There is absolutely no way that catching a few druggies could possibly be worth tainting the reputation of a respected security research institution with the suspicion of being just another malware vendor for the feds.
CMU is a high-profile institution, their reputation won't be negatively impacted in any way.
Their reputation may be harmed in some segment of the tech population, but do keep in mind that it will be enhanced in other segments. You may not believe it, but the response "Good! At least one institution is actively working to unmask terrorists, pedophiles, and drug pushers" is going to be exactly the way some people will view it.
You many not like it, but not everybody thinks the same.
Secular institutions like universities don't generally promote faith-based philosophies like libertarianism.
I know you're trolling, but I can't resist: How does a libertarian philosophy require faith? What must be believed without evidence?
Libertarianism doesn't require faith in that. The mix of people actually enjoying acting out of altruism and the situations where people acting for their own good inherently results...
There you go. That word "inherently" is the faith part.
( for the sarcastically challenged: the above are not a recipe for creating a sound economy, just so that we are clear)
I wish people would stop attempting sarcasm on the web. Sarcasm becomes completely invisible against the background noise, and it's impossible to tell a troll from somebody trying to be ironic (usually unsuccessfully).
Poe's law doesn't just apply to fundamentalism any more.
Worst, there is no "education for women must be provided".
Why that? It is the only known (working) way to decrease number of child per female (and decrease human aspect to warming).
Actually, three things are well understood as decreasing the number of children per female:
(1) Better economy. More wealthy people have fewer children than less-wealthy people.
(2) access to birth control. Doesn't have to be compulsory-- just has to be available.
(3) education. Educating women, yes, but, also education in general.
I'm sorry, but no.
Germany is not, on the average, 15C warmer than it was 35 years ago (that would be 60 Fahrenheit degrees!). Did you mean 1.5 C? that's about right.
In other news Microsoft also released another 14 updates that increase telemetry, attempt to forcibly install Win 10, beat your children and do unspeakable things to the cat!
Yes, I could care less what amount of carbon dioxide they are putting out. It isn't harmful to humans. We do breathe it out all the time, after all. (I'm not counting asphyxiation here.) Nitrous oxides are known to be unhealthy and we should be banning/regulating those not going on a wild goose chase after CO2.
And global warming isn't harmful to humans ?
Not directly very harmful to humans. It will mean that we will have to spend a few trillion dollars moving population away from flooded areas, and either building gigantic dikes, or else moving cities, but that's just a matter of money.
Oh, and agriculture changes, of course.
You keep making up different arguments; it's hard to keep up.
However:
In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.
Exactly! You got it! Gold star!
But you aren't getting it. There is nothing magic about "accounting for externalities" when talking about supply, demand, and taxes. The more you tax, the less demand there is.
Exactly. There's nothing "magic" about simple economics. The more expensive something is, the less is used. It's little more than common sense, but using numbers.
So: You just clearly and succinctly stated that this approach would work to reduce carbon emissions. We agree.
Now, a different question is whether this is the best approach, and a different yet question is whether this is even a problem that we need to solve at all.
However, you seem to be violently agreeing with me on the basic economics, so I'll stop here.
It's not unique. 40 million people share one with somebody else according to the article.
Not exactly. If you click through to the link, it says that "more than 40 million SSNs are associated with multiple people."
It turns out, when you read through the article, what this means is that at least once somebody made a typo and wrote the wrong social security number. Not cases of a people using the same social security numbers.
We seem to have a vocabulary problem here. Doing nothing is not a "solution." Doing nothing is choosing to not solve the problem. This is indeed an option which should be considered, but you can't call it is a "solution"-- saying "we don't have to solve this problem" is not a solution.
Indeed we have a vocabulary problem. "We do nothing" only means that government does nothing because the "we" in that phrase refers to collective action by society. You erroneously believe that "we do nothing" amounts to nothing being done at all.
Indeed, we do have a vocabulary problem. When, in your original post, you said "do nothing," I assumed that you meant "do nothing." There was no "we" in what you posted. Now what you're saying is to do something, but in a distributed system, where your "do nothing" does not mean do nothing, but means to not take in a directed, organized action.
OK. You're saying that people will decrease their use of fossil fuel because it's expensive. I'd like to see some numbers here. But, actually, I can analyze it trivially. Fossil fuel usage increases directly in proportion to GNP. Overall, the gross world product is increasing-- the poor are getting less poor (despite all the doomsaying). This is despite the face that, in your belief, fossil fuels are "expensive". So, the net result is that fossil fuel consumption is increasing.
Going up. Not down. Nope, that does not solve the problem.
But, you wouldn't expect it to. Since the piece doesn't reflect externalities, there's no reason in the world to expect usage to decrease to account for the fact that the planet is growing warmer. That isn't part of the market calculation.
I don't know of any real-world economist who says that the only way to discourage fossil fuel use is to properly account for externalities.
You could have stopped typing after "I don't know any real-world economists".
In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.
Exactly! You got it! Gold star!
"incentivized to look for alternatives." Exactly. That's called "substitution of resources". That's how markets work.
I would assume that it is not a coincidence that two women with the same name and same birthdate got the same social security number; I expect that when the second application came in, they checked the name and birdhday and assumed that it was a duplication of the first application, and just send out "here is your number".
First, I'm not sure why you think I'm not considering the option of doing nothing
Because you said so, in a roundabout way ("If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are 'statist'").
We seem to have a vocabulary problem here. Doing nothing is not a "solution." Doing nothing is choosing to not solve the problem. This is indeed an option which should be considered, but you can't call it is a "solution"-- saying "we don't have to solve this problem" is not a solution.
In fact, there is one solution that is not, namely doing nothing. It's been on the table for a long time, but people with vested political and economic interests keep denouncing its proponents as "deniers".
"Deniers" are people who deny that the greenhouse effect exists, or at least deny that human-generated greenhouse gasses cause warming.
As far as I know, there isn't a word for people who agree that human-generated gasses cause warming, but propose that the optimum way to address the issue is to do nothing. I don't think I've ever met proponents of that previously-- in fact, I'd be interested if you have a citation to somebody else holding that view.
Second, if the cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of all the effects of burning it and putting the waste into the atmosphere, it's not paying its way-- the people who do have to pay for the effects are subsidizing the price. And so the market won't "take care" of this, because the externalities are not part of the market price-- the price is artificially low, meaning that too much coal will be burned.
That's irrelevant to the point I was making,
No, it's not. You claimed that market forces would solve the problem. They won't, because the cost of warming is not incorporated into the market price.
namely that if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions quickly and efficiently, market mechanisms without government interference are likely to be the quickest way of accomplishing that goal,
That's an assertion. You have given no evidence to support it.
since markets already have a strong incentive to reduce fossil fuel use because it's expensive.
No, it's not. Fossil fuels are cheap. They are cheap, in part, because the cost of the externalities are not included in the price, which means that the price is subsidized The fact that the price is subsidized means that the market is not accurately accounting for it.
That point has nothing to do with externalities.
Exactly. Since you're not accounting for externalities, the equilibrium price point doesn't include them. Since the equilibrium doesn't include this cost, the solution isn't optimized to trade the cost of not reducing emission against the cost of reducing emissions.
Accounting for externalities is a good thing in principle. But the problem with that idea is the notion that governments can do this. In fact, the various carbon taxes that exist or are proposed do not account for externalities correctly, and they certainly don't go to the people who actually bear the cost from carbon emissions.
That's a reasonable point to argue. However, don't attribute it to "economists", because most economists won't agree. Dealing with externailties is hard, but most economists accept that, one way or another, governments have to be involved.
I know way too many economists. I don't believe that I have ever heard an economist use the word "statist". That's basically a word libertarians invented to mean "anybody who supports anything a government does that I don't like."
"Statism" is a term from political science referring to the concentration of economic and political power in the state;
Nope, you were right the first time: science doesn't address this, that's a political choice.
Economics and political science certainly tell us that large, statist institutions are inefficient or even ineffective.
I know way too many economists. I don't believe that I have ever heard an economist use the word "statist". That's basically a word libertarians invented to mean "anybody who supports anything a government does that I don't like."
As a general thing, economists point out that some things are well accomplished by market solutions, and some things require government actions. One of the conditions where free markets are not efficient is when there are externalities to production: that is, when a company's actions affect others in a way that they do not have to pay for. Pollution is a classic example of this. If it is more expensive to produce goods with no pollution, then companies that pollute will drive companies that don't pollute out of business.
What economists usually point out as the solution to this problem is to do the free market solution: make the companies pay for their externalities. This, in layman's terms, means: tax them for polluting. The result is that the ones who really do achieve efficiencies by polluting will pay to do so, and the ones who don't will adapt by avoiding polluting. (I should point out that this is different from the usual liberal solution, which would be to simply make it illegal to pollute.)
So, most of the economists I know favor a carbon tax. It's actually sort of a no-brainer for them; if emitting carbon dioxide has costs, the people who emit it should pay the costs, and thus they will adjust their actions to find alternate production means that emit less carbon dioxide. This is a form of "substitution of resources"-- a classic (and well understood) economic effect.
However, politicians hate the word "tax", and so this will never happen. The "cap and trade" concept was invented to try to achieve the same effect as a tax, but without using that poison word.
The rest of your post puts forth a false dichotomy, in which there are only two possibilities, to not make any changes whatsoever to attempt to address climate, or to do radical changes according to some unspecified plan, in order to (I would guess) completely stop carbon emissions. In fact, you are simplifying a complicated problem, and there is a complete continuum of possible actions between "nothing" and "completely stop carbon emission," and there are a great number of possible solutions in all the shades in between. The obvious right answer is to do those things that make sense, and not do the ones that don't.
You're also wrong and misreading the IPCC reports, by the way. There is no one solution, with one well defined cost, that can be compared to one effects model, with again a well defined cost.
Your problem is simply that you aren't listening to the simplest and most effective solution: do nothing. Fossil fuels are already expensive and provide a strong built-in incentive to economize on their usage. The market will therefore take care of this by itself.
First, I'm not sure why you think I'm not considering the option of doing nothing, since I've mentioned it in pretty much every single post I've made in this thread. That is one of the things that should be in the cost/benefit analysis.
Second, if the cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of all the effects of burning it and putting the waste into the atmosphere, it's not paying its way-- the people who do have to pay for the effects are subsidizing the price. And so the market won't "take care" of this, because the externalities are not part of the market price-- the price is artificially low, meaning that too much coal will be burned.
Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right.
The science isn't the issue here, it's the politics.
You seem to be arguing some point that is different from the point I was addressing.
The issue I was talking about was the science. Not the politics.
Science doesn't say we need to create large statist institutions to reduce carbon emissions; that's a political choice.
That's correct.
In fact, if anything, science tells us the exact opposite.
Nope, you were right the first time: science doesn't address this, that's a political choice. The science can tell us how much the world will warm as a function of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and (just as important) tell us why we know it, and with what error bars. How much it will cost to correct it is an economic calculation. And how we chose to correct it-- or even whether we chose to correct it-- is a political decision.
First, if we don't act on climate change, the costs won't be any worse (and likely be lower) than if we do act;
The science tells us nothing of the sort. The science does tell us what the physical and biological effect of warming will be (although predicting the detailed effects is much harder than, and hence is quite a bit less precise than, the simple prediction of how much the warming will be.) A review of what we currently know is covered in the IPCC Working Group II report, for what it's worth: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... ("Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability").
The science does not tell us the societal or economic costs, and in no way does it tell us the cost of acting-- that's economics and politics, not science. Among other things, that first would require examining alternative plans to addressing the problem, and there really isn't any political consensus on that.
I will blame the deniers for that, by the way. By shouting "NO! IT'S A HOAX!" every time the issue of how to address the problem comes up, they have totally drowned out any substantive discussion of how, or even whether, we should deal with it; and completely derailed any discussions of the cost benefit ratio of various potential methods to deal with it. If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are "statist"-- well, that's because the people who might have other ideas are too busy shouting "IT'S A HOAX."
...(As for the science itself, although I generally believe the climate models are fairly reasonable as far as climate modeling goes, whether they are "right" on predictions for 2100 can only be determined in 2100, not today.)
Well, that's true, but it's true because it's a tautology. The only way to tell whether any prediction for the future is right is to wait to see whether it happens.
It isn't new, but "this is a conspiracy by statists to grab more power" is a conspiracy theory that doesn't make a lick of sense.
I don't see anybody alleging a "conspiracy"; "conspiracy" requires secrecy and deception.
The original poster-- "Speck'sbacon"-- was alleging a conspiracy. He was saying that we need to "follow the money", which will reveal that thousands of scientists, working for twenty different agencies in different countries on different continents, are all presenting corrupt results for money.
I was merely pointing out that not only is there no evidence for this, and not only does follow the money reveal no such thing, but that this is absurd
I'm sure scientists and politicians promoting action on AGW truly believe what they are saying, and they aren't secret about it. But that doesn't make them right.
Whether they are right is a different thread. The thread I was commenting on was pointing out the absurdities in the proposal by speck'sbacon.
Now, to the best of our knowledge, they in fact are right. But this is because they use the tools of science-- observation, calculation, and comparing competing hypotheses by measurements and use of the scientific method. And if better measurements show something different, the state of "the best of our knowledge" can change. So far, however, they haven't.
Your idea that there is a " simple, self-organizing, positive feedback" cycle supporting wrong science is a different statement, but it is also wrong. Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right. Add evidence that the existing models are right, or find evidence that competing models are right, either one works, but you do not get ahead in science by being wrong. If it looked like existing climate models were wrong, believe me, climate scientists would all be rushing to be the first to show it.
As far as I can tell, all the "investigations" of the ClimateGate situation were whitewashes.
Since your definition for "whitewash" is "detailed investigation found nothing wrong".
"The University investigated its own global warming researchers and concluded that they are doing a great job!"
There were eight independent investigations of the so-called "climategate", not including the investigation by the university itself. These ranged from the British House of Commons all the way across the ocean to the National Science Foundation. None of them found any wrongdoing other than failures to adequately explain their results.
There's nothing found, because there really was nothing there to be found. But eight investigations weren't enough, apparently.
And I keep reading articles like this one where it shows that NOAA has stealth-edited the temperature data, and all the old data got pushed down and all the new data got pushed up.
Getting progressively better models and more accurate data sets is what science does. That's how science works. You would worry if they didn't get better data set.
In this case, however, the updated NOAA data made minor changes in the shape of the curve but in no way changed the actual result: the average temperature was increasing in the old data, and it's still increasing in the revised data.
Can you find me anyone prominent in the global warming community who spoke out in 2004 against the prediction that sea level rise would start drowning island countries by 2010?
No one spoke out against this because it didn't exist. There was no prediction by scientists that island countries would drown by 2010. The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change made a prediction in 2007 that conservative estimates suggest that global sea level will reach increase "8 to 16 inches above 1990 levels" by 2090, is that what you're thinking of? Some of the news reports (such as the New York Times quoted that as "by the end of the century" which sometimes gets written as "by 2100". That kind of looks like "by 2010", if you squint at it.
It's hard for me to take this stuff seriously when the most outrageous claims are never challenged
Outrageous claims should be challenged... but far too many of these "outrageous" claims don't actually exist, except in the minds of self-proclaimed skeptics who never try to actually track them down to original sources.
I don't take the specifics of the post seriously, but the idea that this fear-mongering in the press about global warming is really a power grab by statists at the national and international levels isn't new.
It isn't new, but "this is a conspiracy by statists to grab more power" is a conspiracy theory that doesn't make a lick of sense.
Saying "be afraid of terrorists! We need to put policemen armed with tanks and bazookas in every schoolroom, and strip search everybody who ever gets on an airplane"-- now that's a power grab. Saying "we need to make changes in the regulatory system that will, over the course of decades, change the distribution of new power systems and will encourage more efficient use of energy" really is not-- that's pretty much the most incompetent "power grab" ever.
The belief that there are "statists" out there who are trying to increase the power of government not for any particular reason, but just to increase the government, is really quite silly. There are many many people out there who want to use the power of government to accomplish specific goals-- both left and right-- and those can be frightening. But the idea that there are statists out there who simply want governments to have more power for no reason at all other than power: no, that's a boogeyman. Not real.
...My point in focusing on government in this case is because I too often see cognitive dissonance regarding "following the money," with people only doing so when private firms/individuals are involved, but never governments.
Because the "follow the money" trail is very clear when looking at climate change deniers: they are massively funded by fossil-fuel corporations or by lobbying organizations which are funded by fossil fuel corporations, and the fossil fuel industry is literally a multi-trillion dollar industry. It's easy to follow the money: you can see who's paying, you can see who they are paying, and you can see what they are asking for and why they want it. It's so not-secret an agenda that you can find the actual memos written by the American Petroleum Institute laying out their strategy.
But the "follow the money" trail just peters out when looking at climate scientists. They're funded by a range of government agencies, true, ranging from NASA to NOAA to the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie to the Japanese Meteorological agency, but now you're telling me that they all have the same secret agenda... to do what, exactly? Really, the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie does not have a secret desire to increase the amount of regulations in the world. Even if the German government somehow did have this goal... how do they it tell the Max-Planck Institut? Memos saying "make sure that the scientists you fund are instructed to only give results saying climate change is real?" Do you really think that dozens of scientific agencies in as many countries are all going to be getting this memo (why? From who?) and not a single person is going to leak it?
You can try to follow the money... but when you do, there just isn't anywhere it goes. And then, how exactly do the thousands of scientist get their instructions?
There are indeed a lot of people who want to influence government-- plenty of them. But they all do so to anticipate actual, tangible benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
There is absolutely no way that catching a few druggies could possibly be worth tainting the reputation of a respected security research institution with the suspicion of being just another malware vendor for the feds.
CMU is a high-profile institution, their reputation won't be negatively impacted in any way.
Their reputation may be harmed in some segment of the tech population, but do keep in mind that it will be enhanced in other segments. You may not believe it, but the response "Good! At least one institution is actively working to unmask terrorists, pedophiles, and drug pushers" is going to be exactly the way some people will view it.
You many not like it, but not everybody thinks the same.
Secular institutions like universities don't generally promote faith-based philosophies like libertarianism.
I know you're trolling, but I can't resist: How does a libertarian philosophy require faith? What must be believed without evidence?
Libertarianism doesn't require faith in that. The mix of people actually enjoying acting out of altruism and the situations where people acting for their own good inherently results ...
There you go. That word "inherently" is the faith part.
( for the sarcastically challenged: the above are not a recipe for creating a sound economy, just so that we are clear)
I wish people would stop attempting sarcasm on the web. Sarcasm becomes completely invisible against the background noise, and it's impossible to tell a troll from somebody trying to be ironic (usually unsuccessfully).
Poe's law doesn't just apply to fundamentalism any more.
I, for one, welcome our new OpenAI overlords
I think I get about one call a DAY. How do YOU get the do not call to work???
Granted, if we want to be pedantic about what "nitrogen" means then that's not nitrogen gas (N2).
Correct. Hydrogen is not the same as water, and nitrous oxide is not the same as nitrogen.
the list of such countries being led by the USA. The rest like China and Russia will simply falsify their emission data.
With satellite-based carbon dioxide measurement, this is going to be more difficult than it used to be.
http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/
Worst, there is no "education for women must be provided". Why that? It is the only known (working) way to decrease number of child per female (and decrease human aspect to warming).
Actually, three things are well understood as decreasing the number of children per female:
(1) Better economy. More wealthy people have fewer children than less-wealthy people.
(2) access to birth control. Doesn't have to be compulsory-- just has to be available.
(3) education. Educating women, yes, but, also education in general.
You are seeing the victory of idiocy over common sense. The contribution of CO2, Methane and nitrogen
Nitrogen? Who the fuck mentioned nitrogen? Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, and nobody ever claimed it was a greenhouse gas.
Basically, I stopped reading here, because this shows that you're one more clueless anonymous coward.
Data here:
Berlin temperature record: http://climatereason.com/Littl...
Hohenpeissenberg temperature record: http://climatereason.com/Littl...
"...the goal of recruiting and hiring 'hundreds of people' with autism" Yeah, that explains a lot about their user interface.
In other news Microsoft also released another 14 updates that increase telemetry, attempt to forcibly install Win 10, beat your children and do unspeakable things to the cat!
Oh, noes! Not the cat!
KITTEH!
Yes, I could care less what amount of carbon dioxide they are putting out. It isn't harmful to humans. We do breathe it out all the time, after all. (I'm not counting asphyxiation here.) Nitrous oxides are known to be unhealthy and we should be banning/regulating those not going on a wild goose chase after CO2.
And global warming isn't harmful to humans ?
Not directly very harmful to humans. It will mean that we will have to spend a few trillion dollars moving population away from flooded areas, and either building gigantic dikes, or else moving cities, but that's just a matter of money. Oh, and agriculture changes, of course.
Yes, I could care less what amount of carbon dioxide they are putting out.
Ob. xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1576/
But you aren't getting it. There is nothing magic about "accounting for externalities" when talking about supply, demand, and taxes. The more you tax, the less demand there is.
Exactly. There's nothing "magic" about simple economics. The more expensive something is, the less is used. It's little more than common sense, but using numbers.
So: You just clearly and succinctly stated that this approach would work to reduce carbon emissions. We agree.
Now, a different question is whether this is the best approach, and a different yet question is whether this is even a problem that we need to solve at all.
However, you seem to be violently agreeing with me on the basic economics, so I'll stop here.
It's not unique. 40 million people share one with somebody else according to the article.
Not exactly. If you click through to the link, it says that "more than 40 million SSNs are associated with multiple people." It turns out, when you read through the article, what this means is that at least once somebody made a typo and wrote the wrong social security number. Not cases of a people using the same social security numbers.
Indeed we have a vocabulary problem. "We do nothing" only means that government does nothing because the "we" in that phrase refers to collective action by society. You erroneously believe that "we do nothing" amounts to nothing being done at all.
Indeed, we do have a vocabulary problem. When, in your original post, you said "do nothing," I assumed that you meant "do nothing." There was no "we" in what you posted. Now what you're saying is to do something, but in a distributed system, where your "do nothing" does not mean do nothing, but means to not take in a directed, organized action.
OK. You're saying that people will decrease their use of fossil fuel because it's expensive. I'd like to see some numbers here. But, actually, I can analyze it trivially. Fossil fuel usage increases directly in proportion to GNP. Overall, the gross world product is increasing-- the poor are getting less poor (despite all the doomsaying). This is despite the face that, in your belief, fossil fuels are "expensive". So, the net result is that fossil fuel consumption is increasing.
Gross world product here: http://stats.areppim.com/stats...
Fossil fuel use here: http://worldhistoryforusall.sd...
Going up. Not down. Nope, that does not solve the problem.
But, you wouldn't expect it to. Since the piece doesn't reflect externalities, there's no reason in the world to expect usage to decrease to account for the fact that the planet is growing warmer. That isn't part of the market calculation.
I don't know of any real-world economist who says that the only way to discourage fossil fuel use is to properly account for externalities.
You could have stopped typing after "I don't know any real-world economists".
In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.
Exactly! You got it! Gold star!
"incentivized to look for alternatives." Exactly. That's called "substitution of resources". That's how markets work.
I would assume that it is not a coincidence that two women with the same name and same birthdate got the same social security number; I expect that when the second application came in, they checked the name and birdhday and assumed that it was a duplication of the first application, and just send out "here is your number".
So, then what do the usernames of slashdot posters tell about the age and psychology of slashdotters?
Because you said so, in a roundabout way ("If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are 'statist'").
We seem to have a vocabulary problem here. Doing nothing is not a "solution." Doing nothing is choosing to not solve the problem. This is indeed an option which should be considered, but you can't call it is a "solution"-- saying "we don't have to solve this problem" is not a solution.
In fact, there is one solution that is not, namely doing nothing. It's been on the table for a long time, but people with vested political and economic interests keep denouncing its proponents as "deniers".
"Deniers" are people who deny that the greenhouse effect exists, or at least deny that human-generated greenhouse gasses cause warming.
As far as I know, there isn't a word for people who agree that human-generated gasses cause warming, but propose that the optimum way to address the issue is to do nothing. I don't think I've ever met proponents of that previously-- in fact, I'd be interested if you have a citation to somebody else holding that view.
That's irrelevant to the point I was making,
No, it's not. You claimed that market forces would solve the problem. They won't, because the cost of warming is not incorporated into the market price.
namely that if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions quickly and efficiently, market mechanisms without government interference are likely to be the quickest way of accomplishing that goal,
That's an assertion. You have given no evidence to support it.
since markets already have a strong incentive to reduce fossil fuel use because it's expensive.
No, it's not. Fossil fuels are cheap. They are cheap, in part, because the cost of the externalities are not included in the price, which means that the price is subsidized The fact that the price is subsidized means that the market is not accurately accounting for it.
That point has nothing to do with externalities.
Exactly. Since you're not accounting for externalities, the equilibrium price point doesn't include them. Since the equilibrium doesn't include this cost, the solution isn't optimized to trade the cost of not reducing emission against the cost of reducing emissions.
Accounting for externalities is a good thing in principle. But the problem with that idea is the notion that governments can do this. In fact, the various carbon taxes that exist or are proposed do not account for externalities correctly, and they certainly don't go to the people who actually bear the cost from carbon emissions.
That's a reasonable point to argue. However, don't attribute it to "economists", because most economists won't agree. Dealing with externailties is hard, but most economists accept that, one way or another, governments have to be involved.
"Statism" is a term from political science referring to the concentration of economic and political power in the state;
Economics and political science certainly tell us that large, statist institutions are inefficient or even ineffective.
I know way too many economists. I don't believe that I have ever heard an economist use the word "statist". That's basically a word libertarians invented to mean "anybody who supports anything a government does that I don't like."
As a general thing, economists point out that some things are well accomplished by market solutions, and some things require government actions. One of the conditions where free markets are not efficient is when there are externalities to production: that is, when a company's actions affect others in a way that they do not have to pay for. Pollution is a classic example of this. If it is more expensive to produce goods with no pollution, then companies that pollute will drive companies that don't pollute out of business.
What economists usually point out as the solution to this problem is to do the free market solution: make the companies pay for their externalities. This, in layman's terms, means: tax them for polluting. The result is that the ones who really do achieve efficiencies by polluting will pay to do so, and the ones who don't will adapt by avoiding polluting. (I should point out that this is different from the usual liberal solution, which would be to simply make it illegal to pollute.)
So, most of the economists I know favor a carbon tax. It's actually sort of a no-brainer for them; if emitting carbon dioxide has costs, the people who emit it should pay the costs, and thus they will adjust their actions to find alternate production means that emit less carbon dioxide. This is a form of "substitution of resources"-- a classic (and well understood) economic effect.
However, politicians hate the word "tax", and so this will never happen. The "cap and trade" concept was invented to try to achieve the same effect as a tax, but without using that poison word.
The rest of your post puts forth a false dichotomy, in which there are only two possibilities, to not make any changes whatsoever to attempt to address climate, or to do radical changes according to some unspecified plan, in order to (I would guess) completely stop carbon emissions. In fact, you are simplifying a complicated problem, and there is a complete continuum of possible actions between "nothing" and "completely stop carbon emission," and there are a great number of possible solutions in all the shades in between. The obvious right answer is to do those things that make sense, and not do the ones that don't.
You're also wrong and misreading the IPCC reports, by the way. There is no one solution, with one well defined cost, that can be compared to one effects model, with again a well defined cost.
Your problem is simply that you aren't listening to the simplest and most effective solution: do nothing. Fossil fuels are already expensive and provide a strong built-in incentive to economize on their usage. The market will therefore take care of this by itself.
First, I'm not sure why you think I'm not considering the option of doing nothing, since I've mentioned it in pretty much every single post I've made in this thread. That is one of the things that should be in the cost/benefit analysis.
Second, if the cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of all the effects of burning it and putting the waste into the atmosphere, it's not paying its way-- the people who do have to pay for the effects are subsidizing the price. And so the market won't "take care" of this, because the externalities are not part of the market price-- the price is artificially low, meaning that too much coal will be burned.
The science isn't the issue here, it's the politics.
You seem to be arguing some point that is different from the point I was addressing.
The issue I was talking about was the science. Not the politics.
Science doesn't say we need to create large statist institutions to reduce carbon emissions; that's a political choice.
That's correct.
In fact, if anything, science tells us the exact opposite.
Nope, you were right the first time: science doesn't address this, that's a political choice. The science can tell us how much the world will warm as a function of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and (just as important) tell us why we know it, and with what error bars. How much it will cost to correct it is an economic calculation. And how we chose to correct it-- or even whether we chose to correct it-- is a political decision.
First, if we don't act on climate change, the costs won't be any worse (and likely be lower) than if we do act;
The science tells us nothing of the sort. The science does tell us what the physical and biological effect of warming will be (although predicting the detailed effects is much harder than, and hence is quite a bit less precise than, the simple prediction of how much the warming will be.) A review of what we currently know is covered in the IPCC Working Group II report, for what it's worth: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... ("Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability").
The science does not tell us the societal or economic costs, and in no way does it tell us the cost of acting-- that's economics and politics, not science. Among other things, that first would require examining alternative plans to addressing the problem, and there really isn't any political consensus on that.
I will blame the deniers for that, by the way. By shouting "NO! IT'S A HOAX!" every time the issue of how to address the problem comes up, they have totally drowned out any substantive discussion of how, or even whether, we should deal with it; and completely derailed any discussions of the cost benefit ratio of various potential methods to deal with it. If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are "statist"-- well, that's because the people who might have other ideas are too busy shouting "IT'S A HOAX."
...(As for the science itself, although I generally believe the climate models are fairly reasonable as far as climate modeling goes, whether they are "right" on predictions for 2100 can only be determined in 2100, not today.)
Well, that's true, but it's true because it's a tautology. The only way to tell whether any prediction for the future is right is to wait to see whether it happens.
I don't see anybody alleging a "conspiracy"; "conspiracy" requires secrecy and deception.
The original poster-- "Speck'sbacon"-- was alleging a conspiracy. He was saying that we need to "follow the money", which will reveal that thousands of scientists, working for twenty different agencies in different countries on different continents, are all presenting corrupt results for money.
I was merely pointing out that not only is there no evidence for this, and not only does follow the money reveal no such thing, but that this is absurd
I'm sure scientists and politicians promoting action on AGW truly believe what they are saying, and they aren't secret about it. But that doesn't make them right.
Whether they are right is a different thread. The thread I was commenting on was pointing out the absurdities in the proposal by speck'sbacon.
Now, to the best of our knowledge, they in fact are right. But this is because they use the tools of science-- observation, calculation, and comparing competing hypotheses by measurements and use of the scientific method. And if better measurements show something different, the state of "the best of our knowledge" can change. So far, however, they haven't.
Your idea that there is a " simple, self-organizing, positive feedback" cycle supporting wrong science is a different statement, but it is also wrong. Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right. Add evidence that the existing models are right, or find evidence that competing models are right, either one works, but you do not get ahead in science by being wrong. If it looked like existing climate models were wrong, believe me, climate scientists would all be rushing to be the first to show it.
As far as I can tell, all the "investigations" of the ClimateGate situation were whitewashes.
Since your definition for "whitewash" is "detailed investigation found nothing wrong".
"The University investigated its own global warming researchers and concluded that they are doing a great job!"
There were eight independent investigations of the so-called "climategate", not including the investigation by the university itself. These ranged from the British House of Commons all the way across the ocean to the National Science Foundation. None of them found any wrongdoing other than failures to adequately explain their results.
There's nothing found, because there really was nothing there to be found. But eight investigations weren't enough, apparently.
And I keep reading articles like this one where it shows that NOAA has stealth-edited the temperature data, and all the old data got pushed down and all the new data got pushed up.
Getting progressively better models and more accurate data sets is what science does. That's how science works. You would worry if they didn't get better data set.
In this case, however, the updated NOAA data made minor changes in the shape of the curve but in no way changed the actual result: the average temperature was increasing in the old data, and it's still increasing in the revised data.
Can you find me anyone prominent in the global warming community who spoke out in 2004 against the prediction that sea level rise would start drowning island countries by 2010?
No one spoke out against this because it didn't exist. There was no prediction by scientists that island countries would drown by 2010. The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change made a prediction in 2007 that conservative estimates suggest that global sea level will reach increase "8 to 16 inches above 1990 levels" by 2090, is that what you're thinking of? Some of the news reports (such as the New York Times quoted that as "by the end of the century" which sometimes gets written as "by 2100". That kind of looks like "by 2010", if you squint at it.
It's hard for me to take this stuff seriously when the most outrageous claims are never challenged
Outrageous claims should be challenged... but far too many of these "outrageous" claims don't actually exist, except in the minds of self-proclaimed skeptics who never try to actually track them down to original sources.
I don't take the specifics of the post seriously, but the idea that this fear-mongering in the press about global warming is really a power grab by statists at the national and international levels isn't new.
It isn't new, but "this is a conspiracy by statists to grab more power" is a conspiracy theory that doesn't make a lick of sense.
Saying "be afraid of terrorists! We need to put policemen armed with tanks and bazookas in every schoolroom, and strip search everybody who ever gets on an airplane"-- now that's a power grab. Saying "we need to make changes in the regulatory system that will, over the course of decades, change the distribution of new power systems and will encourage more efficient use of energy" really is not-- that's pretty much the most incompetent "power grab" ever.
The belief that there are "statists" out there who are trying to increase the power of government not for any particular reason, but just to increase the government, is really quite silly. There are many many people out there who want to use the power of government to accomplish specific goals-- both left and right-- and those can be frightening. But the idea that there are statists out there who simply want governments to have more power for no reason at all other than power: no, that's a boogeyman. Not real.
...My point in focusing on government in this case is because I too often see cognitive dissonance regarding "following the money," with people only doing so when private firms/individuals are involved, but never governments.
Because the "follow the money" trail is very clear when looking at climate change deniers: they are massively funded by fossil-fuel corporations or by lobbying organizations which are funded by fossil fuel corporations, and the fossil fuel industry is literally a multi-trillion dollar industry. It's easy to follow the money: you can see who's paying, you can see who they are paying, and you can see what they are asking for and why they want it. It's so not-secret an agenda that you can find the actual memos written by the American Petroleum Institute laying out their strategy.
But the "follow the money" trail just peters out when looking at climate scientists. They're funded by a range of government agencies, true, ranging from NASA to NOAA to the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie to the Japanese Meteorological agency, but now you're telling me that they all have the same secret agenda... to do what, exactly? Really, the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie does not have a secret desire to increase the amount of regulations in the world. Even if the German government somehow did have this goal... how do they it tell the Max-Planck Institut? Memos saying "make sure that the scientists you fund are instructed to only give results saying climate change is real?" Do you really think that dozens of scientific agencies in as many countries are all going to be getting this memo (why? From who?) and not a single person is going to leak it?
You can try to follow the money... but when you do, there just isn't anywhere it goes. And then, how exactly do the thousands of scientist get their instructions?
There are indeed a lot of people who want to influence government-- plenty of them. But they all do so to anticipate actual, tangible benefits.