The only point I would add is that, in general, I do see activists as mainly people that are against something. They never want to improve the world, they don't have ideas for change - they just want to prevent you from changing things. Whenever that is not true, you stop being an activist and start being a movement.
How about more movements and less activism for a change?
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Okay. Here are the options that are currently achievable with modern technology.
1) Cut CO2 levels.
Your call! Take your pick.
And that is the problem. You feel that you understand the problem, and you have the only solution. Further, you are culling debate (or at the very least, those that agree with you are). You are claiming a consensus, or appealing to authority as the only evidence of your system. (Because of the complexity, etc.)
Look, I hate to say it, but I really am a rocket scientist - this is not about who is smarter. This is about access to information, and bias. I am not saying that I know the "one truth", I am saying that advocates aren't even discussing the truth (or at least that is the exception rather than the norm). You say that they have this model that can predict everything, OK, fine. I can't beleive you because you are obviously biased - there are more than one options here!
1. Reduce CO2 2. Put dust in the stratosphere 3. Put large mirrors in orbit 4. Put Al Gore in orbit and use his head to shade the Earth (sorry, couldn't resist!)
All these have about the same feasibility - yet you believe that #1 is the only answer. That is evidence of bias, and makes me strongly discount the rest of what you say. Yes, any of those would be hard to do - some might be impossible. But reducing CO2 without killing people is just as impossible.
OK, I agree that the government has the guns and can do this. I might even go so far as to say that in general this is a good thing. But using the consensus of a small group of people to decide policy for the rest of us is not good - it is a dictatorship. How would you feel about my example, forcing society to pay for anyone that wants to leave the planet? I can definately get a consensus on that from everyone that really understands rockets.
That's the problem with rule by consensus of scientists... and that even ignores the fact that science may be able to tell what the problem is, and whether different attempts to fix it will work - but it cannot tell us the best way to fix it. That is a political question - or at the very least an engineering one.
But does it really? People were talking about this before - I really don't think there is anyone that doesn't know about global warming. The problem is credibility - and this movie does not help!
Basicly heat radiates as the cube of the temperature change in kelven so going from 60 degrees...
This is what you commonly see as a reply to the "sun may be causing it" problem. What you have ignored is the effect of the atmosphere - as more energy comes in, there is more energy to get water into the atmosphere where it causes global warming because of the greenhouse effect (water is the strongest greenhouse gas). Basically, a 1% change in energy input can cause a 10% change in temperature, because as the temperature goes up less energy can escape the system. (Simplified answer - Earth is not a black body)
Venus hotter than Mercury even though it get's ~1/4 the heat from the sun.
Which proves my point - the atmosphere amplifies the effect of a change in input energy. Instead of comparing Venus to Mercury, compare it to Earth. Runaway global warming on Earth (100% CO2 atmosphere absorption line saturation) raises our temperature 10 degrees. The same thing raised Venus' temperature 700 degrees! The most important thing to realize is that and planet with an atmosphere is not a blackbody - and as temperature increases, the ability to get rid of energy goes down.
I have looked into it quite extensively, and I agree with A) it exists. Your B) is incorrect, however. The propper B) is B) we have caused a large increase in CO2, a known greenhouse gas. There is not much evidence that B) is what lead to A) - though making that assumption is understandable, unless you are trying to force others to follow your plan on the matter.
I agree with you about ignoring the loud mouths and looking at the data - but you and I may disagree on who the loud mouths are. I could probably make a movie using science to prove the the sky is green, it just wouldn't be helpful. I just don't think this movie has helped humanity at all...
True, true. But if an activist goes around saying that we must do X (I cannot imagin a possible X;-} ) because the Earth is 4.57216 billion years old and claims a consensus, it is still wrong.
The base problem is that biased people are trying to use government coertion to achieve there aims by claiming consensus. That is evil, and has nothing to do with global warming (or the age of the Earth, for that matter!).
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
As further proof of the topic in my previous post - those advocating change by claiming "consensus" have modded the parent comment down multiple times. Call it consensus by censorship...
Maybe this is really a time to say: "Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!";-}
Agreed, but that is not the debate I am hearing. The debate I am hearing is how we better turn power over to the activists and pretend that the economy is unimportant. Well, that is not going to go over very well, is it?
My real problem with climate science in general is that it is a very young field, and is trying to make these grandiose predictions. In the beginning of any human endevour there is a lot of error and over-assumption. The number one psychological failing among scientists is that they think they know a topic completely, and that therefor their predictions do not need to be "taken with a grain of salt." Ask a real climate scientist about the solar influence question - their best answer is that it doesn't seem to be likely that a change 100 years ago can effect weather today. But that is exactly what CO2 will do, right? And the Earth is pretty big, maybe it takes a century or two to fully adjust to a solar input variation.
The preceeding is not "the truth about global warming", or anything like that. It merely demonstrates that there are things that we don't know about the climate, that may eliminate the risk. Personally, I think there is at least a few degrees centigrade of truth in it - but that is belief, not fact.
Think about it this way - whenever an asteriod is seen that might impact Earth, the probability of impact keeps going up and up until that one observation that changes it to a probability of zero. You see that in science (and all human endevours - even managing servers and writing code) all the time.
My prediction: the probability and scary effects predicted by global warming will keep going up for a few years, and then plummet to a change of a few degrees as the field matures.
What's amazing is that you seem to be in favor of filing a movie by Al Gore as science. AL GORE, as is I invented the internet Al Gore? Please see a doctor immediately, there still may be a chance to save you!
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I once asked a global warming activist if they would still be against the use of oil if there was another way to eliminate global warming. He replied:
That would be great, but I would still argue against oil burning.
That is the real issue - and most people see that. To put it another way, what most people say about global warming is "there is a scientific concensus", and "you can't understand it unless you are a climatologist". Both of those arguments are obviously ad hominum - trust the message because of the messenger. If that is the only way to make the argument (which may be true - this is not simple stuff), then you need to be especially careful about the flip side - the ad hominum attack. Mankind is supposed to trust you because of who you are, but one of the things you are is biased. Good, bad, or indifferent, that is how most people percieve the situation. Of course, sites like this help a lot - but even then, since the average layman can't really follow the physics, it still smells of ad hominum.
The problem is that there are alternate explanations that have not been eliminated. For example, a possible posit is that atmospheric effects act as an amplifier of the solar input. In other words, a 10% increase in solar activity causes a 100% increase in temperature, with about a 1000 year step response function (or delay before the results show). So a slight increase in solar activity 100 years ago can cause an exponential rise in temperature today.
Venus is very strong evidence for this (as are changes in other planet's weather) - that atmosphere is clearly doing things that are impossible at Earth's solar energy levels. The worst case numbers (at 100% CO2 absorption band saturation) is about a 10C swing for Earth's energy input levels.
That said, this theory is certainly not proven either (though it does fit all the facts) - and if we do experience (or can forcast convincingly) global warming that is annoying to humans we should look at CO2 reduction or insolation reduction (there are many methods available, all need to be explored without bias).
The global warming activits do not see what is wrong with what they propose - they say that the changes needed will not put us back in the stone age. But they are talking about taking my money away from me and transfering it to their priorities (for certain values of them and me), at gun point. (I'm assuming here that I am not allowed to opt out). How would everyone here feel if I forced the world's population to pay for my priorities (cheap space access for all, btw). I honestly think that cheap space access will solve 90% of the worlds problems, and is a good investment. Should I be able to gather a consensus of like minded people and force the world to pay for it?
Again, this is why the separation of problem and solution is so important - otherwise, you are simply viewed as presenting your agenda. Global warming should not be about CO2, except to scientists. Global warming should be about how likely it is to get hot, and what we can do about it - all of the options. In other words, when global warming is suspected, and the obvious solution to scientists is to cut CO2 and the crowd reacts negatively - give them the other options, and say choose! Don't presume to choose for them - if you do that, they cannot trust you. And if they cannot trust you and cannot understand the physics, they will not avoid an approaching global warming catastrophe.
To wit, making the movie "An inconvenient truth" was worse than doing nothing. It riles up the activists - making the normal people less likely to believe them - and doesn't really bring any new information to the debate. It's not like global warming was unheard of - it just has a credibility problem.
Unfortunately, that analogy has the cart driving the horse. A propper analogy might be: your hourly rate driver is driving in normal conditions. He tells you, citing other hourly drivers that agree with him, that unknown and unseeable conditions make it dangerous to drive over 10 miles per hour. Everyone else on the road is continuing to go 60.
It is more than slightly possible that the driver is inflating the danger. You can't know, you just don't have access to the information - but the fact that his interests are so well aligned with his message pegs your BS meter.
It is the same with global warming for many people.
This is easy if you stop trying to go it alone and start thinking about using existing resources. Every day there are just over 10 million aircraft that take off, go up to the stratosphere, and then come back down. Want to get something up there? Coat the bottom of the wing with it, put it in a bag, something. A $10,000 change to the airplane, a few thousand dollars a year to refill the bags at major airports. Easy.
They say they need about 10 million tons of sulfur put up per year. That is 5 pounds (2.5 kg for you EU guys) per flight! Are you going to tell me that we couldn't require planes to take an extra 5 pounds up with them?
Now the question of should we do it is valid - but can we do it is not a question.
1) Global warming is complex, and can not be undeniably explained to a normal person. 2) Therefor: The only way to tell the veracity of global warming is to examine the messenger. 3) The messengers all have huge biases, either for or against. 4) Therefor: There is not enough information to act upon.
Thing like this anouncement help fight against this, because you can't exactly call someone who is calling for world-wide polution a tree hugger.
This is why I personally advocate putting mirror satelites in orbit. The satelites can either reflect more sunlight in or block the sunlight as needed, and can adjust to events very quickly.
The only problem is that it is a tad expensive, and I can't get a "consensus of scientists" to support it...
What's funny is that this is exactly what I was blogging about earlier - that if they want to be taken seriously, they should seriously talk about the "inexpensive" remediation policies. I even specifically mentioned putting dust in the high atmosphere. (I wonder if he reads the same blogs I do). In my example, for far less than the estimated $400B per year (1% of GDP) decreasing our fuel consumption would cost we could install dirtbags on airliners and dump reflective dirt in the upper atmosphere.
At least we are talking about positive steps now, not just "don't kill the planet". This also totally eliminates the conflict of interest between the conservationalists and the global warming problem - in essence, they are saying "we take this global warming thing so seriously that we are willing to put aside tree hugging and give real options."
As a slightly more serious alternative, how about putting bags of dirt on all our jets - adding dust to the upper atmosphere would reduce the global warming effect in a completely controllable way. This could probably be done for only a few billion dollars...
I simply don't believe the private sector has the resources (or the will) to make sure everyone has the necessities of life.
Actually, the private sector has far more resources than the public sector. The problem is the will to use it, as you point out. I think this could be worked out, but perhaps is not worth it. The real thing to remember about welfare is that it really doesn't work 10% of the time - and if the Feds are in charge, there is no alternate plan to try (this is definately an area where one size does not fit all). I know many people (myself included) that the government's welfare program left hanging in the breeze.
Probably what we have now (a mixture of private and public) is the best. I just get upset whenever someone argues for increasing government welfare at the expense of private citizens (and by extension, private welfare) as the pinacle of perfection.
Well, I don't have a problem feeding kids, obviously. But I don't believe that more government is the answer. Personally, I give a little over a tenth of my income to a group of volunteers that helps people pick themselves up - they don't earn any money, and they teach job application skills, help people find jobs, and give loans for education (mainly outside the US). If everyone did that, I think we wouldn't have these problems - but if you doubled the government budget, I would seriously bet that the problem would get worse, not better!
BS - I lost the use of my legs for several years, was unable to get out of bed, and was turned down by our government's welfare system (oh, and my family was overseas, my father was in the military) - but I still paid my own way. If you want a job and are willing to do anything to get one, you can get one. You can also live on an astonishingly small amount of money (I used to buy 10-20 hamburgers at McDonalds on 10 cent Tuesdays, and I'd have enough to eat for a week on $2). I am now in nearly constant pain when I walk, but I walk anyway, and it is slowly getting better. I have a job, I create startups - and because I stuck to it, I'm now pretty good at it. (And for the record, I live in Illinois.)
That, and government welfare systems do not work - they decide who needs help based on politics (in this case, I believe racism was involved), not need. (Why does more than 1/3 of my income go to welfare again?)
The reason it makes sense economically is because companies would be persuing it regardless of government coertion - by definition, since there is no current government coertion. If we get the government involved with edicts like "thou shalt develope only hydrogen or solar cars", then you have the broken glass fallicy. Essentially, if the government forces people to use more expensive/valuable resources than are currently used those resources are not available for doing something else. Money spent replacing cars (that already work just fine) is money not spent curing cancer, to rehash an overused phrase.
This doesn't mean that there is no reason for government involvement, but it does mean that if there is government involvement jobs are lost, not created. (Interestingly enough you can prove that this is true in the general case of government spending, assuming only that a capitalist economy outperforms a government based one - but no one cares, not when it comes to their job! Something to remember whenever a congress-critter talks about the jobs they have brought to the state...)
What does this have to do with the dabate on whether this is anthropomorphic or not?
Why are you so interested in assigning blame? Who cares if it was humanity or the great goat of the stars? The only valid questions are:
1) Can we predict future weather enough to try to avoid problems we see coming? 2) Can we change future weather enough to make a difference once a problem is seen? 3) Are we better off trying to change the weather or adjusting to the new weather?
Any other questions are pointless posturing.
As far as I know, very few global warming scaremongers are asking these questions. The answer to question 1) may very well be yes, at least when it comes to overall trends - but the answer to 2) and 3) are definately no. We do not know enough to change things rationally (how much CO2 is OK?) - and even if we knew that we cannot enforce harsh provisions on developing countries politically (and that matters - killing your own economy to accomplish nothing is dumb). We don't know how much it would cost to alter the weather (see the answer to #2), and we don't know how much it would cost to adjust to the new weather (because even if #1 is yes, it still is a very imprecise prediction).
So really, the logical response is to wait and see - and fund the scientists. But the scientists are not hurting for funding right now, anyway.
Well, according to this article, we can easily reverse global warming by painting everything white. A recent article said that we could fix the problem by spending 1% of GDP now - about $600B. I am an engineer, so obviously I can do better than that! The Earth's surface area is 150,000,000 sq km. Normal white paint can cover of 300 sq. ft. per gallon - so we need about 1.6x1015/300 ~ 5 trillion gallons. At $1 per gallon (I'm sure we could get a volume discount!), that is a mere $5 trillion dollars. Compared to this, that $600B looks like a steal - but remember, this paint job will last 20 years (Longer, if you ignore your neighbors complaints!) so it is actually to be compared with $12 trillion! This is a win-win, guys! (Quickly buys Sherman Williams stock)... And once the planet starts freezing, we can paint it black to fix that!
On a slightly more serious note, I'm also interested by the rock weathering reaction that takes CO2 out of the air - the reaction rate increases exponentially as temperature rises, so it would seem to be a regulator for global warming. Has anyone seen that mentioned in a study? This study seems to say that enough carbon dioxide to shock heat the entire Earth from below freezing to 50C was very quickly (less than 100 years) taken out of the atmosphere - that is fairly impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
My thoughts exactly!
The only point I would add is that, in general, I do see activists as mainly people that are against something. They never want to improve the world, they don't have ideas for change - they just want to prevent you from changing things. Whenever that is not true, you stop being an activist and start being a movement.
How about more movements and less activism for a change?
Okay. Here are the options that are currently achievable with modern technology.
1) Cut CO2 levels.
Your call! Take your pick.
And that is the problem. You feel that you understand the problem, and you have the only solution. Further, you are culling debate (or at the very least, those that agree with you are). You are claiming a consensus, or appealing to authority as the only evidence of your system. (Because of the complexity, etc.)
Look, I hate to say it, but I really am a rocket scientist - this is not about who is smarter. This is about access to information, and bias. I am not saying that I know the "one truth", I am saying that advocates aren't even discussing the truth (or at least that is the exception rather than the norm). You say that they have this model that can predict everything, OK, fine. I can't beleive you because you are obviously biased - there are more than one options here!
1. Reduce CO2
2. Put dust in the stratosphere
3. Put large mirrors in orbit
4. Put Al Gore in orbit and use his head to shade the Earth (sorry, couldn't resist!)
All these have about the same feasibility - yet you believe that #1 is the only answer. That is evidence of bias, and makes me strongly discount the rest of what you say. Yes, any of those would be hard to do - some might be impossible. But reducing CO2 without killing people is just as impossible.
OK, I agree that the government has the guns and can do this. I might even go so far as to say that in general this is a good thing. But using the consensus of a small group of people to decide policy for the rest of us is not good - it is a dictatorship. How would you feel about my example, forcing society to pay for anyone that wants to leave the planet? I can definately get a consensus on that from everyone that really understands rockets.
That's the problem with rule by consensus of scientists... and that even ignores the fact that science may be able to tell what the problem is, and whether different attempts to fix it will work - but it cannot tell us the best way to fix it. That is a political question - or at the very least an engineering one.
I see the movie as opening up debate
But does it really? People were talking about this before - I really don't think there is anyone that doesn't know about global warming. The problem is credibility - and this movie does not help!
Basicly heat radiates as the cube of the temperature change in kelven so going from 60 degrees...
This is what you commonly see as a reply to the "sun may be causing it" problem. What you have ignored is the effect of the atmosphere - as more energy comes in, there is more energy to get water into the atmosphere where it causes global warming because of the greenhouse effect (water is the strongest greenhouse gas). Basically, a 1% change in energy input can cause a 10% change in temperature, because as the temperature goes up less energy can escape the system. (Simplified answer - Earth is not a black body)
Venus hotter than Mercury even though it get's ~1/4 the heat from the sun.
Which proves my point - the atmosphere amplifies the effect of a change in input energy. Instead of comparing Venus to Mercury, compare it to Earth. Runaway global warming on Earth (100% CO2 atmosphere absorption line saturation) raises our temperature 10 degrees. The same thing raised Venus' temperature 700 degrees! The most important thing to realize is that and planet with an atmosphere is not a blackbody - and as temperature increases, the ability to get rid of energy goes down.
I have looked into it quite extensively, and I agree with A) it exists. Your B) is incorrect, however. The propper B) is B) we have caused a large increase in CO2, a known greenhouse gas. There is not much evidence that B) is what lead to A) - though making that assumption is understandable, unless you are trying to force others to follow your plan on the matter.
I agree with you about ignoring the loud mouths and looking at the data - but you and I may disagree on who the loud mouths are. I could probably make a movie using science to prove the the sky is green, it just wouldn't be helpful. I just don't think this movie has helped humanity at all...
True, true. But if an activist goes around saying that we must do X (I cannot imagin a possible X ;-} ) because the Earth is 4.57216 billion years old and claims a consensus, it is still wrong.
The base problem is that biased people are trying to use government coertion to achieve there aims by claiming consensus. That is evil, and has nothing to do with global warming (or the age of the Earth, for that matter!).
As further proof of the topic in my previous post - those advocating change by claiming "consensus" have modded the parent comment down multiple times. Call it consensus by censorship...
;-}
Maybe this is really a time to say: "Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!"
I wasn't going to reply to this, because everyone seems to be taking a joke WAY too seriously, but I'd like to point out something:
Bu, science is science, regardless of who is presenting it, or who disagrees with it. That's the beauty of facts.
You lose all rights to this statement when your leading argument is: "There is a scientific consensus." Think about it.
Yes, yes - it is a funny. Not real. Just funny.
Agreed, but that is not the debate I am hearing. The debate I am hearing is how we better turn power over to the activists and pretend that the economy is unimportant. Well, that is not going to go over very well, is it?
My real problem with climate science in general is that it is a very young field, and is trying to make these grandiose predictions. In the beginning of any human endevour there is a lot of error and over-assumption. The number one psychological failing among scientists is that they think they know a topic completely, and that therefor their predictions do not need to be "taken with a grain of salt." Ask a real climate scientist about the solar influence question - their best answer is that it doesn't seem to be likely that a change 100 years ago can effect weather today. But that is exactly what CO2 will do, right? And the Earth is pretty big, maybe it takes a century or two to fully adjust to a solar input variation.
The preceeding is not "the truth about global warming", or anything like that. It merely demonstrates that there are things that we don't know about the climate, that may eliminate the risk. Personally, I think there is at least a few degrees centigrade of truth in it - but that is belief, not fact.
Think about it this way - whenever an asteriod is seen that might impact Earth, the probability of impact keeps going up and up until that one observation that changes it to a probability of zero. You see that in science (and all human endevours - even managing servers and writing code) all the time.
My prediction: the probability and scary effects predicted by global warming will keep going up for a few years, and then plummet to a change of a few degrees as the field matures.
What's amazing is that you seem to be in favor of filing a movie by Al Gore as science. AL GORE, as is I invented the internet Al Gore? Please see a doctor immediately, there still may be a chance to save you!
I once asked a global warming activist if they would still be against the use of oil if there was another way to eliminate global warming. He replied:
That would be great, but I would still argue against oil burning.
That is the real issue - and most people see that. To put it another way, what most people say about global warming is "there is a scientific concensus", and "you can't understand it unless you are a climatologist". Both of those arguments are obviously ad hominum - trust the message because of the messenger. If that is the only way to make the argument (which may be true - this is not simple stuff), then you need to be especially careful about the flip side - the ad hominum attack. Mankind is supposed to trust you because of who you are, but one of the things you are is biased. Good, bad, or indifferent, that is how most people percieve the situation. Of course, sites like this help a lot - but even then, since the average layman can't really follow the physics, it still smells of ad hominum.
The problem is that there are alternate explanations that have not been eliminated. For example, a possible posit is that atmospheric effects act as an amplifier of the solar input. In other words, a 10% increase in solar activity causes a 100% increase in temperature, with about a 1000 year step response function (or delay before the results show). So a slight increase in solar activity 100 years ago can cause an exponential rise in temperature today.
Venus is very strong evidence for this (as are changes in other planet's weather) - that atmosphere is clearly doing things that are impossible at Earth's solar energy levels. The worst case numbers (at 100% CO2 absorption band saturation) is about a 10C swing for Earth's energy input levels.
That said, this theory is certainly not proven either (though it does fit all the facts) - and if we do experience (or can forcast convincingly) global warming that is annoying to humans we should look at CO2 reduction or insolation reduction (there are many methods available, all need to be explored without bias).
The global warming activits do not see what is wrong with what they propose - they say that the changes needed will not put us back in the stone age. But they are talking about taking my money away from me and transfering it to their priorities (for certain values of them and me), at gun point. (I'm assuming here that I am not allowed to opt out). How would everyone here feel if I forced the world's population to pay for my priorities (cheap space access for all, btw). I honestly think that cheap space access will solve 90% of the worlds problems, and is a good investment. Should I be able to gather a consensus of like minded people and force the world to pay for it?
Again, this is why the separation of problem and solution is so important - otherwise, you are simply viewed as presenting your agenda. Global warming should not be about CO2, except to scientists. Global warming should be about how likely it is to get hot, and what we can do about it - all of the options. In other words, when global warming is suspected, and the obvious solution to scientists is to cut CO2 and the crowd reacts negatively - give them the other options, and say choose! Don't presume to choose for them - if you do that, they cannot trust you. And if they cannot trust you and cannot understand the physics, they will not avoid an approaching global warming catastrophe.
To wit, making the movie "An inconvenient truth" was worse than doing nothing. It riles up the activists - making the normal people less likely to believe them - and doesn't really bring any new information to the debate. It's not like global warming was unheard of - it just has a credibility problem.
Unfortunately, that analogy has the cart driving the horse. A propper analogy might be: your hourly rate driver is driving in normal conditions. He tells you, citing other hourly drivers that agree with him, that unknown and unseeable conditions make it dangerous to drive over 10 miles per hour. Everyone else on the road is continuing to go 60.
It is more than slightly possible that the driver is inflating the danger. You can't know, you just don't have access to the information - but the fact that his interests are so well aligned with his message pegs your BS meter.
It is the same with global warming for many people.
This is easy if you stop trying to go it alone and start thinking about using existing resources. Every day there are just over 10 million aircraft that take off, go up to the stratosphere, and then come back down. Want to get something up there? Coat the bottom of the wing with it, put it in a bag, something. A $10,000 change to the airplane, a few thousand dollars a year to refill the bags at major airports. Easy.
They say they need about 10 million tons of sulfur put up per year. That is 5 pounds (2.5 kg for you EU guys) per flight! Are you going to tell me that we couldn't require planes to take an extra 5 pounds up with them?
Now the question of should we do it is valid - but can we do it is not a question.
The basic problem is this:
1) Global warming is complex, and can not be undeniably explained to a normal person.
2) Therefor: The only way to tell the veracity of global warming is to examine the messenger.
3) The messengers all have huge biases, either for or against.
4) Therefor: There is not enough information to act upon.
Thing like this anouncement help fight against this, because you can't exactly call someone who is calling for world-wide polution a tree hugger.
Well, maybe a tree hugger on (sulfuric) acid...
This is why I personally advocate putting mirror satelites in orbit. The satelites can either reflect more sunlight in or block the sunlight as needed, and can adjust to events very quickly.
The only problem is that it is a tad expensive, and I can't get a "consensus of scientists" to support it...
What's funny is that this is exactly what I was blogging about earlier - that if they want to be taken seriously, they should seriously talk about the "inexpensive" remediation policies. I even specifically mentioned putting dust in the high atmosphere. (I wonder if he reads the same blogs I do). In my example, for far less than the estimated $400B per year (1% of GDP) decreasing our fuel consumption would cost we could install dirtbags on airliners and dump reflective dirt in the upper atmosphere.
At least we are talking about positive steps now, not just "don't kill the planet". This also totally eliminates the conflict of interest between the conservationalists and the global warming problem - in essence, they are saying "we take this global warming thing so seriously that we are willing to put aside tree hugging and give real options."
As a slightly more serious alternative, how about putting bags of dirt on all our jets - adding dust to the upper atmosphere would reduce the global warming effect in a completely controllable way. This could probably be done for only a few billion dollars...
I simply don't believe the private sector has the resources (or the will) to make sure everyone has the necessities of life.
Actually, the private sector has far more resources than the public sector. The problem is the will to use it, as you point out. I think this could be worked out, but perhaps is not worth it. The real thing to remember about welfare is that it really doesn't work 10% of the time - and if the Feds are in charge, there is no alternate plan to try (this is definately an area where one size does not fit all). I know many people (myself included) that the government's welfare program left hanging in the breeze.
Probably what we have now (a mixture of private and public) is the best. I just get upset whenever someone argues for increasing government welfare at the expense of private citizens (and by extension, private welfare) as the pinacle of perfection.
Well, I don't have a problem feeding kids, obviously. But I don't believe that more government is the answer. Personally, I give a little over a tenth of my income to a group of volunteers that helps people pick themselves up - they don't earn any money, and they teach job application skills, help people find jobs, and give loans for education (mainly outside the US). If everyone did that, I think we wouldn't have these problems - but if you doubled the government budget, I would seriously bet that the problem would get worse, not better!
BS - I lost the use of my legs for several years, was unable to get out of bed, and was turned down by our government's welfare system (oh, and my family was overseas, my father was in the military) - but I still paid my own way. If you want a job and are willing to do anything to get one, you can get one. You can also live on an astonishingly small amount of money (I used to buy 10-20 hamburgers at McDonalds on 10 cent Tuesdays, and I'd have enough to eat for a week on $2). I am now in nearly constant pain when I walk, but I walk anyway, and it is slowly getting better. I have a job, I create startups - and because I stuck to it, I'm now pretty good at it. (And for the record, I live in Illinois.)
That, and government welfare systems do not work - they decide who needs help based on politics (in this case, I believe racism was involved), not need. (Why does more than 1/3 of my income go to welfare again?)
What you say is true, but only just barely ;-}
The reason it makes sense economically is because companies would be persuing it regardless of government coertion - by definition, since there is no current government coertion. If we get the government involved with edicts like "thou shalt develope only hydrogen or solar cars", then you have the broken glass fallicy. Essentially, if the government forces people to use more expensive/valuable resources than are currently used those resources are not available for doing something else. Money spent replacing cars (that already work just fine) is money not spent curing cancer, to rehash an overused phrase.
This doesn't mean that there is no reason for government involvement, but it does mean that if there is government involvement jobs are lost, not created. (Interestingly enough you can prove that this is true in the general case of government spending, assuming only that a capitalist economy outperforms a government based one - but no one cares, not when it comes to their job! Something to remember whenever a congress-critter talks about the jobs they have brought to the state...)
What does this have to do with the dabate on whether this is anthropomorphic or not?
Why are you so interested in assigning blame? Who cares if it was humanity or the great goat of the stars? The only valid questions are:
1) Can we predict future weather enough to try to avoid problems we see coming?
2) Can we change future weather enough to make a difference once a problem is seen?
3) Are we better off trying to change the weather or adjusting to the new weather?
Any other questions are pointless posturing.
As far as I know, very few global warming scaremongers are asking these questions. The answer to question 1) may very well be yes, at least when it comes to overall trends - but the answer to 2) and 3) are definately no. We do not know enough to change things rationally (how much CO2 is OK?) - and even if we knew that we cannot enforce harsh provisions on developing countries politically (and that matters - killing your own economy to accomplish nothing is dumb). We don't know how much it would cost to alter the weather (see the answer to #2), and we don't know how much it would cost to adjust to the new weather (because even if #1 is yes, it still is a very imprecise prediction).
So really, the logical response is to wait and see - and fund the scientists. But the scientists are not hurting for funding right now, anyway.
Well, according to this article, we can easily reverse global warming by painting everything white. A recent article said that we could fix the problem by spending 1% of GDP now - about $600B. I am an engineer, so obviously I can do better than that! The Earth's surface area is 150,000,000 sq km. Normal white paint can cover of 300 sq. ft. per gallon - so we need about 1.6x1015/300 ~ 5 trillion gallons. At $1 per gallon (I'm sure we could get a volume discount!), that is a mere $5 trillion dollars. Compared to this, that $600B looks like a steal - but remember, this paint job will last 20 years (Longer, if you ignore your neighbors complaints!) so it is actually to be compared with $12 trillion! This is a win-win, guys! (Quickly buys Sherman Williams stock)... And once the planet starts freezing, we can paint it black to fix that!
On a slightly more serious note, I'm also interested by the rock weathering reaction that takes CO2 out of the air - the reaction rate increases exponentially as temperature rises, so it would seem to be a regulator for global warming. Has anyone seen that mentioned in a study? This study seems to say that enough carbon dioxide to shock heat the entire Earth from below freezing to 50C was very quickly (less than 100 years) taken out of the atmosphere - that is fairly impressive.