The US Constitution is about a set of enumerated powers. I don't see any of the enumerated powers that would allow the US government to intervene in society to "reduce the risk of homicides".
which has fascinating notes about what a government is supposed to do
The Declaration of Independence is quite clear: government ought to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are negative rights.
Perhaps you are referring to the "laying of foundations" and "organization" in order to "most likely [effect] safety and happiness". It is your error to interpret such a phrase as an authorization for the government to take away individual liberties of law abiding citizen in order to reduce perceived risks. In fact, history and experience shows us that those kinds of policies end up doing the opposite. In any case, the Declaration of Independence is neither law, nor is it a statement of perfect principles of government (neither, for that matter is the US Constitution).
Oh, my. I can't possibly sum up the irrationality of your analyses any better than this.
It isn't my "analysis" that is irrational. Rather, we disagree on the nature of government: you believe government ought to be rational, whereas I believe it ought to secure liberty. There are two things you don't seem to realize. First, those two goals cannot be achieved simultaneously: you can't have a society that is governed rationally and that simultaneously is free. Second, even if rational government were desirable, it couldn't be realized in practice; the more rational you attempt to make government, the more corrupt it becomes.
Of course it does. Even very strange concepts are the source of political arguments.
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear: Of course, none of this even amounts to a valid political argument.
At any cost, no. But reducing homicides is _definitely_ one of the roles of government.
I must have missed that part of the US Constitution.
And of course it does. The _risks_ of gun ownership are why societies make laws about it.
Well, if gun ownership is not about rights but about expediency, why not outlaw gun ownership for African Americans? If gun control is effective, then that would cut the US murder rate in half. Of course, that would be a racist policy, but for progressives and Democrats, it's all about improving society statistically, isn't it?
In fact, the underlying problem with your reasoning is that you even think that there is something like "the" risks. Risk is an inherently subjective quantity: it depends fundamentally on the state of knowledge of the observer. Making policy based on risk estimates (or probabilities in general) is inherently unjust and is not compatible with a free society.
Part of the key to understanding the gun control claims and "refutations" is to watch the language very carefully.
I don't have rely "the language", I looked at the data myself: there is no correlation. What that tells you is that if gun control has any effect, it can't be a large one.
And the homicide rates in Europe and other gun controlled parts of the world are notably lower than the US, with reasonably good correlation with levels of gun control.
It's hard to quantify gun control, but if you look at the rate of gun ownership vs the homicide rate, there is no correlation. There is a strong correlation between gun ownership and gun deaths, but that's mostly because people commit suicide with guns when guns are available.
The state by state results can be obscured by many factors, such as the age or income of the state populations, so it can be difficult to ensure that homicide rates can be strongly linked to homicide.
Yeah, I think you put your finger on it: the authors wanted to "ensure" that homicide rates "can be linked to" gun ownership, and they massaged the data until they got that result.
In any case, even if everything they did were valid, all it would tell you is that "all things being equal", gun control would reduce homicide rates. But given that in the real world all things are not equal, gun control could still be completely ineffective, or even harmful. That is, you can't combine correlations in the way the authors implicitly assume when they try to draw conclusions about gun violence; it is statistically invalid.
The higher crime rates happen from poverty, racism, gangs, and other social problems, and the tighter gun control goes hand in hand with trying to _control_ those.
Again, that kind of reasoning tells you that gun control is obviously not effective, and that these other factors need to be addressed.
In fact, from a political point of view, one might argue that gun control laws, low legal gun ownership, and high homicide rates are all caused by the same common factor, namely progressive and/or Democratic government (and I would add racism and poverty to the list of effects of progressivism as well).
Of course, none of this even amounts to a political argument. Politically, whether you decide to off your neighbor with your gun has no bearing on my interest or right to own a gun. That is, reducing homicide rates at any cost should not be the goal of government. East Germany had very low rates of gun violence and tough gun control laws, but you wouldn't have wanted to live there.
Funny how right wingers are prepared to treat economics as a science as long as it supports laissez faire capitalism unthinkingly, whereas otherwise it's a liberal-hippy pseudo-science like sociology.
Well, that's because some parts of economics are sound and well-supported by data, and others are not. You know, like any other science as well.
As I was saying, I do believe that we should let Middle Easter countries elect whoever they want to and govern themselves however they want to. But don't kid yourself: they will be much worse off for it. The reason not to intervene is not because it helps them, but because it's cheaper and less risky for us.
Furthermore, if they elect "the wrong party" and end up threatening us, we still have to do something. If it isn't a coup, then that means military and economic containment from the outside. Think North Korea.
What we can't do is turn other nations into thriving democracies from the outside; democracy is something the people of a country need to desire themselves and grow into culturally. Note that "democracy" doesn't simply mean "majority rule" or "rule by popular will"; the Nazis were popularly elected, but they weren't democratic.
Over the last couple of centuries Britain and France (particularly) and latterly the US have ridden roughshod over national sovereignty and human rights in the middle east whenever it suited their political or economic purposes.
Do you imagine the MIddle East had liberal democracies before the US and Europe came in and destroyed it? The Middle East has been a totalitarian shithole for a long, long time. It never had "human rights" in the Western sense. And the whole point of many of these Islamic movements is to get rid of "national sovereignty" and restore an Islamic empire. And creating that Islamic empire isn't for the good of humanity, it is to take revenge for the fact that Europe successfully defended itself and kicked out the first few Islamic empires.
Now, I disapprove of the US and European governments meddling in the Middle East. It is clearly not very effective, it is very costly, and it just riles up the people who live there. But the West does not bear any moral responsibility for the plight of the people in the Middle East, and it isn't our responsibility to ensure that they have "national sovereignty and human rights". In fact, the Middle East probably has achieved more "national sovereignty and human rights" with US and European meddling than without, it's just that the price we are paying for it is too high for us.
The homicide rate with guns in the USA shows the difficulty. The idea that an "armed society is a politie society" was explored by Robert Heinlein in a number of his stories. In real life, the frequency of domestic violence and of violent neighborhood brawls remains so high that the deaths from household violence far outnumber those which might be saved by making personal firearms widely available.
There is a wide range of household gun ownership among US states (from 10% to 60%) and no correlation between gun ownership and homicide rate. Other statistics show similar results. The fact is that homicide rate in a large population simply doesn't have anything to do with rate of gun ownership, let alone rate of legal gun ownership. Furthermore, gun control has never been shown to be an effective measure of reducing homicide rates.
For some reason, people like you are obsessed with a policy objective ("outlaw guns") and then fabricate reasons to support it. You need to reflect on why that is.
OK, so how about offering some good, constructive and effective ideas to deal with the problem? As far as I can see, with the problems we are facing: terrorism, unsustainable growth, climate change etc
You presume incorrectly that there is "a problem". Terrorism is a negligible cause of death. In fact, violent death as a whole keeps decreasing.
- we don't have the option of not making any sacrifices at all
Who is this "we" you are speaking of? If you want to make sacrifices in order to deal with your fear of "terrorism, unsustainable growth, climate change", make them. It's simple. You can address these "problems" (such as they are) simply and effectively by moving and changing how you live.
What you are actually saying is that you want other people to make sacrifices in order to subsidize your current, preferred lifestyle, which somehow involves an irrational fear of a bunch of things.
These are "problems" only from the point of view of anti-terrorism efforts, but these laws are useless against terrorism anyway. What these laws are for are mostly to extend the power of banks (by eliminating cheap competition) and police (by letting them go on fishing expeditions through your data).
The total cost was probably less than 50k Euros, almost all of which was probably paid in cash to criminals
Precisely. And they weren't going to comply with reporting requirements either.
You don't say! And how is that working out for you?
And killing people with guns and bombs is something you want to prevent instead of penalizing it after it happens.
You can do that even better by turning countries into police states or fascist dictatorships. Is that what you're going to advocate next?
The more you observe, the more predictive power you gain.
No, sorry, in practice that's not true: more information only gains you "predictive power" if you have the resources to process it. In the case of anti-terrorism efforts, that means having the people to follow up on it, and short of turning all of Europe into a STASI operation, those resources are not there and won't be there. Even if you did that, it's still doubtful that you'd be able to prevent a lot of these attacks: these attacks seem to be not centrally organized, they are cheap, and the people engaging in them are not going to conform to banking or encryption laws any more than they are going to conform to gun control laws or laws against killing people.
Even if it were true, it's the wrong question to ask. The question isn't "does it improve our ability to fight terrorism", but "does it improve our ability to fight terrorism enough to justify the massive intrusion into personal liberties", and it does not. Tragic as the death of 129 people is, it is a miniscule cause of death compared to others, and there is little justification on expending a lot of resources on preventing such deaths.
Nope. The only study that showed net benefits up to 1C warming had errors.
I didn't claim that there was a "net benefit" to warming. I made a statement about the IPCC. However, I didn't say what I wanted to say.
What the IPCC actually says is that the cost of mitigation about balance the benefits from mitigation. That is, according to the IPCC, we always incur a net cost from climate change, but the cost is the same whether we successfully mitigate or not.
Say, why not answer the question? what is the economic cost of the projected sea level rise for Miami alone?
The cost is close to zero, since essentially nothing that is in Miami today will have any economic value in the year 2100. That fact is independent of what happens to Miami in the year 2100, whether it gets flooded, destroyed by a nuclear blast, or erased in an alien invasion.
Another way of looking at it is that about a hundred years ago, Miami was a tiny hamlet with a few hundred people, so at worst, it will simply go back to that; that is, over the span of 200 years, nothing will have been lost even if Miami becomes almost completely uninhabitable.
You're putting up one straw man and piece of FUD after another. Let's return to your original point: you were saying that climate change isn't uniform and were trying to imply that that puts us at greater risk. I was pointing out that the non-uniformity of climate change, in fact, puts us at an overall less risk, because from everything we know, climate change tends to make cold, biologically unproductive regions warmer, and dry regions wetter.
Actually there is - pretty much every major climate shift has been accompanied by large extinction events.
That's a straw man and unrelated to the original point. But let's run with it for fun. Several large extinction events were probably caused by asteroid impacts, volcanism, or biological innovation; climate change was a consequence of those events, not a cause. The few cases where extinctions with no other known cause coincided with climate change was due to cooling. I don't know of any case where warming has been demonstrated as the cause of any large extinction event. In any case, most climate change doesn't seem to lead to extinction at all; we have had dozens of rapid temperature oscillations by more than 10C over the last few million years with no large extinctions. Furthermore, paleontology is probably also not a good guide anyway; animals and plants today have been through so much climate change that they are likely adapted to highly variable climate.
Sure, the tropics may eventually extend to the poles, but tropical vegetation can only spread by so many yards per year,
That's not how deserts get reclaimed. You're mixing up the effects of slow ecological progression with "spreading". Even if seed dispersal was a problem, humans could easily and cheaply help the process along.
The effect is even more pronounced for relatively isolated ecosystems such as high mountains. The plants and animals that call them home generally aren't well suited to crossing plains, so as their ecosystem warms they die off, without the ability to move to more polar latitudes.
Again, a straw man and with little support. Animals and plants are very good at "crossing plains" because they have experienced these kinds of massive climate change many dozen times over the last few million years. As elsewhere, we can also help them along if we wanted to. Finally, the loss of a few high mountain ecosystems is unfortunate for biologists and museums, but hardly a big deal for humanity or the planet.
As for the speed of climate change, yes it IS much faster than anything mankind has experience in thousands of years.
This is another straw man. I don't see what you think it is relevant to or in response to.
And where deserts are concerned, yes, if rainfall increases immediately they should benefit. But you need vegetation, especially trees, immediately upwind to make that a safe assumption
You said that "during the transition deserts will be likely without extensive human intervention - the existing vegetation can't migrate fast enough". Again, there is no evidence for that, and nothing you said changes that. In fact, deserts are already shrinking today, probably due to climate change. Good thing too.
Yes, just like economics classes point out why "competing systems" like socialism and fascism don't work and aren't actually "competing".
Your problem is that you don't listen to science and reason, and instead think that it's all a grand conspiracy. Kind of like a nutcase who thinks that ideas for perpetual motion machines are being suppressed by the evil oil companies.
but the distinction between the British colonies and the southern U.S. which they became is minor
I don't think it is "minor" at all: it identifies the political and legal system and the ruling class responsible for slavery, and that was British, not American.
There were slaves imported up to 1808, when it was finally outlawed (the Constitution required that it not be done until 1808).
Did I say otherwise? Note that this fact really largely relieves the US of responsibility: getting the British colonies to declare independence required this political compromise prior to the creation of the USA, and as soon as slave trade could be outlawed by the new country, it was outlawed.
That being said, I really doubt there were even hundreds of thousands [before] independence (whether traditionally 1776, de facto 1781, or de jure 1783).
Probably about half the slaves were brought to the current territory of the US under British rule, the other half under US rule; but all of those under US rule were either brought in under the legacy compromise that enabled the US to be founded in the first place, or were simply brought in illegally.
Note, however, that my statement was slightly different anyway; I said what it should say is that "hundreds of thousands of workers from Africa to the British colonies to work on British plantations". Those plantations weren't just in the modern territory of the US; there is no justification for discounting British guilt by looking at just the number of people they brought to the present day territory of the US.
but completely ignores the centuries of transition - such small timescales are effectively invisible in the geologic record, but surviving them with civilization intact will likely be far more expensive than avoiding them would be.
There is little to support that assertion. The IPCC doesn't predict that. There is no evidence for it geologically. And it frankly doesn't make sense, given that the projected climate change isn't all that much faster than what we have already experienced and that people adapt to without even noticing.
And during the transition deserts will be likely without extensive human intervention - the existing vegetation can't migrate fast enough
Again, you are guessing, and quite wrongly. When precipitation goes up, deserts don't grow first and the shrink, they shrink immediately as they are settled by pioneering plants. Of course, mature plants of the right type may take decades to settle, but that's a different matter.
I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
Probably someone who wanted to make a point about slavery and the issue of labor supply and demand in the colonies, something that is important and relevant in US history. It's not like they were trying to hide that these were slaves, since they were actually clear in the same sentence that these "workers" were brought in by the "Slave Trade".
A bigger question is what the author's "ideological proclivity" by misstating the numbers and locations so badly. The African Slave Trade did not, in fact, bring "millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations", it brought "hundreds of thousands of workers from Africa to the British colonies to work on British plantations". That is compared to the millions that were brought to other Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonies elsewhere.
“The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."
There are indeed two massive errors in that sentence. First, the total number of slaves brought to the entire US from Africa was about 388000, and less than half a million if you count other points of origin, like the Carribean, not "millions". Second, most of those slaves weren't brought to the "southern United States" because they didn't exist yet, they were brought to British colonies that happen to be where the southern United States is located today.
It was European colonialism that forced more than 10 million Africans into slavery, and only a few percent of those slaves ended up in the territory of the US, most of them before the US even existed.
It's disingenuous to call a slave a 'worker' because it intentionally leaves out important context. The fact that they were slaves instead of free men is an important thing to understand in a history book.
The context is provided right there: "The African Slave Trade brought millions of workers...", so they are obviously not pretending that these people came voluntarily. The fact that these slaves were "workers" from an economic point of view because economics drove a lot of the dispute between the North and the South.
There is, however, a far bigger problem with the sentence: the numbers are off by an order of magnitude. The total number of slaves brought to the US from Africa was around 388000; it was never "millions".
My economics course in High School was a propaganda platform for capitalism. There was no discussion of other competing systems,
And your physics course was a propaganda platform for the Laws of Thermodynamics, with no discussion of perpetual motion machines. Reality and science sometimes are just no fun.
It's simple when you have that privilege available to you.
I want poor families to have the same privilege as rich families when it comes to education: send their kids to a school of their choice. The way to do that is to give kids school vouchers.
What snobs like you want is to railroad poor kids into lousy public schools, while they move into expensive suburbs with good schools, and while their political heroes send their kids to top private schools.
You're yet another person who is selfish or who can't imagine anything outside of his/her own life.
Nobody claims that global warming will be uniform,
No, in fact what "global warming" mostly does is warm up cold place and cause more precipitation in dry place, while changing the already warm places much less. At the peak of the Eocene, the entire globe was covered with vegetation at any latitude, with tropical and subtropical vegetation far into Northern Europe. That's not exactly the "scorched earth" picture we always get with global warming articles.
The terms "global warming" and the use of global average temperatures as the primary measure to communicate about this are propagandistic choices made by people who want to get people that "global warming" is a disaster. Because the misrepresentation was too blatant, eventually, the term was changed to "climate change".
While you're at it, you may want to look up the economic cost of the projected sea level rise for Miami alone. If you're going to have a strong opinion on this topic it may as well be an informed one.
I'm way ahead of you: (1) basically, even the IPCC says that the costs and benefits about balance out if we do nothing, and (2) the IPCC (as well as you) are actually overestimating the costs of inaction and underestimating the costs of action.
As for "Pollyannaism", it's people who propose action on AGW who are unreasonably optimistic: they believe that government action is effective, that its costs are lower than they are, and that we can somehow "stabilize" the climate and coastal areas. You people have all the naivite of a young earth creationist and a socialist rolled into one.
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The US Constitution is about a set of enumerated powers. I don't see any of the enumerated powers that would allow the US government to intervene in society to "reduce the risk of homicides".
The Declaration of Independence is quite clear: government ought to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are negative rights.
Perhaps you are referring to the "laying of foundations" and "organization" in order to "most likely [effect] safety and happiness". It is your error to interpret such a phrase as an authorization for the government to take away individual liberties of law abiding citizen in order to reduce perceived risks. In fact, history and experience shows us that those kinds of policies end up doing the opposite. In any case, the Declaration of Independence is neither law, nor is it a statement of perfect principles of government (neither, for that matter is the US Constitution).
It isn't my "analysis" that is irrational. Rather, we disagree on the nature of government: you believe government ought to be rational, whereas I believe it ought to secure liberty. There are two things you don't seem to realize. First, those two goals cannot be achieved simultaneously: you can't have a society that is governed rationally and that simultaneously is free. Second, even if rational government were desirable, it couldn't be realized in practice; the more rational you attempt to make government, the more corrupt it becomes.
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear: Of course, none of this even amounts to a valid political argument.
I must have missed that part of the US Constitution.
Well, if gun ownership is not about rights but about expediency, why not outlaw gun ownership for African Americans? If gun control is effective, then that would cut the US murder rate in half. Of course, that would be a racist policy, but for progressives and Democrats, it's all about improving society statistically, isn't it?
In fact, the underlying problem with your reasoning is that you even think that there is something like "the" risks. Risk is an inherently subjective quantity: it depends fundamentally on the state of knowledge of the observer. Making policy based on risk estimates (or probabilities in general) is inherently unjust and is not compatible with a free society.
I don't have rely "the language", I looked at the data myself: there is no correlation. What that tells you is that if gun control has any effect, it can't be a large one.
It's hard to quantify gun control, but if you look at the rate of gun ownership vs the homicide rate, there is no correlation. There is a strong correlation between gun ownership and gun deaths, but that's mostly because people commit suicide with guns when guns are available.
Yeah, I think you put your finger on it: the authors wanted to "ensure" that homicide rates "can be linked to" gun ownership, and they massaged the data until they got that result.
In any case, even if everything they did were valid, all it would tell you is that "all things being equal", gun control would reduce homicide rates. But given that in the real world all things are not equal, gun control could still be completely ineffective, or even harmful. That is, you can't combine correlations in the way the authors implicitly assume when they try to draw conclusions about gun violence; it is statistically invalid.
Again, that kind of reasoning tells you that gun control is obviously not effective, and that these other factors need to be addressed.
In fact, from a political point of view, one might argue that gun control laws, low legal gun ownership, and high homicide rates are all caused by the same common factor, namely progressive and/or Democratic government (and I would add racism and poverty to the list of effects of progressivism as well).
Of course, none of this even amounts to a political argument. Politically, whether you decide to off your neighbor with your gun has no bearing on my interest or right to own a gun. That is, reducing homicide rates at any cost should not be the goal of government. East Germany had very low rates of gun violence and tough gun control laws, but you wouldn't have wanted to live there.
Well, that's because some parts of economics are sound and well-supported by data, and others are not. You know, like any other science as well.
I think most of what they predict would simply go unnoticed and be accepted as normal by people growing up with it.
In any case, what matters really is the cost/benefit tradeoffs, not whether it is "pretty".
As I was saying, I do believe that we should let Middle Easter countries elect whoever they want to and govern themselves however they want to. But don't kid yourself: they will be much worse off for it. The reason not to intervene is not because it helps them, but because it's cheaper and less risky for us.
Furthermore, if they elect "the wrong party" and end up threatening us, we still have to do something. If it isn't a coup, then that means military and economic containment from the outside. Think North Korea.
What we can't do is turn other nations into thriving democracies from the outside; democracy is something the people of a country need to desire themselves and grow into culturally. Note that "democracy" doesn't simply mean "majority rule" or "rule by popular will"; the Nazis were popularly elected, but they weren't democratic.
Do you imagine the MIddle East had liberal democracies before the US and Europe came in and destroyed it? The Middle East has been a totalitarian shithole for a long, long time. It never had "human rights" in the Western sense. And the whole point of many of these Islamic movements is to get rid of "national sovereignty" and restore an Islamic empire. And creating that Islamic empire isn't for the good of humanity, it is to take revenge for the fact that Europe successfully defended itself and kicked out the first few Islamic empires.
Now, I disapprove of the US and European governments meddling in the Middle East. It is clearly not very effective, it is very costly, and it just riles up the people who live there. But the West does not bear any moral responsibility for the plight of the people in the Middle East, and it isn't our responsibility to ensure that they have "national sovereignty and human rights". In fact, the Middle East probably has achieved more "national sovereignty and human rights" with US and European meddling than without, it's just that the price we are paying for it is too high for us.
There is a wide range of household gun ownership among US states (from 10% to 60%) and no correlation between gun ownership and homicide rate. Other statistics show similar results. The fact is that homicide rate in a large population simply doesn't have anything to do with rate of gun ownership, let alone rate of legal gun ownership. Furthermore, gun control has never been shown to be an effective measure of reducing homicide rates.
For some reason, people like you are obsessed with a policy objective ("outlaw guns") and then fabricate reasons to support it. You need to reflect on why that is.
You presume incorrectly that there is "a problem". Terrorism is a negligible cause of death. In fact, violent death as a whole keeps decreasing.
Who is this "we" you are speaking of? If you want to make sacrifices in order to deal with your fear of "terrorism, unsustainable growth, climate change", make them. It's simple. You can address these "problems" (such as they are) simply and effectively by moving and changing how you live.
What you are actually saying is that you want other people to make sacrifices in order to subsidize your current, preferred lifestyle, which somehow involves an irrational fear of a bunch of things.
These are "problems" only from the point of view of anti-terrorism efforts, but these laws are useless against terrorism anyway. What these laws are for are mostly to extend the power of banks (by eliminating cheap competition) and police (by letting them go on fishing expeditions through your data).
Precisely. And they weren't going to comply with reporting requirements either.
You don't say! And how is that working out for you?
You can do that even better by turning countries into police states or fascist dictatorships. Is that what you're going to advocate next?
No, sorry, in practice that's not true: more information only gains you "predictive power" if you have the resources to process it. In the case of anti-terrorism efforts, that means having the people to follow up on it, and short of turning all of Europe into a STASI operation, those resources are not there and won't be there. Even if you did that, it's still doubtful that you'd be able to prevent a lot of these attacks: these attacks seem to be not centrally organized, they are cheap, and the people engaging in them are not going to conform to banking or encryption laws any more than they are going to conform to gun control laws or laws against killing people.
Even if it were true, it's the wrong question to ask. The question isn't "does it improve our ability to fight terrorism", but "does it improve our ability to fight terrorism enough to justify the massive intrusion into personal liberties", and it does not. Tragic as the death of 129 people is, it is a miniscule cause of death compared to others, and there is little justification on expending a lot of resources on preventing such deaths.
I didn't claim that there was a "net benefit" to warming. I made a statement about the IPCC. However, I didn't say what I wanted to say.
What the IPCC actually says is that the cost of mitigation about balance the benefits from mitigation. That is, according to the IPCC, we always incur a net cost from climate change, but the cost is the same whether we successfully mitigate or not.
The cost is close to zero, since essentially nothing that is in Miami today will have any economic value in the year 2100. That fact is independent of what happens to Miami in the year 2100, whether it gets flooded, destroyed by a nuclear blast, or erased in an alien invasion.
Another way of looking at it is that about a hundred years ago, Miami was a tiny hamlet with a few hundred people, so at worst, it will simply go back to that; that is, over the span of 200 years, nothing will have been lost even if Miami becomes almost completely uninhabitable.
You're putting up one straw man and piece of FUD after another. Let's return to your original point: you were saying that climate change isn't uniform and were trying to imply that that puts us at greater risk. I was pointing out that the non-uniformity of climate change, in fact, puts us at an overall less risk, because from everything we know, climate change tends to make cold, biologically unproductive regions warmer, and dry regions wetter.
That's a straw man and unrelated to the original point. But let's run with it for fun. Several large extinction events were probably caused by asteroid impacts, volcanism, or biological innovation; climate change was a consequence of those events, not a cause. The few cases where extinctions with no other known cause coincided with climate change was due to cooling. I don't know of any case where warming has been demonstrated as the cause of any large extinction event. In any case, most climate change doesn't seem to lead to extinction at all; we have had dozens of rapid temperature oscillations by more than 10C over the last few million years with no large extinctions. Furthermore, paleontology is probably also not a good guide anyway; animals and plants today have been through so much climate change that they are likely adapted to highly variable climate.
That's not how deserts get reclaimed. You're mixing up the effects of slow ecological progression with "spreading". Even if seed dispersal was a problem, humans could easily and cheaply help the process along.
Again, a straw man and with little support. Animals and plants are very good at "crossing plains" because they have experienced these kinds of massive climate change many dozen times over the last few million years. As elsewhere, we can also help them along if we wanted to. Finally, the loss of a few high mountain ecosystems is unfortunate for biologists and museums, but hardly a big deal for humanity or the planet.
This is another straw man. I don't see what you think it is relevant to or in response to.
You said that "during the transition deserts will be likely without extensive human intervention - the existing vegetation can't migrate fast enough". Again, there is no evidence for that, and nothing you said changes that. In fact, deserts are already shrinking today, probably due to climate change. Good thing too.
Yes, just like economics classes point out why "competing systems" like socialism and fascism don't work and aren't actually "competing".
Your problem is that you don't listen to science and reason, and instead think that it's all a grand conspiracy. Kind of like a nutcase who thinks that ideas for perpetual motion machines are being suppressed by the evil oil companies.
I don't think it is "minor" at all: it identifies the political and legal system and the ruling class responsible for slavery, and that was British, not American.
Did I say otherwise? Note that this fact really largely relieves the US of responsibility: getting the British colonies to declare independence required this political compromise prior to the creation of the USA, and as soon as slave trade could be outlawed by the new country, it was outlawed.
Probably about half the slaves were brought to the current territory of the US under British rule, the other half under US rule; but all of those under US rule were either brought in under the legacy compromise that enabled the US to be founded in the first place, or were simply brought in illegally.
Note, however, that my statement was slightly different anyway; I said what it should say is that "hundreds of thousands of workers from Africa to the British colonies to work on British plantations". Those plantations weren't just in the modern territory of the US; there is no justification for discounting British guilt by looking at just the number of people they brought to the present day territory of the US.
There is little to support that assertion. The IPCC doesn't predict that. There is no evidence for it geologically. And it frankly doesn't make sense, given that the projected climate change isn't all that much faster than what we have already experienced and that people adapt to without even noticing.
Again, you are guessing, and quite wrongly. When precipitation goes up, deserts don't grow first and the shrink, they shrink immediately as they are settled by pioneering plants. Of course, mature plants of the right type may take decades to settle, but that's a different matter.
Probably someone who wanted to make a point about slavery and the issue of labor supply and demand in the colonies, something that is important and relevant in US history. It's not like they were trying to hide that these were slaves, since they were actually clear in the same sentence that these "workers" were brought in by the "Slave Trade".
A bigger question is what the author's "ideological proclivity" by misstating the numbers and locations so badly. The African Slave Trade did not, in fact, bring "millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations", it brought "hundreds of thousands of workers from Africa to the British colonies to work on British plantations". That is compared to the millions that were brought to other Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonies elsewhere.
There are indeed two massive errors in that sentence. First, the total number of slaves brought to the entire US from Africa was about 388000, and less than half a million if you count other points of origin, like the Carribean, not "millions". Second, most of those slaves weren't brought to the "southern United States" because they didn't exist yet, they were brought to British colonies that happen to be where the southern United States is located today.
It was European colonialism that forced more than 10 million Africans into slavery, and only a few percent of those slaves ended up in the territory of the US, most of them before the US even existed.
The context is provided right there: "The African Slave Trade brought millions of workers...", so they are obviously not pretending that these people came voluntarily. The fact that these slaves were "workers" from an economic point of view because economics drove a lot of the dispute between the North and the South.
There is, however, a far bigger problem with the sentence: the numbers are off by an order of magnitude. The total number of slaves brought to the US from Africa was around 388000; it was never "millions".
And your physics course was a propaganda platform for the Laws of Thermodynamics, with no discussion of perpetual motion machines. Reality and science sometimes are just no fun.
I want poor families to have the same privilege as rich families when it comes to education: send their kids to a school of their choice. The way to do that is to give kids school vouchers.
What snobs like you want is to railroad poor kids into lousy public schools, while they move into expensive suburbs with good schools, and while their political heroes send their kids to top private schools.
No, that's what you obviously are.
No, in fact what "global warming" mostly does is warm up cold place and cause more precipitation in dry place, while changing the already warm places much less. At the peak of the Eocene, the entire globe was covered with vegetation at any latitude, with tropical and subtropical vegetation far into Northern Europe. That's not exactly the "scorched earth" picture we always get with global warming articles.
The terms "global warming" and the use of global average temperatures as the primary measure to communicate about this are propagandistic choices made by people who want to get people that "global warming" is a disaster. Because the misrepresentation was too blatant, eventually, the term was changed to "climate change".
And it will be worth every cent!
I'm way ahead of you: (1) basically, even the IPCC says that the costs and benefits about balance out if we do nothing, and (2) the IPCC (as well as you) are actually overestimating the costs of inaction and underestimating the costs of action.
As for "Pollyannaism", it's people who propose action on AGW who are unreasonably optimistic: they believe that government action is effective, that its costs are lower than they are, and that we can somehow "stabilize" the climate and coastal areas. You people have all the naivite of a young earth creationist and a socialist rolled into one.