WRT farming methods, a farming method that will enable sustained farming for the next 500 years is infinitely preferrable to an "inexpensive farming method" that will make food 20% cheaper for 50 years and then make no food for the following 450 years.
I guess that depends on whether you starve to death during that first 50 years or not. Also, it depends on whether you can look forward to enough technological progress during that 50 years to eliminate the threat to the next 450. Or if there's somewhere else to farm in the future. Also, it hinges on predicting the future. Can you predict the future with a high degree of certainty? Why should we believe you can?
Here "wise" implies a cost/benefits analysis.
Yeay! An implied cost/benefit analysis is good. An actual one is even better. Better still is a cost/benefit analysis where only the human costs and human benefits are considered rather than costs to humans and benefits to birds and fish.
This is another one of the one-liners Diamond addresses. His basic response (I don't have the book handy so I can't quote it direclty) is that he's only ever heard this argument from people who themselves are relatively elite, rich, and well off.
So?
The poor little girl who was killed by malaria at three years old does a poor job of arguing in favor of treating the inside of her house with DDT. It's no wonder Jared Diamond didn't hear her.
The poor people he's met in environmentally damaged areas are keenly aware of the need for better management, but don't have the power (or don't feel they have the power) to do anything about it.
Yeah. That's what being poor is. You want things or need things, but you don't have the resources to attain them. You'd like to avoid some problem, but you can't afford it.
If the environmentalists force you to deal with the problem, then you lose the ability to afford other things that are even more necessary. Poor becomes poorer while the environmentalist pats himself on the back for fixing the only problem he cared about. Then he goes away and leaves you to deal with the consequences.
I strongly suggest you read his book.
Pass. I can think my own thoughts, thanks. More people should try it instead of just repeating the thoughts of others.
It's a scientific study of past civilizations that have collapsed, as well as past civilizations that were in similar danger of collapsing but made choices to avert disaster. Collapsed civilizations include the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi Indians in New Mexico, and the Greenland Norse. Even if you only check it out of the library and read a few chapters, read the chapters on Easter Island. They're particularly disquieting.
Comparing a modern, flourishing civilization to an ancient highly-challenged one will lead to incorrect conclusions, especially if you're doing it to exaggerate our own challenges.
Our current level of technology and productivity leaves us dissimilar to the society of the Anasazi, for example. Our untapped resources and our increasing ability to find new previously-unavailable resources is a key distinction between us and the Easter Islanders.
You can learn a lot from things that went wrong for other people. But if you don't face the same challenges, that knowledge has little practical use.
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Damaging the environment damages the economy. The rich people can afford to move away,
Poverty has never been a significant barrier to population migrations.
or to protect themselves from the effects of the damaged environment, but poor people can't. For example, if a water supply is polluted with industrial toxins, rich people can afford to ship in bottled water, while poor people have to use whatever's local.
And if you shut that industry down, it will be the poor people who are put out of work, causing them to starve. If you shut down inexpensive farming methods, poor people can't afford basic food. If you shut down inexpensive production methods, poor people can't afford basic goods. Rich people have none of these problems.
If the local fisheries are depleted, rich people can afford to eat imported meats, while poor people will just starve.
Overfishing is hardly relevant to Global Warming or pollution.
Increasing the costs of production burdens poor people. Pollution burdens poor people. An objective (and correct) cost/benefit analysis is needed for every law and regulation.
Environmental advocates (who tend to be elites, and often rich or well off) tend to talk about threats to bears and birds and trees. Often they are blind to the human suffering their policies cause. DDT vs. malaria is commonly cited as an example.
PhDs can't lie? PhDs can't defraud? Climate scientists' FORTRAN code is immune to bugs? Or mistakes? Or manipulation?
Do these PhDs ever get revoked?
Your statement is silly.
I know lots of PhDs. I work with them. They sometimes make mistakes. (But it gets discovered because I'm in a field where predictions get tested. We don't just come to a consensus and then tell everyone else to shut up.)
The point about whether it's better for you personally is not the issue. The issue is that there are millions of people who will be affected, not just you. A 1m rise in sea level (deemed possible by 2100) would destroy farmland near coastal areas...
And that warming couldn't make new lands in Asia (Siberia) more productive as farm land?
... and cost billions to build seawalls to protect cities like London...
Billions of dollars? Over the course of a century?
To avoid this (imagined) expense, we're being asked to pay trillions of dollars.
Do you even bother to read the science? It *has* warmed in the last decade.
You've personally analyzed the raw data yourself then? Or are you just repeating what the climate change believers say?
Regardless, you're nit-picking and missing the larger point. There's clearly a difference of opinion on whether it has warmed since 1998. Arguments that it has not warmed are at least as persuasive as arguments that it has warmed. This is because it just doesn't seem very warm. Sea levels haven't risen a noticeable amount. People still talk about 1998 as the hottest year on record. There's a gathering consensus that it hasn't warmed since then. (See how consensus is useless in determining what's factual?)
The larger point stands, regardless of whether it has or hasn't technically warmed in the last 10 years. Replace "it hasn't warmed" with "it doesn't seem to have warmed" if you're distracted by the wording.
Power. Money. Idealism. Etc... How many motives do you want?
And so what if some of them are true believers? All destructive philosophies in the history of the world had true believers. See the 9/11/2001 terrorist incident for a recent example.
Why should climate skeptics be asked to make a good faith effort when the climate scientists have been so clearly and obviously shown to be acting in bad faith?
And it's in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there's a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
Decide there's global warming and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
- The data used for this analysis - Any computer code used for calculations - Other computer analysis tools (spreadsheets, etc) - Any notes taken or emails exchanged by the scientists on the subject during the analysis - The raw data from the measurements - A justification of the methodology for the measurement and analysis - Any additional measurements required to indicate this isn't normal - A list of every person involved in this project - The source of funding for this project
And for good measure:
- Please tell us what the AGW computer models predicted for this melting. Preferably, this prediction would have occurred and been published before the melting was discovered.
The downsides are poverty, death, government tyranny, despair, hunger, loss of cultural heritage, loss of the ability to technically advance, and a general sense of hopelessness about the future.
Every human action must be tested against thousands of pessimistic "what if" scenarios, often by people with selfish or political motives. And even if you slip past the tests, any gain you receive from your actions will be largely taken from you to pay the salaries of the bureaucrats that tried to stand in your way.
The real AGW arguments (and the motivation of all the parties involved) seem to be about the remedies rather than the climate. The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.
They demand the power to do this, but they refuse to release their data. They refuse to publish the code for their computer models. They refuse to rationally refute skepticism. They refuse to understand human behavior as described by the discipline of Economics. They refuse to address the question of whether warmer may be better than colder. They refuse to identify the "correct" temperature, let alone describe how they arrived at that temperature. They refuse to close the loop on their proposed remedies to objectively weigh the benefits against the cost.
If Global Warming was simply an academic question rather than a life-or-death political struggle for power (or against power and for freedom), then it could be discussed as such.
AGW is going to lose the political struggle because of Climategate. It was already reeling from the fact that it hasn't warmed in the last decade. And it faced an uphill battle due to the depression: rich people can afford to pay for environmental spirituality, poor people can't. If the political struggle ends, this can go back to being about whether carbon release causes warming, and how much, and what it really means.
I share your anachronistic devotion to truth and accuracy and reality. But those things are out of fashion. They've been replaced with hate and greed and envy and the self absorbtion that is called "awareness".
To care about the truth is to fail to fit into modern society. Your "common ground" is very uncommon these days.
It isn't extortion for the disabled to, for example, require that sidewalks are traversible without being able to step up. Or that legal documents are available in forms that are comprehensible to people that are lacking senses like vision or hearing. That isn't extortion, it is equality.
Those are both government-provided services, so no that's not extortion.
It becomes extortion when things like that are required of a private person or business. When someone wants some sort of accommodation from another free person, he should have to ask. A free person should be free to say "no" for any reason (or for no reason at all). That's what freedom is. The ADA forces free people to act against their will. Hence "extortion".
You don't understand. The reasoning goes like this:
I'm blind, therefore you have an obligation...
There's nothing that can't be justified by that reasoning. Any time a blind person isn't experiencing perfect joy, you can be argued to have failed in your obligation. It doesn't cross a line. There's no line.
The USA is, at least historically, a free country. That means people are free to buy the service they will and providers are free to provide the service they will. As long as the agreement is entered into freely by both parties and as long as the service is offered and paid according to the that agreement, no one has cause to bring the government into the transaction to force one party or the other to act against their free will.
As the idea of freedom fades from memories in favor of force and coercion to benefit interests with political power, you may wish to remember the post that you made and the discussion here. There was a day when everyone didn't have to bow to a government overlord for the permission to take every action. That day still dawns in the US, for some, in some cases, for at least a short while longer.
No wrongdoing is necessary. US Attorneys are political appointees and serve at the pleasure of the President. They are regularly dismissed for political reasons, often simply the desire to appoint a political ally instead of the current US Attorney.
Sourcewatch is an organ of the leftist Center for Media and Democracy, BTW. For more credibility, you might want to try citing information from non-propaganda sources.
Why use a simple device that works with an existing configuration when you can spend your time performing complex hacks on all your computers to find a way to patch them together into a vague approximation of the simple device? Because you want internet access to get work done, not a puzzle to solve to inflate your self-regard.
Lots of companies selling high-priced software won't send you a disk any more. In some states, if you get a disk, you have to pay sales tax. If you download, you don't pay the tax.
I'm not sure what you're complaining about. If you are owed software and haven't received it in a timely manner, then call the Mathworks and get them to fix the problem. Complaining to Slashdot or waiting are not really problem-solving strategies -- unless your real problem is that you'd like to justify pirating MATLAB.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should the large populations of the US, or Europe, or China consider themselves subservient to the needs of the small population of the Maldives?
Why shouldn't people live where they can make a living and move when times get hard like they've done for millions of years?
We've had warm and cold periods before. What is the evidence that everything was optimal in 1982?
WRT farming methods, a farming method that will enable sustained farming for the next 500 years is infinitely preferrable to an "inexpensive farming method" that will make food 20% cheaper for 50 years and then make no food for the following 450 years.
I guess that depends on whether you starve to death during that first 50 years or not. Also, it depends on whether you can look forward to enough technological progress during that 50 years to eliminate the threat to the next 450. Or if there's somewhere else to farm in the future. Also, it hinges on predicting the future. Can you predict the future with a high degree of certainty? Why should we believe you can?
Here "wise" implies a cost/benefits analysis.
Yeay! An implied cost/benefit analysis is good. An actual one is even better. Better still is a cost/benefit analysis where only the human costs and human benefits are considered rather than costs to humans and benefits to birds and fish.
This is another one of the one-liners Diamond addresses. His basic response (I don't have the book handy so I can't quote it direclty) is that he's only ever heard this argument from people who themselves are relatively elite, rich, and well off.
So?
The poor little girl who was killed by malaria at three years old does a poor job of arguing in favor of treating the inside of her house with DDT. It's no wonder Jared Diamond didn't hear her.
The poor people he's met in environmentally damaged areas are keenly aware of the need for better management, but don't have the power (or don't feel they have the power) to do anything about it.
Yeah. That's what being poor is. You want things or need things, but you don't have the resources to attain them. You'd like to avoid some problem, but you can't afford it.
If the environmentalists force you to deal with the problem, then you lose the ability to afford other things that are even more necessary. Poor becomes poorer while the environmentalist pats himself on the back for fixing the only problem he cared about. Then he goes away and leaves you to deal with the consequences.
I strongly suggest you read his book.
Pass. I can think my own thoughts, thanks. More people should try it instead of just repeating the thoughts of others.
It's a scientific study of past civilizations that have collapsed, as well as past civilizations that were in similar danger of collapsing but made choices to avert disaster. Collapsed civilizations include the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi Indians in New Mexico, and the Greenland Norse. Even if you only check it out of the library and read a few chapters, read the chapters on Easter Island. They're particularly disquieting.
Comparing a modern, flourishing civilization to an ancient highly-challenged one will lead to incorrect conclusions, especially if you're doing it to exaggerate our own challenges.
Our current level of technology and productivity leaves us dissimilar to the society of the Anasazi, for example. Our untapped resources and our increasing ability to find new previously-unavailable resources is a key distinction between us and the Easter Islanders.
You can learn a lot from things that went wrong for other people. But if you don't face the same challenges, that knowledge has little practical use.
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Damaging the environment damages the economy. The rich people can afford to move away,
Poverty has never been a significant barrier to population migrations.
or to protect themselves from the effects of the damaged environment, but poor people can't. For example, if a water supply is polluted with industrial toxins, rich people can afford to ship in bottled water, while poor people have to use whatever's local.
And if you shut that industry down, it will be the poor people who are put out of work, causing them to starve. If you shut down inexpensive farming methods, poor people can't afford basic food. If you shut down inexpensive production methods, poor people can't afford basic goods. Rich people have none of these problems.
If the local fisheries are depleted, rich people can afford to eat imported meats, while poor people will just starve.
Overfishing is hardly relevant to Global Warming or pollution.
Increasing the costs of production burdens poor people. Pollution burdens poor people. An objective (and correct) cost/benefit analysis is needed for every law and regulation.
Environmental advocates (who tend to be elites, and often rich or well off) tend to talk about threats to bears and birds and trees. Often they are blind to the human suffering their policies cause. DDT vs. malaria is commonly cited as an example.
PhDs can't lie? PhDs can't defraud? Climate scientists' FORTRAN code is immune to bugs? Or mistakes? Or manipulation?
Do these PhDs ever get revoked?
Your statement is silly.
I know lots of PhDs. I work with them. They sometimes make mistakes. (But it gets discovered because I'm in a field where predictions get tested. We don't just come to a consensus and then tell everyone else to shut up.)
Evidence for that claim?
Google the name Paul Erlich. He wrote a book in 1968 (before AGW) called "The Population Bomb". Read his policy recommendations.
The point about whether it's better for you personally is not the issue. The issue is that there are millions of people who will be affected, not just you. A 1m rise in sea level (deemed possible by 2100) would destroy farmland near coastal areas ...
And that warming couldn't make new lands in Asia (Siberia) more productive as farm land?
... and cost billions to build seawalls to protect cities like London ...
Billions of dollars? Over the course of a century?
To avoid this (imagined) expense, we're being asked to pay trillions of dollars.
My peers have reviewed my original comment and determined that it's accurate. They also say I'm "Insightful".
The question is settled. I don't have to waste my time dealing with "deniers" like you.
Do you even bother to read the science? It *has* warmed in the last decade.
You've personally analyzed the raw data yourself then? Or are you just repeating what the climate change believers say?
Regardless, you're nit-picking and missing the larger point. There's clearly a difference of opinion on whether it has warmed since 1998. Arguments that it has not warmed are at least as persuasive as arguments that it has warmed. This is because it just doesn't seem very warm. Sea levels haven't risen a noticeable amount. People still talk about 1998 as the hottest year on record. There's a gathering consensus that it hasn't warmed since then. (See how consensus is useless in determining what's factual?)
The larger point stands, regardless of whether it has or hasn't technically warmed in the last 10 years. Replace "it hasn't warmed" with "it doesn't seem to have warmed" if you're distracted by the wording.
Power. Money. Idealism. Etc... How many motives do you want?
And so what if some of them are true believers? All destructive philosophies in the history of the world had true believers. See the 9/11/2001 terrorist incident for a recent example.
Why should climate skeptics be asked to make a good faith effort when the climate scientists have been so clearly and obviously shown to be acting in bad faith?
And it's in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there's a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
Decide there's global warming and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
It's a big pseudo-scientific world out there.
Please supply:
- The data used for this analysis
- Any computer code used for calculations
- Other computer analysis tools (spreadsheets, etc)
- Any notes taken or emails exchanged by the scientists on the subject during the analysis
- The raw data from the measurements
- A justification of the methodology for the measurement and analysis
- Any additional measurements required to indicate this isn't normal
- A list of every person involved in this project
- The source of funding for this project
And for good measure:
- Please tell us what the AGW computer models predicted for this melting. Preferably, this prediction would have occurred and been published before the melting was discovered.
Thanks. And consider not positing it as an AC.
The downsides are poverty, death, government tyranny, despair, hunger, loss of cultural heritage, loss of the ability to technically advance, and a general sense of hopelessness about the future.
Every human action must be tested against thousands of pessimistic "what if" scenarios, often by people with selfish or political motives. And even if you slip past the tests, any gain you receive from your actions will be largely taken from you to pay the salaries of the bureaucrats that tried to stand in your way.
Why bother doing anything?
The real AGW arguments (and the motivation of all the parties involved) seem to be about the remedies rather than the climate. The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.
They demand the power to do this, but they refuse to release their data. They refuse to publish the code for their computer models. They refuse to rationally refute skepticism. They refuse to understand human behavior as described by the discipline of Economics. They refuse to address the question of whether warmer may be better than colder. They refuse to identify the "correct" temperature, let alone describe how they arrived at that temperature. They refuse to close the loop on their proposed remedies to objectively weigh the benefits against the cost.
If Global Warming was simply an academic question rather than a life-or-death political struggle for power (or against power and for freedom), then it could be discussed as such.
AGW is going to lose the political struggle because of Climategate. It was already reeling from the fact that it hasn't warmed in the last decade. And it faced an uphill battle due to the depression: rich people can afford to pay for environmental spirituality, poor people can't. If the political struggle ends, this can go back to being about whether carbon release causes warming, and how much, and what it really means.
I share your anachronistic devotion to truth and accuracy and reality. But those things are out of fashion. They've been replaced with hate and greed and envy and the self absorbtion that is called "awareness".
To care about the truth is to fail to fit into modern society. Your "common ground" is very uncommon these days.
It isn't extortion for the disabled to, for example, require that sidewalks are traversible without being able to step up. Or that legal documents are available in forms that are comprehensible to people that are lacking senses like vision or hearing. That isn't extortion, it is equality.
Those are both government-provided services, so no that's not extortion.
It becomes extortion when things like that are required of a private person or business. When someone wants some sort of accommodation from another free person, he should have to ask. A free person should be free to say "no" for any reason (or for no reason at all). That's what freedom is. The ADA forces free people to act against their will. Hence "extortion".
It is basically a form of extortion...
So just like almost everything else government does then?
You seem to be arguing for reforms so we can have more efficient, more targeted extortion.
Because lawyers need to get paid.
You don't understand. The reasoning goes like this:
There's nothing that can't be justified by that reasoning. Any time a blind person isn't experiencing perfect joy, you can be argued to have failed in your obligation. It doesn't cross a line. There's no line.
The USA is, at least historically, a free country. That means people are free to buy the service they will and providers are free to provide the service they will. As long as the agreement is entered into freely by both parties and as long as the service is offered and paid according to the that agreement, no one has cause to bring the government into the transaction to force one party or the other to act against their free will.
As the idea of freedom fades from memories in favor of force and coercion to benefit interests with political power, you may wish to remember the post that you made and the discussion here. There was a day when everyone didn't have to bow to a government overlord for the permission to take every action. That day still dawns in the US, for some, in some cases, for at least a short while longer.
Timmeh!
TIMMEH!
No wrongdoing is necessary. US Attorneys are political appointees and serve at the pleasure of the President. They are regularly dismissed for political reasons, often simply the desire to appoint a political ally instead of the current US Attorney.
Sourcewatch is an organ of the leftist Center for Media and Democracy, BTW. For more credibility, you might want to try citing information from non-propaganda sources.
Except those prosecutors were fired for refusing to do their job prosecuting voter fraud cases.
Why use a simple device that works with an existing configuration when you can spend your time performing complex hacks on all your computers to find a way to patch them together into a vague approximation of the simple device? Because you want internet access to get work done, not a puzzle to solve to inflate your self-regard.
Lots of companies selling high-priced software won't send you a disk any more. In some states, if you get a disk, you have to pay sales tax. If you download, you don't pay the tax.
I'm not sure what you're complaining about. If you are owed software and haven't received it in a timely manner, then call the Mathworks and get them to fix the problem. Complaining to Slashdot or waiting are not really problem-solving strategies -- unless your real problem is that you'd like to justify pirating MATLAB.
when you're injured.