Wow, yet another 'human' with species hatred so badly that you can totally ignore the 'magnitude' arguments here.
Not at all. The thing here is that intelligence is quite powerful. Even a small number of humans could kill off all the large mammals, if they were so inclined. And it's the only explanation which can span two continents.
Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
It's worth noting that neither happened. The citizenry still has lots of guns and people are still dying at a pretty high rate (with 2014 starting at an even higher rate than 2013).
Recent estimates for the total CO2 release put it at ~13,000 to 43,000 PgC in 20 to 400 ky -- an annual carbon release of ~0.1 to 1 PgC per year [compared with 9.9 PgC in 2008].
Here's the obvious problems with that particular comment. It's an estimate with order of magnitude error right there in time and another significant error in CO2 quantity (with a ceiling of 2 PgC incidentally rather than the 1 PgC claimed in the article). Second, time resolution is at best 20 ky. If a basalt flood eruption dumped 1,000 PcG or more in a single year, we wouldn't know. This ignorance about variability matters because of two factors, first, it probably understates the impact of the eruptions which are thought to have caused this extinction event by a large amount. Huge variability of eruptions would IMHO have created a much more lethal situation globally than even, continuous eruption would have done. Second, it weakens the comparison with human-generated CO2 emissions because those are far less variable.
Third, we don't actually accurately know the amount of CO2 released, because some of it would have been sinked. Or because the estimates are at best poor as I previously noted. We also don't have a good idea what else was released, which might have been more lethal than the CO2 (for example, sulfates or fluorides).
Finally, it's worth noting that even if your assertion is complete and accurate, it would take at minimum a millennium for current rates of CO2 production and 13,000 PgC (the lower bound) to put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to match the impact of this extinction event. The upper bound increases that to over four millennia. We should be able to figure things out long before that happens.
That last part leads to one of my bigger concerns. What is the hurry? Sure, we don't want to run the situation out for a few millennia until we end up in a huge global extinction event. But we can figure things out in far less time than that.
I think this research indicates it's just not ready for making decisions that affect the lives of billions of people. It's an interesting and somewhat plausible story, but there's just too much error and uncertainty.
But we don't even know if we'll have a large fossil fuel economy anywhere in the world by the end of the century.
Fossils and oxygen isotopes are both direct observations.
Fossils are direct observations of the organism that made the fossil. "Oxygen isotopes" are the direct observation of a current ratio of oxygen in some geological structure which may or may not have relevance to a particular point or period of local climate in the past.
I think it's foolish to claim that one is directly measuring something climate-related when one has no means to back that claim.
Hopefully you're right to ignore Honisch et al. 2012.
What is there to ignore? Looking at the abstract, they make the claim:
Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistryâ"a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.
It's worth noting that they don't actually have evidence to back the claim of being "unprecedented". The more accurate and honest phrasing would have been that they had been unable to find evidence of similar rapidity of CO2 release in past geological events that they looked at.
For example, an obvious rebuttal is that a fast CO2 emission rate which didn't lead to long term changes in climate probably would not appear in the geological record.
Another issue is diffusion. Even in solid rock, you will have considerable diffusion of the isotopes they measured over the time frame of hundreds of millions of years. There could have been numerous times during the period of the Permian-Triassic extinction event when CO2 emission levels were increasing far faster than present, but due to diffusion, this fine detail would be lost.
I know it's best not to go tampering around where my good intentions could lead to very unexpected (and perhaps very unpleasant) results.
I see your point with one caveat. You don't actually "know" what you claim to know. Good intentions can lead to very unpleasant results or they could lead to very wonderful results. One way to find out is by actually doing it and seeing what happens.
Small local tribes can only exhaust small local populations
Everywhere in the Americas would have had local tribes inside of a few hundred years. Humans get around. That's how a local problem becomes a continental-scale one.
Even before we get there, we will need to tackle the question of whether a created machine can be granted the civil rights normally associated with an adult human, at all..
We could grant the civil rights of an adult human to a screw driver. So yes, I think we could do it for a created machine that actually would be able to exercise those rights.
It however requires assuming that jobs grow on trees.
Jobs don't grow on trees, but they do grow in healthy economies.
Places without social safety nets do better economically, but guess what happens to their economic output? Only a fraction goes back to their own people.
A large fraction of that wealth - enough to improve the well being of those people considerably. And it's no different for economies with safety nets. A fraction of their wealth goes to their own people. The rest goes to the wealthy as well.
When the economy grows, two things happen
1) Society has more ability to pay for stuff, including social safety nets
2) A growing demand for social safety nets. The coming tide lifts all boats, but it doesn't lift them equally. Those who didn't get rich or as rich as others will convince themselves that they could have done better, if only there were safety nets.
So what? You just spelled out the fundamental problem of modern society, namely, that there's a lot of ignorant and/or greedy people who would destroy what gives them wealth in order to obtain that wealth. That is, they'll strangle the golden goose in order to get gold eggs faster. The solution is to deny them these destructive wants rather than placate them with it.
Just like a single fossil isn't sufficient support for evolution, global estimates require measurements at different locations.
And once again, we come to the fundamental different between the two things. A fossil is a direct observation of an organism that made the fossil. Collect enough fossils and you can trace the evolution of the organisms that made them.
The speleothem observation is something that might be relevant to a local temperature measurement or it might not. We don't know since we don't have direct observations of the climate of that time. So we could collect a bunch of such observation from spatial and temporally different points, but we wouldn't know whether we're collecting data that is relevant to the climate estimates we wish to make.
So it is the nuclear industries fault that they follow safety regs and your mom and pop solar installer doesn't?
I also blame them for morning wood. Their perfidy knows no bounds.
I think it is more helpful to consider my post an observation rather than an accusation. Solar power would have gotten a lot more expensive both for the producers and for the regulators, if governments were regulating it just as thoroughly as nuclear power is. So sure, it might be possible to get solar power safety figures down to the point where there're similar deaths per MwH as there are with nuclear, but it'd greatly increase the cost of solar in the process.
Of course one can claim that those numbers can be reduced with proper safety measures but if one accept that argument for solar then the same should hold for nuclear.
Only if nuclear is at the same level of non-compliance with proper safety measures. I wonder what the price tag would need to be to get solar regulated at the same hardcore level as is present with the nuclear industry?
than the impossible task of digging up and radiocarbon dating speleothems from the 350s and analyzing their growth rates.
Which is irrelevant to the argument we were making. Speleothems do not measure mean global temperature.
Khallow knows that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and oceans ten times faster than before the Great Dying has only modest effects.
This assertion is not based on evidence. Nobody was around during the end of the Permian to measure this and compare it to today. Or to tell us whether the degree of CO2 release is as important as is claimed today. Volcanos release a lot of other chemicals, some which are far nastier than CO2 and it may be those other chemicals which triggered the dire effects of the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
Your observation, even if accurate, also tells us nothing about the degree of absolute change. After all, there are faster changes in CO2 levels between the seasons than there are in collective rise of CO2 from year to year. Yet we don't care about those changes because they are reversed over the course of the year.
And I find it interesting how you prove my point by posting something so hysterical and unsubstantiated. Are you shilling for the Koch brothers?
Khallow is so certain of this that he's accusing climate scientists of fraud, apparently including Plass 1956 and Chamberlin 1897 which were presumably just playing games with the ambiguous term "climatic change".
Just because two people use a term doesn't mean that they use the term for the same reasons. Using the term, "climate change" for unspecified changes in climate (in other words, for the situation it should be used for) is a different kettle of fish than using it as a label for a very specific sort of change, namely, human carbon dioxide emissions (and to a lesser extent other greenhouse gas emissions) that happens to increase global mean temperature and a few related effects.
Firstly, for it to be slander, it would have to be untrue. Alas... as you just said, it is totally, completely, and utterly true.
As the previous poster, it was untrue. The company didn't give out this gear, the employee did.
They don't "interfere with the game's economy"? A month's worth of game time costs $9.95... a plex costs about $15 and does the same thing in game. And since Sir You Obviously Weren't There has forgotten... players protested en masse in a place in game called "Jita" over this "pay to win" model, many quit, and the server crashed several times as they tried (and succeeded) to overload the blade the busiest system in game. So yeah, please stop drinking the koolaid... Eve is a very interesting game, but CCP can and does make mistakes. Big ones. Stackless Python for the backend comes to mind... necessitating this "time dilation" they speak of... which is really code for "The server's so fucking overloaded everything's running like shit."
I see you don't actually refute the claim. I do agree that CCP interferes hard with the game, but not in this way. Every time they have an expansion they whack on the game with a mallet. First, there's the flavor of the month changes with ships, tactics, resources, and industry which are always overcompensating. This causes in turn a massive shift in the economy as huge portions of the Eve world retool to meet the new need. Second, there's the new technologies and industries developed which always require people to do things which they weren't doing before.
Either way, the economy gets kranged hard as people go for the new hotness.
As to stackless Python, anything else would have the same trouble, though perhaps at somewhat different levels of load. The time dilation is required because players bring lots of friends and there is a huge interaction load when a lot of people are in the same place at the same time.
If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there's only one way it ends: With a lot of death. Whether it's due to plague, starvation, or war, eventually a large portion of the human race is going to die.
What part of that 20,000 years of "history" (including over 14,000 years of prehistory) actually indicates what you think it indicates? I don't see it myself.
Maybe they didn't have the choice to land it normally. If the drone will crash, it's better to crash it where there are no people rather than say, the middle of San Diego.
This is not a hypothetical situation that has never happened before. For example, a passenger jet made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York City in 2009. That beat running the plane through a building or belly flopping on a crowded street.
Also notice how the masses are also goaded to hate the Chinese and globalization. This discourages the masses from seeking aid from China or other countries to topple the current regime. Don't want the same trick you used on the British used on yourself see. The characterization of France being cheese eating surrender monkeys also helps keep Americans isolated from those who used to help them gain independence or gifted them the Statue of Liberty...
Ever hear the term "exporting the pollution"? This competition between cultures and societies is the great threat to social safety nets everywhere since the parts of the world with less of a social safety net will do better economically than the ones with more.
History has shown that the poor, if not placated, are capable of much more harmful activities than merely not work or think about the future.
You can placate them with a useful job too. That doesn't require a "social safety net", especially ones for which few of their activities have anything to do with helping the poor.
Yes, you can just merely look at the fossil record which you've collected completely by yourself, and radiocarbon dated completely by yourself, and identified the fossils completely by yourself, etc.
You can collect fossils yourself. You don't have to verify everyone else's fossils. While you can't measure your very own global mean temperature for 351 AD.
Anyway, keep up your accusations of fraud. People will remember those for a long time. I think you're absolutely right to accuse climate scientists of fraud, but you need to accept that evolutionists have fraudulently scammed the public just like those fraudulent scamming paleoclimatologists.
I sense I've struck a nerve somehow. I also forgot two more signs of a scam. First, You have to act now. Despite knowing that global warming acts over centuries with at best modest effects, we are told that we need to act now.
And then there's the games played with "extreme weather" and the term, "climate change". The former is just an easy confirmation bias for any funny weather. Something weird or bad happens, somehow it can magically be tied into global warming. It's an easy means to generate news for global warming and keep it in the news.
Then there's the preference for the ambiguous term, "climate change" over the concrete and scientific term, "anthropogenic global warming". And considerable biased political activism historically by leaders of research institutions (James Hansen at NASA's GISS and Phil Jones at the Climate Research Unit at the UK's University of East Anglia, that's incidentally most of the paleoclimate interpretation in those two institutions).
In other words, I see not only see ripe conditions for the practice of widespread fraud in climate research, but what I consider actual evidence of the practice. I don't have a smoking gun that definitively indicates fraud, but I don't rule it out under the circumstances and I think it would be foolish for anyone to do so without further supporting evidence.
However, a reliable safety net allows people to take more risks because they know they can fall back on that safety net.
They don't actually do so, but they could. Who's paying for this "safety net" too?
I suppose my primary beefs with "reliable safety nets" are that either they aren't such things (US Social Security and corporate welfare come to mind as prominent examples) or that they don't actually work as advertised. I see no evidence that business creation, creativity and innovation, foresight, etc is improved. Instead, I see counter-evidence such as a large number of unemployed throughout the developed world who aren't looking for work, repeated calls for more public funding of research (even though the developed world already spends a vast amount in that way on scientific research), and of course, the problem of society being remarkably short sighted.
That is despite vastly more "safety net" than the world has had before.
Then there's the matter of who pays for this. This isn't free money. The money that goes into making someone's life easier or less risky comes out of employing other people and doing stuff that needs doing. My view is that we're taking money out of productive uses and dumping it into useless and harmful activities - such as paying people not to work or think about the future.
Well, maybe the civilian death toll would have been less if NATO has not intervened.
And why would that be the case? Keep in mind that the trigger for NATO intervention was the massacre of civilians by participants (particular, the Serbian side).
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, yet another 'human' with species hatred so badly that you can totally ignore the 'magnitude' arguments here.
Not at all. The thing here is that intelligence is quite powerful. Even a small number of humans could kill off all the large mammals, if they were so inclined. And it's the only explanation which can span two continents.
Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
It's worth noting that neither happened. The citizenry still has lots of guns and people are still dying at a pretty high rate (with 2014 starting at an even higher rate than 2013).
Recent estimates for the total CO2 release put it at ~13,000 to 43,000 PgC in 20 to 400 ky -- an annual carbon release of ~0.1 to 1 PgC per year [compared with 9.9 PgC in 2008].
Here's the obvious problems with that particular comment. It's an estimate with order of magnitude error right there in time and another significant error in CO2 quantity (with a ceiling of 2 PgC incidentally rather than the 1 PgC claimed in the article). Second, time resolution is at best 20 ky. If a basalt flood eruption dumped 1,000 PcG or more in a single year, we wouldn't know. This ignorance about variability matters because of two factors, first, it probably understates the impact of the eruptions which are thought to have caused this extinction event by a large amount. Huge variability of eruptions would IMHO have created a much more lethal situation globally than even, continuous eruption would have done. Second, it weakens the comparison with human-generated CO2 emissions because those are far less variable.
Third, we don't actually accurately know the amount of CO2 released, because some of it would have been sinked. Or because the estimates are at best poor as I previously noted. We also don't have a good idea what else was released, which might have been more lethal than the CO2 (for example, sulfates or fluorides).
Finally, it's worth noting that even if your assertion is complete and accurate, it would take at minimum a millennium for current rates of CO2 production and 13,000 PgC (the lower bound) to put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to match the impact of this extinction event. The upper bound increases that to over four millennia. We should be able to figure things out long before that happens.
That last part leads to one of my bigger concerns. What is the hurry? Sure, we don't want to run the situation out for a few millennia until we end up in a huge global extinction event. But we can figure things out in far less time than that.
I think this research indicates it's just not ready for making decisions that affect the lives of billions of people. It's an interesting and somewhat plausible story, but there's just too much error and uncertainty.
But we don't even know if we'll have a large fossil fuel economy anywhere in the world by the end of the century.
Looks like I found a copy here.
Read more than the abstract. In particular, read page 1061 which I already directed you to. The relevant statement is near the end of the page.
Needs a user name and password. I don't have an account on the system.
Fossils and oxygen isotopes are both direct observations.
Fossils are direct observations of the organism that made the fossil. "Oxygen isotopes" are the direct observation of a current ratio of oxygen in some geological structure which may or may not have relevance to a particular point or period of local climate in the past.
I think it's foolish to claim that one is directly measuring something climate-related when one has no means to back that claim.
Hopefully you're right to ignore Honisch et al. 2012.
What is there to ignore? Looking at the abstract, they make the claim:
Although similarities exist, no past event perfectly parallels future projections in terms of disrupting the balance of ocean carbonate chemistryâ"a consequence of the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place.
It's worth noting that they don't actually have evidence to back the claim of being "unprecedented". The more accurate and honest phrasing would have been that they had been unable to find evidence of similar rapidity of CO2 release in past geological events that they looked at.
For example, an obvious rebuttal is that a fast CO2 emission rate which didn't lead to long term changes in climate probably would not appear in the geological record.
Another issue is diffusion. Even in solid rock, you will have considerable diffusion of the isotopes they measured over the time frame of hundreds of millions of years. There could have been numerous times during the period of the Permian-Triassic extinction event when CO2 emission levels were increasing far faster than present, but due to diffusion, this fine detail would be lost.
Except for the facts that get in the way of that. 13000 years ago the Americas were extremely underpopulated.
For driving things extinct? We're not speaking of passenger pigeons but rather of very large mammals who probably never were very numerous.
That's not enough people to drive anything extinct.
I don't know why you would think that.
I know it's best not to go tampering around where my good intentions could lead to very unexpected (and perhaps very unpleasant) results.
I see your point with one caveat. You don't actually "know" what you claim to know. Good intentions can lead to very unpleasant results or they could lead to very wonderful results. One way to find out is by actually doing it and seeing what happens.
Small local tribes can only exhaust small local populations
Everywhere in the Americas would have had local tribes inside of a few hundred years. Humans get around. That's how a local problem becomes a continental-scale one.
Even before we get there, we will need to tackle the question of whether a created machine can be granted the civil rights normally associated with an adult human, at all..
We could grant the civil rights of an adult human to a screw driver. So yes, I think we could do it for a created machine that actually would be able to exercise those rights.
If the 10,000 people are the next wealthiest 10,000 people, then it's a lot more than the wealth of 3.5 billion people least wealthy people.
It however requires assuming that jobs grow on trees.
Jobs don't grow on trees, but they do grow in healthy economies.
Places without social safety nets do better economically, but guess what happens to their economic output? Only a fraction goes back to their own people.
A large fraction of that wealth - enough to improve the well being of those people considerably. And it's no different for economies with safety nets. A fraction of their wealth goes to their own people. The rest goes to the wealthy as well.
When the economy grows, two things happen
1) Society has more ability to pay for stuff, including social safety nets
2) A growing demand for social safety nets. The coming tide lifts all boats, but it doesn't lift them equally. Those who didn't get rich or as rich as others will convince themselves that they could have done better, if only there were safety nets.
So what? You just spelled out the fundamental problem of modern society, namely, that there's a lot of ignorant and/or greedy people who would destroy what gives them wealth in order to obtain that wealth. That is, they'll strangle the golden goose in order to get gold eggs faster. The solution is to deny them these destructive wants rather than placate them with it.
Just like a single fossil isn't sufficient support for evolution, global estimates require measurements at different locations.
And once again, we come to the fundamental different between the two things. A fossil is a direct observation of an organism that made the fossil. Collect enough fossils and you can trace the evolution of the organisms that made them.
The speleothem observation is something that might be relevant to a local temperature measurement or it might not. We don't know since we don't have direct observations of the climate of that time. So we could collect a bunch of such observation from spatial and temporally different points, but we wouldn't know whether we're collecting data that is relevant to the climate estimates we wish to make.
So it is the nuclear industries fault that they follow safety regs and your mom and pop solar installer doesn't?
I also blame them for morning wood. Their perfidy knows no bounds.
I think it is more helpful to consider my post an observation rather than an accusation. Solar power would have gotten a lot more expensive both for the producers and for the regulators, if governments were regulating it just as thoroughly as nuclear power is. So sure, it might be possible to get solar power safety figures down to the point where there're similar deaths per MwH as there are with nuclear, but it'd greatly increase the cost of solar in the process.
Even without a bomb, I gather these are heavy and fast enough to cause a bit of damage to normal civilian property and people.
Of course one can claim that those numbers can be reduced with proper safety measures but if one accept that argument for solar then the same should hold for nuclear.
Only if nuclear is at the same level of non-compliance with proper safety measures. I wonder what the price tag would need to be to get solar regulated at the same hardcore level as is present with the nuclear industry?
than the impossible task of digging up and radiocarbon dating speleothems from the 350s and analyzing their growth rates.
Which is irrelevant to the argument we were making. Speleothems do not measure mean global temperature.
Khallow knows that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and oceans ten times faster than before the Great Dying has only modest effects.
This assertion is not based on evidence. Nobody was around during the end of the Permian to measure this and compare it to today. Or to tell us whether the degree of CO2 release is as important as is claimed today. Volcanos release a lot of other chemicals, some which are far nastier than CO2 and it may be those other chemicals which triggered the dire effects of the Permian-Triassic extinction event.
Your observation, even if accurate, also tells us nothing about the degree of absolute change. After all, there are faster changes in CO2 levels between the seasons than there are in collective rise of CO2 from year to year. Yet we don't care about those changes because they are reversed over the course of the year.
And I find it interesting how you prove my point by posting something so hysterical and unsubstantiated. Are you shilling for the Koch brothers?
Khallow is so certain of this that he's accusing climate scientists of fraud, apparently including Plass 1956 and Chamberlin 1897 which were presumably just playing games with the ambiguous term "climatic change".
Just because two people use a term doesn't mean that they use the term for the same reasons. Using the term, "climate change" for unspecified changes in climate (in other words, for the situation it should be used for) is a different kettle of fish than using it as a label for a very specific sort of change, namely, human carbon dioxide emissions (and to a lesser extent other greenhouse gas emissions) that happens to increase global mean temperature and a few related effects.
Firstly, for it to be slander, it would have to be untrue. Alas... as you just said, it is totally, completely, and utterly true.
As the previous poster, it was untrue. The company didn't give out this gear, the employee did.
They don't "interfere with the game's economy"? A month's worth of game time costs $9.95... a plex costs about $15 and does the same thing in game. And since Sir You Obviously Weren't There has forgotten... players protested en masse in a place in game called "Jita" over this "pay to win" model, many quit, and the server crashed several times as they tried (and succeeded) to overload the blade the busiest system in game. So yeah, please stop drinking the koolaid... Eve is a very interesting game, but CCP can and does make mistakes. Big ones. Stackless Python for the backend comes to mind... necessitating this "time dilation" they speak of... which is really code for "The server's so fucking overloaded everything's running like shit."
I see you don't actually refute the claim. I do agree that CCP interferes hard with the game, but not in this way. Every time they have an expansion they whack on the game with a mallet. First, there's the flavor of the month changes with ships, tactics, resources, and industry which are always overcompensating. This causes in turn a massive shift in the economy as huge portions of the Eve world retool to meet the new need. Second, there's the new technologies and industries developed which always require people to do things which they weren't doing before.
Either way, the economy gets kranged hard as people go for the new hotness.
As to stackless Python, anything else would have the same trouble, though perhaps at somewhat different levels of load. The time dilation is required because players bring lots of friends and there is a huge interaction load when a lot of people are in the same place at the same time.
If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there's only one way it ends: With a lot of death. Whether it's due to plague, starvation, or war, eventually a large portion of the human race is going to die.
What part of that 20,000 years of "history" (including over 14,000 years of prehistory) actually indicates what you think it indicates? I don't see it myself.
Maybe they didn't have the choice to land it normally. If the drone will crash, it's better to crash it where there are no people rather than say, the middle of San Diego.
This is not a hypothetical situation that has never happened before. For example, a passenger jet made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York City in 2009. That beat running the plane through a building or belly flopping on a crowded street.
Also notice how the masses are also goaded to hate the Chinese and globalization. This discourages the masses from seeking aid from China or other countries to topple the current regime. Don't want the same trick you used on the British used on yourself see. The characterization of France being cheese eating surrender monkeys also helps keep Americans isolated from those who used to help them gain independence or gifted them the Statue of Liberty...
Ever hear the term "exporting the pollution"? This competition between cultures and societies is the great threat to social safety nets everywhere since the parts of the world with less of a social safety net will do better economically than the ones with more.
History has shown that the poor, if not placated, are capable of much more harmful activities than merely not work or think about the future.
You can placate them with a useful job too. That doesn't require a "social safety net", especially ones for which few of their activities have anything to do with helping the poor.
Yes, you can just merely look at the fossil record which you've collected completely by yourself, and radiocarbon dated completely by yourself, and identified the fossils completely by yourself, etc.
You can collect fossils yourself. You don't have to verify everyone else's fossils. While you can't measure your very own global mean temperature for 351 AD.
Anyway, keep up your accusations of fraud. People will remember those for a long time. I think you're absolutely right to accuse climate scientists of fraud, but you need to accept that evolutionists have fraudulently scammed the public just like those fraudulent scamming paleoclimatologists.
I sense I've struck a nerve somehow. I also forgot two more signs of a scam. First, You have to act now. Despite knowing that global warming acts over centuries with at best modest effects, we are told that we need to act now.
And then there's the games played with "extreme weather" and the term, "climate change". The former is just an easy confirmation bias for any funny weather. Something weird or bad happens, somehow it can magically be tied into global warming. It's an easy means to generate news for global warming and keep it in the news.
Then there's the preference for the ambiguous term, "climate change" over the concrete and scientific term, "anthropogenic global warming". And considerable biased political activism historically by leaders of research institutions (James Hansen at NASA's GISS and Phil Jones at the Climate Research Unit at the UK's University of East Anglia, that's incidentally most of the paleoclimate interpretation in those two institutions).
In other words, I see not only see ripe conditions for the practice of widespread fraud in climate research, but what I consider actual evidence of the practice. I don't have a smoking gun that definitively indicates fraud, but I don't rule it out under the circumstances and I think it would be foolish for anyone to do so without further supporting evidence.
However, a reliable safety net allows people to take more risks because they know they can fall back on that safety net.
They don't actually do so, but they could. Who's paying for this "safety net" too?
I suppose my primary beefs with "reliable safety nets" are that either they aren't such things (US Social Security and corporate welfare come to mind as prominent examples) or that they don't actually work as advertised. I see no evidence that business creation, creativity and innovation, foresight, etc is improved. Instead, I see counter-evidence such as a large number of unemployed throughout the developed world who aren't looking for work, repeated calls for more public funding of research (even though the developed world already spends a vast amount in that way on scientific research), and of course, the problem of society being remarkably short sighted.
That is despite vastly more "safety net" than the world has had before.
Then there's the matter of who pays for this. This isn't free money. The money that goes into making someone's life easier or less risky comes out of employing other people and doing stuff that needs doing. My view is that we're taking money out of productive uses and dumping it into useless and harmful activities - such as paying people not to work or think about the future.
Well, maybe the civilian death toll would have been less if NATO has not intervened.
And why would that be the case? Keep in mind that the trigger for NATO intervention was the massacre of civilians by participants (particular, the Serbian side).