And you sound like you don't have anything to contribute to the discussion. There were multiple flaws to the post I was replying to and I merely was being thorough in addressing those weaknesses.
And I see no actual disagreement with my point. Just some pointless whining. As to South Africa, you're going to lose more land to bad farming practices than you will to AGW. Maybe you ought to work on the bigger, more important problems first.
Usable farmland has to have halfway decent soil, not-too-awful soil chemistry, reasonable amounts of water, that sort of thing. Has somebody done a study on random taiga, to see if all it needs is to be warmed up?
Just look at land that's a few hundred miles to the south. Similar chemistry and terrain ten thousand years ago. Now, a bunch of it is among the most fertile land on the planet.
All over the world, we've been having a large amount of weird weather, some of it destructive.
So what? We would have a large amount of weird weather even if nothing was going on. What's special about this "weird weather" that can't be explained easily by confirmation bias?
Hurricane Sandy is a good example, and the flooding was exacerbated to some extent by rising sea levels, which are due to global warming.
A "good example"? You do realize that the area in question gets such hurricanes on a regular, if infrequent basis. There's nothing unusual about Hurricane Sandy aside from the attempts to tie it to AGW.
One problem with the climate change going on is that we don't know what specifically is caused by global warming and what's just flukes (until, of course, it's Too Late). That means that people who have some interest in denying its effects have no difficulty in doing so.
So why are you pushing the theory so hard in the absence of evidence? Even you had to admit implicitly it's unscientific to do so.
Why? The remarkable extent and power of modern technology, especially in agriculture, is apparent to anyone who bothers to look. I tire of people telling me what's impossible when they don't have clue what's already been done.
Umm, they will also rise in the EXISTING arable land which will become less arable.
Already taken into account. Most of that warming is in the places I already noted.
The tundra and taiga is unlikely to be terribly fertile, as nutrients have been leached from it for millennia and not replaced.
By what mechanism? We aren't speaking of rain forest which is pretty much the only terrain type aside from human farms that actually experiences significant nutrient leaching. There would be no leaching of nutrients during glacial periods and interglacial warming just seems to add nutrients (nitrogen and carbon) from plant life growing in the tundra.
As for your "improving technology", that's utter crap.
Then come up with a reason why you have that opinion. There are a variety of known methods for building and maintaining soil. It just isn't that hard.
One might be able to increase the amount of water to a desert, but it will again be to utterly infertile soil. Again, it will take millennia for the soil to become fertile.
Something that has been done in the US and elsewhere for many decades now. Merely plowing in vegetation, particularly "green manure", helps build soil. Adding soil organisms like earthworms and nematodes quickly builds up soil. If it weren't for these methods, then most farmland would already be completely infertile.
If climate change is correct, the consequences are horrifying and cannot easily be solved, even with massive improvements in technology.
We tend to have a naive feeling that we understand the solar system, that it is really just like Earth, but with craters or whatever. It isn't, and we don't.
Given that the vast majority of those naive people will never ever have any impact on space activities, I really don't see the point of the observation. Instead, you should be asking what people who actually plan to do anything in space have as their understanding of space.
Their basis is the laws of physics, which so far have shown to work just the same on Earth as in space. And they've done a lot of remarkable stuff in space that requires more than a ignorant human's understanding of space in order to perform.
New arable land won't just crop up, pardon the pun. You also see to have no grasp of how hard industrial agriculture already pushes the existing land we have to produce as much food as we do today. We do not have a magic fairy improvement wand.
Why not? There's a lot of land in the northern hemisphere that's just too cold to grow things. Warm those places up and you remove the primary obstacle to farming.
And we do have a magic fairy improvement wand called "modern technology".
When the US military, the insurance industry, and the mother effin' Maldives are looking at mitigation plans for this generation, I'm of a mind to think it's demonstrated. Contrarian forum nerdrage is hardly a counter argument.
I fail to be impressed. The insurance industry is milking the climate change cow in order to generate a pretext to raise rates and increase its profits. I see no evidence that they will experience in the next few decades higher costs from AGW or any other sort of global climate change. The US military's boss, President Obama is a guy who's pushing the climate change meme for his benefit. Maldives might have a reason to care, but if things flood out, they can always move with plenty of time to spare.
'hundreds of billions'? No. That's just wrong. At it's peak in 1995, climate funding in the US was $2.4 billion, and that included NASA's work in supporting satellite observation. It has gone down ever since. If it's a scam, it the world's worst ever.
You also have to include renewable energy and the recent and very expensive fad of reparations. The EU, for example, has huge funds committed to solar and wind power, carbon emissions credit markets, and foreign aid to help third world countries adapt to "climate change". So does the US and Japan.
Consider also the currently poorly funded "Green Climate Fund" which some are trying to get funded at $100 billion a year. They aren't going to get squat, if people think that AGW is a problem that we don't have to start to deal with for a century.
And don't forget those insurance companies who are looking for any excuse to increase their profits. Being forced to charge higher premiums for non-existent climate change costs is quite their speed.
That's a new one on me, and how exactly will this occur?
The God of the climate deniers will wave his hand and say "Let there be arable land"?
Or are you going to just redefine the expanding deserts as "arable land"?
Well, where do most of these temperature change predictions claim that temperatures will rise the most? In the taiga forests and tundra which are places where temperature is the biggest reason the place isn't arable land. It'll still need work, such as draining, transportation infrastructure, etc. But it's just not that much work.
Or are you going to just redefine the expanding deserts as "arable land"?
Well, that is a possibility with our ever improving technology. A place needs water and soil. That's something we can make even in the driest and harshest of deserts. If desert terrain become just slightly more expensive to operate as farms than more lush terrains, then they will be considerable arable at some point.
Climate denialism at +5, really? When did Slashdot become an anti-science conspiracy rag?
Crude, anti-scientific name calling in the first sentence and a whine about how Slashdot has become "anti-science" in the second. I guess you never thought you were part of the problem.
You're the one making wild, specious claims. There is no evidence that more arable land will be "created" to replace what "might" be lost on any time scale that will benefit us, but you state it as a given.
What do you mean by "no evidence"? The greatest predicted temperature increases are in the northern taiga forests and tundra. That would make a lot of arable land. As to the "time scale", we move pretty fast on transforming land to farming use when it suits us.
Present generations have already been more than inconvenienced by it
Get back to me when you have evidence for your opinion. This is really one of the more ridiculous claims made by some on the pro-AGW side. There's no evidence that anyone has been inconvenienced by AGW.
and you're ignoring this so that you can justify not doing anything about the ongoing collapse of the global ecosystem because it would be an inconvenience
What collapse? You mean the usual stuff that's been going on for centuries like habitat destruction and industrial pollution? What does that have to do with AGW?
You're a willful killer for convenience, as are all of us in the developed world, but then you're also lying to yourself about it, and that's not just sad â" it also justifies not changing anything, because you deny that there's a problem simply so that you can continue to be part of it.
I can make this even simpler. There's cost and benefit. The costs of AGW mitigation are pretty big. We'd have to restructure our transportation and energy generating infrastructure. And it's already costing some countries considerable wealth and competitive advantage to do so. The costs are also up front. We pay them now, not in a century.
And what do we get for this huge, upfront cost? Some vague opinion that future generations might be better off. There might be more arable land, a little cooler temperatures, or slightly less acidic oceans. These nebulous benefits are also long down the road, should they actually happen at all.
My view is that we'll probably as a society never notice the changes from AGW. They'll be so gradual and slight that we'll instinctively adapt to them over the centuries. But made some big, fast changes in our energy and transportation infrastructure now? We'll notice the poverty, the economic decline, and the mockery from the parts of societies that didn't slit their throats.
I still hope that the worst case scenario(a 4 degree rise) will be the "working scenario" for the solutions that will be used.
Would you mind explaining that? I guess my concern here is that our solutions for AGW seem to be unusually expensive given the problem. I guess the problem here is that the temperature sensitivity of carbon dioxide is inversely proportional to time. And the cost of a solution is inversely proportiona; to the inverse of the exponential of the time over which it has to be implemented (this is "time-value"). One gets a superexponential relationship between temperature sensitivity and the cost of solutions to that temperature sensitivity.
It doesn't show up on short time frames, a solution that is paid for in two weeks costs pretty much the same as one paid for in one week. But over long time frames, it's quite relevant. For example, harm that occurs in 50 years is going to be somewhere around three times as costly in inflation adjusted money as if it happened in 100 years (my assumption here is that money in hand today is about 2% more valuable than that same money, adjusted for inflation in a year's time). Similarly, if it happens in 100 years instead of 200 years, that's a factor of ten roughly in cost difference just from the difference in time.
I think the primary effect would be to push atmosphere up about a hundred meters or so. In a marginal environment like Mt. Everest it probably would save lives on occasion from oxygen deprivation.
The job of accounting hasn't been hurt by the spreadsheet. Instead, it's expanded their role since now accountants can keep track of so much more than they used to.
However, the GP's metric of "prosperity" is not solely dependent on increasing wages and reducing unemployment, and the popularity of limits on working hours isn't necessarily because of a belief it will promote the latter two metrics. Other factors apply, particularly health, safety, quality of service and quality of living.
On that aspect, I think such metrics should be considered by the worker themselves since they are all personally relevant. For professions where there are substantial hazards due to overwork, these are dealt with via liability and higher pay. I see no argument there for a universal reduction in how many hours a person should be allowed to work.
The problem with your argument is that you assume that global warming simply means everywhere gets proportionally hotter, all year round. It doesn't.
I think a bit more nuance is necessary here. Everywhere on the surface of Earth would experience some degree of warming from the AGW effect. It really is a universal heating effect at the surface of the Earth. Not everywhere may experience net warming as a result due to secondary climate effects which cool the area more than AGW heats it up.
This is why I think terms like "climate change" are inherently very deceptive.
As to your claim that everywhere will experience more extreme weather events, it's worth noting that is an opinion not based on fact. To prove evidence for such an assertion, one needs a lot more statistical evidence than has been gathered to date.
As to your claim that the UK will cool down due to the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, this is based on the assumption that a lot of low salinity surface water will come from the Arctic Ocean. We haven't established that degree of melting nor considered how much of such low salinity water may escape through the Bering Strait (obstruction of which appears to be the big driver of geologically recent glaciation).
There might even be simple mechanical means for preventing such climate issues such as an array of floating buoys mechanically mixing sea water from different depths.
Similarly, there isn't legitimate concern for the well being of those future generations, but just a bit of theater. Else you wouldn't have posted that. You played your little meaningless role. Let's cue the hollow applause.
First, it's likely to be quite a bit faster than 500 years. Try 100 - 200 on the outside.
That's still at least an order of magnitude too slow for rapidly evolving human societies.
Perhaps you'd care that here will be a substantial reduction in arable land for crops causing massive, widespread famine.
I don't know about the original author, but sure I'd care if that were happening. But it's not. There's no substantial reduction of arable land since new arable land will be created to replace what might be lost. Even if we were to grant you that claim, we still don't have a cause of massive, widespread famine since we can just use the arable land that is left more effectively. We do have plenty of room for improvement in that respect.
It's sick how callous people are about the future and future generations.
Fuck you. You haven't even demonstrated that future generations will be in the slightest, inconvenienced by AGW, much less that there would be those famines and such. And yes, there really is a limit to how responsible we can possibly be for other generations of grown ups.
It's especially reprehensible to push this generational responsibility thing using the remarkably poor standards of evidence used in climatology. My view at this time is that while there is a bit of merit to AGW claims, most of it is a scam, an attempt to pull hundreds of billions a year in public funds from a hysterical public. Where do you consider the cost of that to your future generations?
My prediction is that around the time of the Warsaw, Poland climate conference (as well as many other future conferences in the years beyond) in November, 2013, we'll see the same propaganda pattern we saw in the climate conference at Doha, Quatar. Alarmist studies will show that AGW (and other bits of "climate change") are worse than feared in the weeks ahead of the conference (even when there's no evidence to support those claims), while more reasonable studies will show that AGW is less harmful than feared in the months after the conference is over.
From my point of view what US has, for example, is strong corporation protection laws - and actual support for them by consumers - enabling corporations to more easily get away with screwing consumers.
Such relatively universal support to me indicates something that works.
The benefit? The consumer, especially educated one, gets to consider more relevant things about their consumer choices than "am I going to be screwed over worse by this or that company", shifting some of the burden on corporations to actually put some effort to not actively try and screw consumers over in just any way they can come up with.
You said it yourself: the customers interests are just as relevant as the interests of businesses.
I don't see that connection. Strong consumer protection doesn't mean that at all. It just means that the consumer has something more of an advantage, and in my view, an undeserved one, when dealing with businesses.
If they weren't mismanaged, and no one was allowed to touch those funds, then how would they be insecure?
Again, because they are future promises and I might add by parties that never can have your best interests at stake, be them some sort of government bureaucracy or the private equivalent. There's always risk involved when you're counting on a future action especially by someone else. And those are rather broad conditionals, I imagine most pensions suffer from a combination of both mismanagement and the ability for others to "touch" those funds.
Hey, I'm not the largest fan of how SS works. But it is better than nothing.
I strongly disagree. I think it is worse than nothing. First, it redistributes wealth from those who need it (people trying to raise families and build lives) to those who don't (the elderly who also happen to be the wealthiest part of society).
Second, it allowed the US govenrment for a period of decades to have tens to hundreds of billions of dollars more per year to play with than they should. All that Social Security "surplus" has been squandered.
Third, it creates dependency and confuses expectations of the future. For example, I imagine most people retiring today has deliberately saved up less money than they would have otherwise because they expect Social Security to go through.
Or how much should people who will retire in a few decades save up? Will Social Security contribute in a meaningful way by then? Who knows?
Fourth, it's helping create intergenerational conflict. Budget problems combined with the various generations and their conflicting interests, create typical zero/negative sum game conflict. Every dollar that goes to Social Security benefits is a dollar that isn't going to educational loans or publicly funded child care.
For example, consider all the whining about the "Baby Boomers," the first TV generation. A lot of that comes from the consequences of short sighted programs like Social Security which aren't for the most part the Boomer's fault, but for which they get the blame because they're the ones trying to protect the benefits.
Too bad. What "social contract" implies to me is a bunch of bleating sheep trying to get more out than they put in
Wow... I'm actually almost speechless. Obviously not completely, since I'm writing this... but... Wow.
Have you actually ever read a book on politics, or the evolution of government, or even about what our Founding Fathers were thinking, and basing their creation around?
Unfortunately, you weren't speechless and generated a fair amount of noise. Reading books doesn't inform you what people currently think a "social contract" is. In your own words:
I've posted about 'social contract' before and its a key issue, here. its not 'entitlement' when you pay so much tax over decades, your parents did, even grandparents. you have invested in your own social system and you expect (no, DEMAND) that it take care of you. you paid your dues!
The selfishness of that statement is abominable. There's another sort of system that also has the paying of dues. It's called the pyramid scheme. Some few lucky early adopters get more than they put in. The rest get screwed to varying degree. And usually the one engineering the pyramid scheme walks away with a vast amount.
My view is that most pension systems whether public or private, for example, are pyramid schemes. More is promised than is being put into the system. So not everyone is going to get what they DEMAND out of the system.
By nature pension schemes and social security are secure. [...] They fail because they are mismanaged.
Nope. Future promised benefits for current payment is fundamentally insecure because the promised benefits aren't sure to happen. And the "mismanaged" aspect is just a manifestation of this.
Since we're speaking of the US system more or less, it's worth noting that a private business would go to jail for fraud, if they tried the same accounting tricks that are used for Social Security. There are many tens of trillions of dollars of liabilities in Social Security that aren't on the books. The fundamental long term insolvency of Social Security was painfully obvious for decades to anyone that was paying attention.
The only way you can make the system balance now is to pay future recipients less than they put in. And that's what will happen whether by overt reductions in benefits or hidden reductions via inflation and other wealth-destroying economic games.
I think Social Security is a multigenerational pyramid scheme that's now entered the failure phase. This is typical of the "social contract" we have now rather than the one we should have had. It's a bunch of poorly thought out or even fraudulent programs that do little, if anything for us or our societies at considerable cost. In the end, it's all about getting yours before the con falls apart.
So here's my conclusion. So you "paid your dues"? Too bad. You'll probably get some of that back. But you should have worked harder to stop some of that "mismanaged" fraud back when you were "paying your dues". Now we have to clean up your "social contract" mess.
That will change over time as the friends with Masters/PhDs start pursuing intellectual pursuits full-time for their career. Perhaps it still works now, but give it 10-15 years, and you'll see a huge difference in behavior, especially in regard to child rearing. Sadly, that's just the way it is:(
Well, what do you think will happen? Last I checked, actually knowing some people who have done so for 10-15 years, it's not that vast a gap. They aren't going to want to talk full time about the minutia of their research or their administrative duties. That common ground remains.
I disagree. Manual labor doesn't destroy the intellect. Instead, one merely needs to look at your father's avoidance of intellectual stimulation to explain why he is the way he is.
I found, for example, that my college teaching job was less intellectually stimulating than my manual labor jobs (which just so happen to be at Yellowstone National Park). The problem was that I was being exhausted intellectually by the job. I couldn't think and teach at the same time (plus I was a rather crummy teacher).
While I had no similar taxing of my mental resources from working a manual labor job. It also meant I had more time to think about things.
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And you sound like you don't have anything to contribute to the discussion. There were multiple flaws to the post I was replying to and I merely was being thorough in addressing those weaknesses.
And I see no actual disagreement with my point. Just some pointless whining. As to South Africa, you're going to lose more land to bad farming practices than you will to AGW. Maybe you ought to work on the bigger, more important problems first.
Usable farmland has to have halfway decent soil, not-too-awful soil chemistry, reasonable amounts of water, that sort of thing. Has somebody done a study on random taiga, to see if all it needs is to be warmed up?
Just look at land that's a few hundred miles to the south. Similar chemistry and terrain ten thousand years ago. Now, a bunch of it is among the most fertile land on the planet.
All over the world, we've been having a large amount of weird weather, some of it destructive.
So what? We would have a large amount of weird weather even if nothing was going on. What's special about this "weird weather" that can't be explained easily by confirmation bias?
Hurricane Sandy is a good example, and the flooding was exacerbated to some extent by rising sea levels, which are due to global warming.
A "good example"? You do realize that the area in question gets such hurricanes on a regular, if infrequent basis. There's nothing unusual about Hurricane Sandy aside from the attempts to tie it to AGW.
One problem with the climate change going on is that we don't know what specifically is caused by global warming and what's just flukes (until, of course, it's Too Late). That means that people who have some interest in denying its effects have no difficulty in doing so.
So why are you pushing the theory so hard in the absence of evidence? Even you had to admit implicitly it's unscientific to do so.
Why? The remarkable extent and power of modern technology, especially in agriculture, is apparent to anyone who bothers to look. I tire of people telling me what's impossible when they don't have clue what's already been done.
Umm, they will also rise in the EXISTING arable land which will become less arable.
Already taken into account. Most of that warming is in the places I already noted.
The tundra and taiga is unlikely to be terribly fertile, as nutrients have been leached from it for millennia and not replaced.
By what mechanism? We aren't speaking of rain forest which is pretty much the only terrain type aside from human farms that actually experiences significant nutrient leaching. There would be no leaching of nutrients during glacial periods and interglacial warming just seems to add nutrients (nitrogen and carbon) from plant life growing in the tundra.
As for your "improving technology", that's utter crap.
Then come up with a reason why you have that opinion. There are a variety of known methods for building and maintaining soil. It just isn't that hard.
One might be able to increase the amount of water to a desert, but it will again be to utterly infertile soil. Again, it will take millennia for the soil to become fertile.
Something that has been done in the US and elsewhere for many decades now. Merely plowing in vegetation, particularly "green manure", helps build soil. Adding soil organisms like earthworms and nematodes quickly builds up soil. If it weren't for these methods, then most farmland would already be completely infertile.
If climate change is correct, the consequences are horrifying and cannot easily be solved, even with massive improvements in technology.
"IF".
And our plumbing and all the shinies we put on things.
We tend to have a naive feeling that we understand the solar system, that it is really just like Earth, but with craters or whatever. It isn't, and we don't.
Given that the vast majority of those naive people will never ever have any impact on space activities, I really don't see the point of the observation. Instead, you should be asking what people who actually plan to do anything in space have as their understanding of space.
Their basis is the laws of physics, which so far have shown to work just the same on Earth as in space. And they've done a lot of remarkable stuff in space that requires more than a ignorant human's understanding of space in order to perform.
New arable land won't just crop up, pardon the pun. You also see to have no grasp of how hard industrial agriculture already pushes the existing land we have to produce as much food as we do today. We do not have a magic fairy improvement wand.
Why not? There's a lot of land in the northern hemisphere that's just too cold to grow things. Warm those places up and you remove the primary obstacle to farming.
And we do have a magic fairy improvement wand called "modern technology".
When the US military, the insurance industry, and the mother effin' Maldives are looking at mitigation plans for this generation, I'm of a mind to think it's demonstrated. Contrarian forum nerdrage is hardly a counter argument.
I fail to be impressed. The insurance industry is milking the climate change cow in order to generate a pretext to raise rates and increase its profits. I see no evidence that they will experience in the next few decades higher costs from AGW or any other sort of global climate change. The US military's boss, President Obama is a guy who's pushing the climate change meme for his benefit. Maldives might have a reason to care, but if things flood out, they can always move with plenty of time to spare.
'hundreds of billions'? No. That's just wrong. At it's peak in 1995, climate funding in the US was $2.4 billion, and that included NASA's work in supporting satellite observation. It has gone down ever since. If it's a scam, it the world's worst ever.
You also have to include renewable energy and the recent and very expensive fad of reparations. The EU, for example, has huge funds committed to solar and wind power, carbon emissions credit markets, and foreign aid to help third world countries adapt to "climate change". So does the US and Japan.
Consider also the currently poorly funded "Green Climate Fund" which some are trying to get funded at $100 billion a year. They aren't going to get squat, if people think that AGW is a problem that we don't have to start to deal with for a century.
And don't forget those insurance companies who are looking for any excuse to increase their profits. Being forced to charge higher premiums for non-existent climate change costs is quite their speed.
That's a new one on me, and how exactly will this occur?
The God of the climate deniers will wave his hand and say "Let there be arable land"?
Or are you going to just redefine the expanding deserts as "arable land"?
Well, where do most of these temperature change predictions claim that temperatures will rise the most? In the taiga forests and tundra which are places where temperature is the biggest reason the place isn't arable land. It'll still need work, such as draining, transportation infrastructure, etc. But it's just not that much work.
Or are you going to just redefine the expanding deserts as "arable land"?
Well, that is a possibility with our ever improving technology. A place needs water and soil. That's something we can make even in the driest and harshest of deserts. If desert terrain become just slightly more expensive to operate as farms than more lush terrains, then they will be considerable arable at some point.
Climate denialism at +5, really? When did Slashdot become an anti-science conspiracy rag?
Crude, anti-scientific name calling in the first sentence and a whine about how Slashdot has become "anti-science" in the second. I guess you never thought you were part of the problem.
Cold or hot, you won't get much corn out of sand, rock, or peat bog.
Peat bogs should be pretty good for farming actually. Just drain them first. Lot of farm land in the US used to be wetlands.
You're the one making wild, specious claims. There is no evidence that more arable land will be "created" to replace what "might" be lost on any time scale that will benefit us, but you state it as a given.
What do you mean by "no evidence"? The greatest predicted temperature increases are in the northern taiga forests and tundra. That would make a lot of arable land. As to the "time scale", we move pretty fast on transforming land to farming use when it suits us.
Present generations have already been more than inconvenienced by it
Get back to me when you have evidence for your opinion. This is really one of the more ridiculous claims made by some on the pro-AGW side. There's no evidence that anyone has been inconvenienced by AGW.
and you're ignoring this so that you can justify not doing anything about the ongoing collapse of the global ecosystem because it would be an inconvenience
What collapse? You mean the usual stuff that's been going on for centuries like habitat destruction and industrial pollution? What does that have to do with AGW?
You're a willful killer for convenience, as are all of us in the developed world, but then you're also lying to yourself about it, and that's not just sad â" it also justifies not changing anything, because you deny that there's a problem simply so that you can continue to be part of it.
I can make this even simpler. There's cost and benefit. The costs of AGW mitigation are pretty big. We'd have to restructure our transportation and energy generating infrastructure. And it's already costing some countries considerable wealth and competitive advantage to do so. The costs are also up front. We pay them now, not in a century.
And what do we get for this huge, upfront cost? Some vague opinion that future generations might be better off. There might be more arable land, a little cooler temperatures, or slightly less acidic oceans. These nebulous benefits are also long down the road, should they actually happen at all.
My view is that we'll probably as a society never notice the changes from AGW. They'll be so gradual and slight that we'll instinctively adapt to them over the centuries. But made some big, fast changes in our energy and transportation infrastructure now? We'll notice the poverty, the economic decline, and the mockery from the parts of societies that didn't slit their throats.
I still hope that the worst case scenario(a 4 degree rise) will be the "working scenario" for the solutions that will be used.
Would you mind explaining that? I guess my concern here is that our solutions for AGW seem to be unusually expensive given the problem. I guess the problem here is that the temperature sensitivity of carbon dioxide is inversely proportional to time. And the cost of a solution is inversely proportiona; to the inverse of the exponential of the time over which it has to be implemented (this is "time-value"). One gets a superexponential relationship between temperature sensitivity and the cost of solutions to that temperature sensitivity.
It doesn't show up on short time frames, a solution that is paid for in two weeks costs pretty much the same as one paid for in one week. But over long time frames, it's quite relevant. For example, harm that occurs in 50 years is going to be somewhere around three times as costly in inflation adjusted money as if it happened in 100 years (my assumption here is that money in hand today is about 2% more valuable than that same money, adjusted for inflation in a year's time). Similarly, if it happens in 100 years instead of 200 years, that's a factor of ten roughly in cost difference just from the difference in time.
I think the primary effect would be to push atmosphere up about a hundred meters or so. In a marginal environment like Mt. Everest it probably would save lives on occasion from oxygen deprivation.
The job of accounting hasn't been hurt by the spreadsheet. Instead, it's expanded their role since now accountants can keep track of so much more than they used to.
However, the GP's metric of "prosperity" is not solely dependent on increasing wages and reducing unemployment, and the popularity of limits on working hours isn't necessarily because of a belief it will promote the latter two metrics. Other factors apply, particularly health, safety, quality of service and quality of living.
On that aspect, I think such metrics should be considered by the worker themselves since they are all personally relevant. For professions where there are substantial hazards due to overwork, these are dealt with via liability and higher pay. I see no argument there for a universal reduction in how many hours a person should be allowed to work.
I'm glad to see that you now accept there is Anthropogenic Global Warming. Now you're only quibbling about it's size.
I agree that there is some degree of AGW. But the problem here is that size really does matter since it is crucial to arguments for AGW mitigation.
The problem with your argument is that you assume that global warming simply means everywhere gets proportionally hotter, all year round. It doesn't.
I think a bit more nuance is necessary here. Everywhere on the surface of Earth would experience some degree of warming from the AGW effect. It really is a universal heating effect at the surface of the Earth. Not everywhere may experience net warming as a result due to secondary climate effects which cool the area more than AGW heats it up.
This is why I think terms like "climate change" are inherently very deceptive.
As to your claim that everywhere will experience more extreme weather events, it's worth noting that is an opinion not based on fact. To prove evidence for such an assertion, one needs a lot more statistical evidence than has been gathered to date.
As to your claim that the UK will cool down due to the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, this is based on the assumption that a lot of low salinity surface water will come from the Arctic Ocean. We haven't established that degree of melting nor considered how much of such low salinity water may escape through the Bering Strait (obstruction of which appears to be the big driver of geologically recent glaciation).
There might even be simple mechanical means for preventing such climate issues such as an array of floating buoys mechanically mixing sea water from different depths.
Similarly, there isn't legitimate concern for the well being of those future generations, but just a bit of theater. Else you wouldn't have posted that. You played your little meaningless role. Let's cue the hollow applause.
First, it's likely to be quite a bit faster than 500 years. Try 100 - 200 on the outside.
That's still at least an order of magnitude too slow for rapidly evolving human societies.
Perhaps you'd care that here will be a substantial reduction in arable land for crops causing massive, widespread famine.
I don't know about the original author, but sure I'd care if that were happening. But it's not. There's no substantial reduction of arable land since new arable land will be created to replace what might be lost. Even if we were to grant you that claim, we still don't have a cause of massive, widespread famine since we can just use the arable land that is left more effectively. We do have plenty of room for improvement in that respect.
It's sick how callous people are about the future and future generations.
Fuck you. You haven't even demonstrated that future generations will be in the slightest, inconvenienced by AGW, much less that there would be those famines and such. And yes, there really is a limit to how responsible we can possibly be for other generations of grown ups.
It's especially reprehensible to push this generational responsibility thing using the remarkably poor standards of evidence used in climatology. My view at this time is that while there is a bit of merit to AGW claims, most of it is a scam, an attempt to pull hundreds of billions a year in public funds from a hysterical public. Where do you consider the cost of that to your future generations?
My prediction is that around the time of the Warsaw, Poland climate conference (as well as many other future conferences in the years beyond) in November, 2013, we'll see the same propaganda pattern we saw in the climate conference at Doha, Quatar. Alarmist studies will show that AGW (and other bits of "climate change") are worse than feared in the weeks ahead of the conference (even when there's no evidence to support those claims), while more reasonable studies will show that AGW is less harmful than feared in the months after the conference is over.
From my point of view what US has, for example, is strong corporation protection laws - and actual support for them by consumers - enabling corporations to more easily get away with screwing consumers.
Such relatively universal support to me indicates something that works.
The benefit? The consumer, especially educated one, gets to consider more relevant things about their consumer choices than "am I going to be screwed over worse by this or that company", shifting some of the burden on corporations to actually put some effort to not actively try and screw consumers over in just any way they can come up with. You said it yourself: the customers interests are just as relevant as the interests of businesses.
I don't see that connection. Strong consumer protection doesn't mean that at all. It just means that the consumer has something more of an advantage, and in my view, an undeserved one, when dealing with businesses.
If they weren't mismanaged, and no one was allowed to touch those funds, then how would they be insecure?
Again, because they are future promises and I might add by parties that never can have your best interests at stake, be them some sort of government bureaucracy or the private equivalent. There's always risk involved when you're counting on a future action especially by someone else. And those are rather broad conditionals, I imagine most pensions suffer from a combination of both mismanagement and the ability for others to "touch" those funds.
Hey, I'm not the largest fan of how SS works. But it is better than nothing.
I strongly disagree. I think it is worse than nothing. First, it redistributes wealth from those who need it (people trying to raise families and build lives) to those who don't (the elderly who also happen to be the wealthiest part of society).
Second, it allowed the US govenrment for a period of decades to have tens to hundreds of billions of dollars more per year to play with than they should. All that Social Security "surplus" has been squandered.
Third, it creates dependency and confuses expectations of the future. For example, I imagine most people retiring today has deliberately saved up less money than they would have otherwise because they expect Social Security to go through.
Or how much should people who will retire in a few decades save up? Will Social Security contribute in a meaningful way by then? Who knows?
Fourth, it's helping create intergenerational conflict. Budget problems combined with the various generations and their conflicting interests, create typical zero/negative sum game conflict. Every dollar that goes to Social Security benefits is a dollar that isn't going to educational loans or publicly funded child care.
For example, consider all the whining about the "Baby Boomers," the first TV generation. A lot of that comes from the consequences of short sighted programs like Social Security which aren't for the most part the Boomer's fault, but for which they get the blame because they're the ones trying to protect the benefits.
Too bad. What "social contract" implies to me is a bunch of bleating sheep trying to get more out than they put in
Wow... I'm actually almost speechless. Obviously not completely, since I'm writing this... but... Wow. Have you actually ever read a book on politics, or the evolution of government, or even about what our Founding Fathers were thinking, and basing their creation around?
Unfortunately, you weren't speechless and generated a fair amount of noise. Reading books doesn't inform you what people currently think a "social contract" is. In your own words:
I've posted about 'social contract' before and its a key issue, here. its not 'entitlement' when you pay so much tax over decades, your parents did, even grandparents. you have invested in your own social system and you expect (no, DEMAND) that it take care of you. you paid your dues!
The selfishness of that statement is abominable. There's another sort of system that also has the paying of dues. It's called the pyramid scheme. Some few lucky early adopters get more than they put in. The rest get screwed to varying degree. And usually the one engineering the pyramid scheme walks away with a vast amount.
My view is that most pension systems whether public or private, for example, are pyramid schemes. More is promised than is being put into the system. So not everyone is going to get what they DEMAND out of the system.
By nature pension schemes and social security are secure. [...] They fail because they are mismanaged.
Nope. Future promised benefits for current payment is fundamentally insecure because the promised benefits aren't sure to happen. And the "mismanaged" aspect is just a manifestation of this.
Since we're speaking of the US system more or less, it's worth noting that a private business would go to jail for fraud, if they tried the same accounting tricks that are used for Social Security. There are many tens of trillions of dollars of liabilities in Social Security that aren't on the books. The fundamental long term insolvency of Social Security was painfully obvious for decades to anyone that was paying attention.
The only way you can make the system balance now is to pay future recipients less than they put in. And that's what will happen whether by overt reductions in benefits or hidden reductions via inflation and other wealth-destroying economic games.
I think Social Security is a multigenerational pyramid scheme that's now entered the failure phase. This is typical of the "social contract" we have now rather than the one we should have had. It's a bunch of poorly thought out or even fraudulent programs that do little, if anything for us or our societies at considerable cost. In the end, it's all about getting yours before the con falls apart.
So here's my conclusion. So you "paid your dues"? Too bad. You'll probably get some of that back. But you should have worked harder to stop some of that "mismanaged" fraud back when you were "paying your dues". Now we have to clean up your "social contract" mess.
That will change over time as the friends with Masters/PhDs start pursuing intellectual pursuits full-time for their career. Perhaps it still works now, but give it 10-15 years, and you'll see a huge difference in behavior, especially in regard to child rearing. Sadly, that's just the way it is :(
Well, what do you think will happen? Last I checked, actually knowing some people who have done so for 10-15 years, it's not that vast a gap. They aren't going to want to talk full time about the minutia of their research or their administrative duties. That common ground remains.
I disagree. Manual labor doesn't destroy the intellect. Instead, one merely needs to look at your father's avoidance of intellectual stimulation to explain why he is the way he is.
I found, for example, that my college teaching job was less intellectually stimulating than my manual labor jobs (which just so happen to be at Yellowstone National Park). The problem was that I was being exhausted intellectually by the job. I couldn't think and teach at the same time (plus I was a rather crummy teacher).
While I had no similar taxing of my mental resources from working a manual labor job. It also meant I had more time to think about things.