of recorded history, and in the 21st we seem determined to replay the same script.
Otherwise, should we demand that all news-media report opinions they don't agree with? Should Christian news-papers be forced to publish pornographic material? Should Fox News be forced to report in a fair and balanced way?
No. But such a defense of private property rights is unexpected from somebody who self-identifies the way you do.
Few if any energy production technologies fully pay for their pollution at the moment
Yeah, yeah. So what? Lots of things have external economic costs that aren't properly accounted for. Why are we singling out energy, which is uniquely important to our economic well-being, for this? Especially in light of the politicized, manipulated "research" that global warming alarmism is based on?
And even ignoring that, what makes you think that this will "level the playing field"? Who is going to get paid to "offset" these costs? The government, at our expense - who, by the way, is the world's largest polluter in the first place.
there are very few activities that directly generate CO2
"Directly" has nothing to do with it; everything uses energy in its production, and the vast majority of energy produces CO2 - including humans attached to rickshaws. I'd be interested in hearing of a single counterexample to this - what's a product whose production did not involve comparatively large amounts of energy?
Though you are correct about nuclear energy being an exception - nuclear is the only "clean" energy that makes sense (or would, were it not so hamstrung by over-regulation). If energy gets more expensive, fewer products will be produced and more (human) effort will go into the production of each. "Renewable" energy like solar, wind, etc are extremely expensive compared to traditional sources of energy - we're not talking a *little* bit more expensive, we're talking *game-changingly* more expensive. Government subsidy doesn't change this fact, but rather is the worst form of corporate welfare - making an unprofitable industry profitable by throwing tax dollars at it. In the big picture, it's still costing us either way, and if we make that our economic modus operandi we will bankrupt ourselves.
In fact, I think it would go the other way: if it takes more effort to generate energy by non-CO2 generating means, then more economic activity will be devoted to doing that.
Paul Krugman, is that you? Why don't we just bury bottles of money and pay people to dig them up?
Economic activity just for the sake of "activity" is not a useful thing to society. If it takes more economic resources to produce a given quantity of end product, that's economically WASTEFUL. Yes, more economic activity will be devoted to energy production, and less wealth will be created in the end. The economy is not about "jobs" - they are a means, not an end. The whole point is to increase our wealth and standard of living. Wasting economic resources and energy by REDUCING productivity has the exact opposite result. More jobs needed to accomplish the same thing means more human effort must be expended with no net gain - this is not a good thing.
Reducing pollution may have other non-tangible benefits, as you said - increased health and so on. But "pollution" in that sense and CO2 are two different things. But claiming that more expensive energy will result in INCREASED productivity shows a total lack of economic understanding - energy is a direct replacement for human effort, and as such cheaper energy means higher productivity and standard of living, all else equal.
Your first option works, but this can't be legislated. If this is what you want, let the market do its thing.
The second is nonsense; the reason these are more expensive are because they are less efficient. Less efficient, more expensive energy translates directly into lower economic activity. Justifying this with far-out predictions of future doom that are supported by broken models and bad data doesn't fly. The damage will be immediate and inevitable.
The fact is that it is economically advantageous for us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
No. All economic activity generates CO2; reducing CO2 will directly reduce economic activity. Taxing it would amount to not only the biggest tax in history, but the biggest tax possible - a tax on *everything*. There is no way to spin this as economically beneficial.
Do you think if Google fails that the search engine is just going to disappear? Or GMail? No, they'll be sold to the highest bidder to pay Google's debts, but they won't themselves be liquidated. Life will go on for the rest of us.
Relax, and stop screwing with the market already. If they make dumb business decisions, let them fail. There are mechanisms in place to deal with that.
The chances of utter catastrophe, while still really unknown and probably very small, are still enough that we should ask ourselves why the fuck we're playing russian roulette with the whole world, when all we have to do is Stop. Putting. So. Much. Carbon. Into. The. Atmosphere.
And where, pray tell, did all that carbon come from in the first place? The atmosphere. Carbon levels in the past were way higher than they are today, and the planet survived just fine.
You made the assertion that climate is chaotic. I asked you for evidence to support your assertion. Attacking the evidence that climate is not chaotic on multi-decade time scales is not the same thing as offering evidence that it is chaotic.
I am not a climate scientist, but I am a software engineer with experience modeling physical systems. Air flows, heat dissipation, and so on are all based on fluid dynamics, which are very chaotic systems that are extremely sensitive to minor variations. If they're not using the Navier-Stokes equations to model the climate, then what exactly are they modeling? The climate is nothing but a huge fluid dynamics system with a large number of diverse inputs. Due to the nature of fluid dynamics, a small error in the inputs leads to a large error in the results - especially when you're trying to simulate years into the future.
And actually, I just did a quick Google search... Navier-Stokes equations are featured very prominently in climate modeling. Fluid simulations based on Navier-Stokes equations are inherently chaotic.
Or is it just that you would prefer to believe that climate (as opposed to weather) is chaotic because you would rather not believe the predictions of climate models?
Why should I believe models that have never proven themselves trustworthy?
So if you want to argue that there can be no predictable trends over a multi-decade time interval, the uncertainty of next week's weather does not constitute evidence of any kind (and it is more than a little deceptive to present it as though it were).
Ok, I'll grant you this point. I will no longer use the example of predicting next week's weather when discussing climate models.
So based upon everything we know about the physics of climate
This is the key phrase. Given that these models have not demonstrated success in predicting the climate based on past data, I maintain that we don't know nearly as much about the physics of climate as we think we do (which would be in keeping with the historical development of new scientific fields - the initial assumptions and theories are almost invariably wrong).
If climate (as opposed to weather) were chaotic, then the curves should diverge from one another exponentially over time, yet this is not observed.
But again, you're simply talking about this particular model, not the actual physical climate.
Notable, climate models that simulate the physical processes that control the earth's energy balance do not exhibit chaotic behavior on multi-decade time scales.
Climate *models* do not exhibit chaotic behavior, or the climate itself does not? Citation please.
Would you argue that it is impossible for a casino to predict whether its dice games will make money if it cannot predict the outcome of the next role of the dice?
I already addressed that in another commenter's response. Games of chance are based on simple statistics - they become easier and easier to predict with a larger number of samples. The climate is a chaotic system - by nature, these become MORE difficult to predict as you go farther out. It's an entirely different thing.
I would not bet on whether it will be warmer or cooler a week from now, but I'd place a substantial sum of money on the bet that it will be warmer 6 months from now.
What about a year from now? You have no idea, and neither does anybody else. Predicting that summer will be warmer than winter is a no-brainer, seeing as how the Earth operates on a clear one-year cycle. But what matters here are the changes from cycle to cycle, not the changes within a single cycle. And our models are nowhere near complete enough to be able to predict those. Like I said, show me a model that can predict today's climate based on 1980's data. There isn't one - they all predict continued warming; meanwhile, the Earth has recently cooled while CO2 continued to rise. There is clearly far more in play than the simplistic models factor in.
My basic point is that the climate is way more complex and chaotic than the models, and you cannot successfully model a chaotic system by simplifying it. It just doesn't work - the tiny (and no-so-tiny) factors that your model ignores end up affecting major trends in the long run in unpredictable ways.
To expand a bit on your roulette analogy, the outcome of a given spin is irrelevant. But if you take a day's worth of spins, your statistical predictions will be fairly accurate. A week's worth of spins will be even easier to predict, and a year's worth of spins can be predicted to a high degree of precision. This is not a chaotic system, and has nothing to do with a true chaotic system such as the climate or the economy.
Weather and climate are two different things, and they occur on different timescales.
No, they are different timescales of the same physical phenomena. As with any complex, chaotic system, the farther out you try to predict an outcome, the more difficult and uncertain it gets.
To make an analogy, how is it possible for casinos to make profit, if nobody can predict where the ball in roulette will end up?
That's a bad analogy. The long-run statistics of roulette are simple to calculate, and the outcome of any given spin is irrelevant. My point is that if we can't predict how the natural environment will behave in very short timeframes, why do we expect to predict how it behaves in larger timeframes?
Again, please show me any climate model that can successfully take data from the 1980's and predict today's climate. None can. The only thing these models are useful for is explaining environmental behavior after the fact. They have no predictive value.
With greater computer power and development of more detailed models, physical climate models have progressively gotten better over the years in calculating the impact of CO2 and other "greenhouse gasses" on the radiative balance of the earth.
No, they haven't. The climate is so extraordinary complex that the models are terribly gross simplifications that ignore all sorts of complex interactions and variables. The models are *better* than they used to be, but they're still crap. You can't model something that you don't understand, and we don't have anything resembling a good understanding of our climate.
When these models can take data from the 1980's and predict today's climate, then we'll talk. Hell, we can't even predict next week's weather with any degree of certainty. It's time to stop pretending that we can predict a global climate catastrophe decades away.
It didn't take very long at all for me to grow dependent on the multitouch gestures in Firefox. Why in the world does WebKit not support the hardware on new Macbooks as well as Firefox? Three-finger swipe (back/forward and top/bottom of the page) and pinch-to-zoom are incredibly useful.
I can't tell much of a difference when listening to music normally if the mp3 is any higher than 128k, but I've found that it really makes a difference if I'm slowing a song down using a program like Transcribe to try to figure out a fast guitar line or something. Even at 50% speed, lossy compression really loses a lot of detail and makes it hard to hear details. It's the audio equivalent of zooming in on a JPEG.
And you didn't need to be omniscient to see that government policy (keeping interest rates extremely low) was leading to a misallocation of investment funds into real estate.
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
The Keynesians MADE this mess. It's not exactly a vote of confidence to say "well, a few of them weren't ENTIRELY blind to the consequences."
Of course they have, and of course it is bad. It's what happens when you fix prices - misallocated resources. And the Fed has been fixing the price of money for a long time.
But those days are over. During deflation, wages fall, and when they aren't allowed to fall more jobs are destroyed instead. We are now in the worst deflationary period ever - with the same root causes as the Great Depression, only on a much larger scale (and then multiplied by orders of magnitude through derivatives). Inflation is NOT a natural by-product of the free market, it is money creation by the Fed and the banks. Without it, the exponential credit (i.e. money supply) growth that is a side effect of fractional reserve banking is not sustainable and things unwind in the opposite direction - through cascading defaults and economic contraction.
To oversimplify things a bit - exponential growth of credit is over, and without it the system is unsustainable and unwinds in the other direction. This is because debt is money and vice versa (by definition, money is backed by nothing more than the full faith and credit of the US government), and new money is always needed to cover interest on existing money. When nobody can take any more debt, there is no channel for the Fed to get new money into the system. At that point, the system as a whole is unable to cover the interest on itself, and must destroy some of that credit one way or another. The government can print money and rain it from the sky, but that would be such a debasement of the dollar that it would in effect constitute a default by the US government.
Note that paying off debt constitutes the destruction of credit (and therefore part of the money supply). The problem is that nobody can afford to cover their debts, so the debt is destroyed via default instead and the damage is spread to the creditor. As I said, I am oversimplifying things somewhat, but this does LITERALLY describe how our monetary system functions. When you take out a loan, it comes into being as nothing more than a number in a database somewhere, backed by some fraction of its value in "real" money. That money didn't exist 10 seconds earlier, but now you owe it to the bank, plus interest. That interest has to come from somewhere, and it comes from debt taken by other people. When people stop taking down debt, other people can no longer pay THEIR debt, and this is a nasty chain reaction.
You didn't think the Fed and Treasury were running around like chickens with their heads cut off for no reason, did you? This is game over for the global economy for a long time, and this is just the beginning. And it'll be a long time before anybody is worried about inflation again. Markets overshoot both ways, both on the way up and the way down. Artificially keeping wages high in such an environment would be disastrous.
A potentially useful analogy around these parts - you can think of this as the dot-gov bubble popping.
Slashdot Mirror
By what measure? Seems to me that the 20th century was the bloodiest in all of recorded history, and in the 21st we seem determined to replay the same script.
No. But such a defense of private property rights is unexpected from somebody who self-identifies the way you do.
It's not even so hidden - a lot of that crowd talks explicitly about returning to a pre-industrial lifestyle.
Yeah, yeah. So what? Lots of things have external economic costs that aren't properly accounted for. Why are we singling out energy, which is uniquely important to our economic well-being, for this? Especially in light of the politicized, manipulated "research" that global warming alarmism is based on?
And even ignoring that, what makes you think that this will "level the playing field"? Who is going to get paid to "offset" these costs? The government, at our expense - who, by the way, is the world's largest polluter in the first place.
"Directly" has nothing to do with it; everything uses energy in its production, and the vast majority of energy produces CO2 - including humans attached to rickshaws. I'd be interested in hearing of a single counterexample to this - what's a product whose production did not involve comparatively large amounts of energy?
Though you are correct about nuclear energy being an exception - nuclear is the only "clean" energy that makes sense (or would, were it not so hamstrung by over-regulation). If energy gets more expensive, fewer products will be produced and more (human) effort will go into the production of each. "Renewable" energy like solar, wind, etc are extremely expensive compared to traditional sources of energy - we're not talking a *little* bit more expensive, we're talking *game-changingly* more expensive. Government subsidy doesn't change this fact, but rather is the worst form of corporate welfare - making an unprofitable industry profitable by throwing tax dollars at it. In the big picture, it's still costing us either way, and if we make that our economic modus operandi we will bankrupt ourselves.
Paul Krugman, is that you? Why don't we just bury bottles of money and pay people to dig them up?
Economic activity just for the sake of "activity" is not a useful thing to society. If it takes more economic resources to produce a given quantity of end product, that's economically WASTEFUL. Yes, more economic activity will be devoted to energy production, and less wealth will be created in the end. The economy is not about "jobs" - they are a means, not an end. The whole point is to increase our wealth and standard of living. Wasting economic resources and energy by REDUCING productivity has the exact opposite result. More jobs needed to accomplish the same thing means more human effort must be expended with no net gain - this is not a good thing.
Reducing pollution may have other non-tangible benefits, as you said - increased health and so on. But "pollution" in that sense and CO2 are two different things. But claiming that more expensive energy will result in INCREASED productivity shows a total lack of economic understanding - energy is a direct replacement for human effort, and as such cheaper energy means higher productivity and standard of living, all else equal.
Your first option works, but this can't be legislated. If this is what you want, let the market do its thing.
The second is nonsense; the reason these are more expensive are because they are less efficient. Less efficient, more expensive energy translates directly into lower economic activity. Justifying this with far-out predictions of future doom that are supported by broken models and bad data doesn't fly. The damage will be immediate and inevitable.
No. All economic activity generates CO2; reducing CO2 will directly reduce economic activity. Taxing it would amount to not only the biggest tax in history, but the biggest tax possible - a tax on *everything*. There is no way to spin this as economically beneficial.
Do you think if Google fails that the search engine is just going to disappear? Or GMail? No, they'll be sold to the highest bidder to pay Google's debts, but they won't themselves be liquidated. Life will go on for the rest of us.
Relax, and stop screwing with the market already. If they make dumb business decisions, let them fail. There are mechanisms in place to deal with that.
And where, pray tell, did all that carbon come from in the first place? The atmosphere. Carbon levels in the past were way higher than they are today, and the planet survived just fine.
I am not a climate scientist, but I am a software engineer with experience modeling physical systems. Air flows, heat dissipation, and so on are all based on fluid dynamics, which are very chaotic systems that are extremely sensitive to minor variations. If they're not using the Navier-Stokes equations to model the climate, then what exactly are they modeling? The climate is nothing but a huge fluid dynamics system with a large number of diverse inputs. Due to the nature of fluid dynamics, a small error in the inputs leads to a large error in the results - especially when you're trying to simulate years into the future.
And actually, I just did a quick Google search... Navier-Stokes equations are featured very prominently in climate modeling. Fluid simulations based on Navier-Stokes equations are inherently chaotic.
Why should I believe models that have never proven themselves trustworthy?
Ok, I'll grant you this point. I will no longer use the example of predicting next week's weather when discussing climate models.
This is the key phrase. Given that these models have not demonstrated success in predicting the climate based on past data, I maintain that we don't know nearly as much about the physics of climate as we think we do (which would be in keeping with the historical development of new scientific fields - the initial assumptions and theories are almost invariably wrong).
But again, you're simply talking about this particular model, not the actual physical climate.
Climate *models* do not exhibit chaotic behavior, or the climate itself does not? Citation please.
I already addressed that in another commenter's response. Games of chance are based on simple statistics - they become easier and easier to predict with a larger number of samples. The climate is a chaotic system - by nature, these become MORE difficult to predict as you go farther out. It's an entirely different thing.
What about a year from now? You have no idea, and neither does anybody else. Predicting that summer will be warmer than winter is a no-brainer, seeing as how the Earth operates on a clear one-year cycle. But what matters here are the changes from cycle to cycle, not the changes within a single cycle. And our models are nowhere near complete enough to be able to predict those. Like I said, show me a model that can predict today's climate based on 1980's data. There isn't one - they all predict continued warming; meanwhile, the Earth has recently cooled while CO2 continued to rise. There is clearly far more in play than the simplistic models factor in.
My basic point is that the climate is way more complex and chaotic than the models, and you cannot successfully model a chaotic system by simplifying it. It just doesn't work - the tiny (and no-so-tiny) factors that your model ignores end up affecting major trends in the long run in unpredictable ways.
To expand a bit on your roulette analogy, the outcome of a given spin is irrelevant. But if you take a day's worth of spins, your statistical predictions will be fairly accurate. A week's worth of spins will be even easier to predict, and a year's worth of spins can be predicted to a high degree of precision. This is not a chaotic system, and has nothing to do with a true chaotic system such as the climate or the economy.
No, they are different timescales of the same physical phenomena. As with any complex, chaotic system, the farther out you try to predict an outcome, the more difficult and uncertain it gets.
That's a bad analogy. The long-run statistics of roulette are simple to calculate, and the outcome of any given spin is irrelevant. My point is that if we can't predict how the natural environment will behave in very short timeframes, why do we expect to predict how it behaves in larger timeframes?
Again, please show me any climate model that can successfully take data from the 1980's and predict today's climate. None can. The only thing these models are useful for is explaining environmental behavior after the fact. They have no predictive value.
No, they haven't. The climate is so extraordinary complex that the models are terribly gross simplifications that ignore all sorts of complex interactions and variables. The models are *better* than they used to be, but they're still crap. You can't model something that you don't understand, and we don't have anything resembling a good understanding of our climate.
When these models can take data from the 1980's and predict today's climate, then we'll talk. Hell, we can't even predict next week's weather with any degree of certainty. It's time to stop pretending that we can predict a global climate catastrophe decades away.
It didn't take very long at all for me to grow dependent on the multitouch gestures in Firefox. Why in the world does WebKit not support the hardware on new Macbooks as well as Firefox? Three-finger swipe (back/forward and top/bottom of the page) and pinch-to-zoom are incredibly useful.
Or toothpaste. Works wonders on scratched up CDs.
Just like the War on Drugs ensures that people can't do drugs.
I can't tell much of a difference when listening to music normally if the mp3 is any higher than 128k, but I've found that it really makes a difference if I'm slowing a song down using a program like Transcribe to try to figure out a fast guitar line or something. Even at 50% speed, lossy compression really loses a lot of detail and makes it hard to hear details. It's the audio equivalent of zooming in on a JPEG.
Oh. So you're that guy.
Heh. The "old Slashdot" was long gone by the time it had half a million registered users. Now get off my lawn.
But it was the Keynesians who wanted the rates pushed so low to begin with. Paul Krugman, for example, explicitly called for a housing bubble in 2002:
The Keynesians MADE this mess. It's not exactly a vote of confidence to say "well, a few of them weren't ENTIRELY blind to the consequences."
Of course they have, and of course it is bad. It's what happens when you fix prices - misallocated resources. And the Fed has been fixing the price of money for a long time.
But those days are over. During deflation, wages fall, and when they aren't allowed to fall more jobs are destroyed instead. We are now in the worst deflationary period ever - with the same root causes as the Great Depression, only on a much larger scale (and then multiplied by orders of magnitude through derivatives). Inflation is NOT a natural by-product of the free market, it is money creation by the Fed and the banks. Without it, the exponential credit (i.e. money supply) growth that is a side effect of fractional reserve banking is not sustainable and things unwind in the opposite direction - through cascading defaults and economic contraction.
To oversimplify things a bit - exponential growth of credit is over, and without it the system is unsustainable and unwinds in the other direction. This is because debt is money and vice versa (by definition, money is backed by nothing more than the full faith and credit of the US government), and new money is always needed to cover interest on existing money. When nobody can take any more debt, there is no channel for the Fed to get new money into the system. At that point, the system as a whole is unable to cover the interest on itself, and must destroy some of that credit one way or another. The government can print money and rain it from the sky, but that would be such a debasement of the dollar that it would in effect constitute a default by the US government.
Note that paying off debt constitutes the destruction of credit (and therefore part of the money supply). The problem is that nobody can afford to cover their debts, so the debt is destroyed via default instead and the damage is spread to the creditor. As I said, I am oversimplifying things somewhat, but this does LITERALLY describe how our monetary system functions. When you take out a loan, it comes into being as nothing more than a number in a database somewhere, backed by some fraction of its value in "real" money. That money didn't exist 10 seconds earlier, but now you owe it to the bank, plus interest. That interest has to come from somewhere, and it comes from debt taken by other people. When people stop taking down debt, other people can no longer pay THEIR debt, and this is a nasty chain reaction.
You didn't think the Fed and Treasury were running around like chickens with their heads cut off for no reason, did you? This is game over for the global economy for a long time, and this is just the beginning. And it'll be a long time before anybody is worried about inflation again. Markets overshoot both ways, both on the way up and the way down. Artificially keeping wages high in such an environment would be disastrous.
A potentially useful analogy around these parts - you can think of this as the dot-gov bubble popping.