We already waited 5 decades, how long do you still want to wait?
And we have as a yet a bunch of untested models, and a lot of vague extrapolations. We don't even know if we'll still be using fossil fuels in 2050 in the "do nothing" scenario.
Oh, shit, there is no urgency? On what planet do you live? For fuck sake how old are you even?
My coldest winters, that I remember, where during my age of 8 to 12... every winter we had around christmas or 1st of january about -25 to -30 degrees centigrade. (Which is fucking cold). 3 years ago we had at the same time, I remember it because of the funny number coincident: 23th of december, +23 degrees centigrade. This is (just in case your math is as bad as your comprehension) up to 53 degrees warmer.
Here's one of those sayings that comes around at times like this. The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data".
You need to have very weird circumstances where waiting pays off.
Time value of money. Economics is one of those places that has those weird circumstances.
Sorry, you don't need evidence for the laws of physic.
The laws of physics are a human construct based on observation. If reality disagrees with the laws of physics, then it's not reality which is wrong.
And even though in theory, you can construct the right model from available data, we've always had to test our models against reality.
Climate models have the twin burdens of having to make a number of approximations (for example, for the cooling effects from storms and cyclones) and data of dubious integrity (there's something like three decades of fairly solid satellite data, about an additional century of less reliable temperature data from weather stations, and then temperature proxy data of dubious value past that point. The laws of physics don't tell you whether that data and those approximations are good enough or not.
This is what everyone is claiming right now... but I find this unbelievable. Trends like this usually accelerate... and after a while of accelerating just a little bit, they suddenly charge with immense speed.
How long is "a while" of accelerating a little bit? Please keep in mind that the radiative heating models they use are generally linear approximations which would snap as well.
Can you prove he wouldn't have gotten both diseases as a non-smoker? Some percentage of non-smokers get them both as well.
The non-smoker versions are different from the smoker versions. But I'm sure there is some small probability of something like that possible. It might be possible to defend oneself on that basis in a court of law, but I wouldn't bet on it. Now try that affair with weather and AGW.
Hurricane Sandy is used as an example of funny weather coming from AGW. But New York City gets hit by hurricanes regularly even in the absence of any sort of AGW. It's not prime hurricane territory like most of the Southeast coast, but it does get hit. So one can't use the fact that there is a hurricane to claim that AGW is causing something. Similarly, one can't use the unusual trajectory of that hurricane simply because we haven't seen enough hurricanes hit that area to know if the trajectory is unusual or not.
Another such example is the cyclone which apparently hit the Philippines recently. Apparently, an attendee to the Doha Climate Change Conference blamed AGW for that. No evidence provided.
At least, anti-smoking advocates had huge amounts of data showing a strong correlation between lung disease and smoking. No such correlation has yet been found for extreme weather and AGW.
Growing more food in Canada, doesn't mean that enough food won't be grown in the US. US doesn't have the population that say, India or China has. That's what would come to my mind, if we were to speak of countries without food security.
Having it work differently is kind of the point. Pessimism is one thing, but you presuppose that all possible alternatives will fail in the same manner?
I figure the new economy will just be the old economy, except with a large majority of people mooching instead of working. That'll work fine until the moochers lose enough power that either they cease to exist or they have to work again, this time starting from nothing they squandered all their capital including human capital.
I figure also that "This time it will be different," and yet the ones creating this new economy will still screw it up. Garbage in. Garbage out.
Really? China is at the same level as the US and India is only slightly better:
They've vastly improved over the past couple of decades. Maybe not by this "Gini coefficient", but definitely by an actual standard of living.
What I'm hearing is that there is hundreds of billions of dollars per year (from the sort of thing I mentioned in my previous post) on the table. But only if you can convince the developed world that there is a near future problem. Now to me, that's a lot of money.
And I'm seeing symptoms of classic con games such as urgency (it has to be done now, we're already too late (which is a new story that came out in the last year), etc), people making decisions on shaky evidence (untested computer models, temperature proxy paleoclimate data, extreme weather, etc), fallacies galore (particular appeals to authority and confirmation bias).
Huge stakes and a shaky, hastily done argument for those stakes. This should give you pause, even if you don't have a case of paranoia that requires medication.
In my world scientists are not payed according to "research results". If that is the case in your world I would challenge you to change something.
I am changing something by advocating wait and see. A lot of these paid for results lose their punch when things aren't rushed along. And there really isn't a good reason not to wait a couple of decades and see what sticks and what doesn't. Despite panicked claims to the contrary, there isn't urgency to AGW. Whatever happens isn't going to be significantly changed or cost more by another couple decades of waiting.
However, I have enough experience to know a fake Rolex when I see one.
Sure, you do. I imagine you'll find a different problem when SpaceX makes this one obsolete.
And at least you are starting to get the numbers right. $2.1billion for 12 jaunts to the ISS.
If so, that's a lot more than 12,000 pounds of ice cream. Maybe some people too, if the manned Dragon is in that.
Wikipedia indicates there would be something like 3300 kg of pressurized payload and a similar amount of unpressurized payload and 2500 kg of return pressurized payload for the cargo-only version of the Dragon. That's up to about 80 metric tons of upmass, half pressurized and 30 metric tons of downmass. That's a bit more than the roughly 5.5 metric tons of ice cream you were claiming would be lifted for the price.
They have the power to justify a $100 billion a year or so revenue stream plus all the other revenue streams that have come out of this, such as renewable energy, electric cars, carbon markets, etc. That's a lot more power than you're implying.
why would you trust the likes of the Heartland Institute over almost ever climatologist in the world?
I don't. But the bill of goods they're trying to sell me is a whole lot cheaper than the bill of goods that the AGW-oriented politicians are trying to sell me. As I see it, the AGW thing slid into scam territory, when they rushed through all these astoundingly expensive fixes and adaptions - for a problem we don't know exists.
What's more, considering which side benefits the most here, who has the greatest benefit; deniers or scientists?
If it gets 5 degrees warmer they sink... what has that to do with evidence?
"If". That's what it has to do with evidence.
Plus, there's the matter of timing. You're claiming 40 years till those people have to move. If instead, it's two centuries, then that changes the strategy. It no longer is such a good idea to pile up a lot of cash flow for something that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Simple logic, melting ice on greenland, and perhaps a few ice bergs breaking of from antarctica is enough.
No evidence that stuff "will" happen like you claim to justify your concern. For example, Antartica currently is accumulating ice and Greenland is within historical range for melting and a later paper indicates earlier results overestimated melt rate by a huge amount (about a factor of two or three allegedly, can't really tell from the story).
In other words, the ice fields that matter aren't melting particularly fast for a threat that supposedly will be bothering us in 40 years. For example, that last paper above estimates 2 mm of sea level rise from the melting of Greenland's ice fields over a six year period (2003-2009). That's under 2 cm of rise, if it continues as is through 2050.
OTOH, you need something more like 2 meters of rise. I doubt you'll see that by 2100, much less 2050.
Several things wrong with this picture. First, the biggest temperature increases come in the upper northern hemisphere, as the snow line retreats. Other land areas, especially those that already start very hot, don't heat up as much. Second, we have air conditioning and ground cooling. No one is going to hang around outside in 45C heat and 100% humidity. Pretty much what they do now anyway.
Third, what 4C change in global mean temperature? The Earth isn't heating up that much now despite how much CO2 has been put in the atmosphere. It's a prediction based on one or more untested models and doesn't really fit what we currently observe. It shouldn't be hard to figure out the problems with doing that sort of thing.
It's interesting how these issues of climate change bring out some of the worst psychopaths in slashdot.
People don't deserve a horrible death just because they disagree with you. I find the sort of advocacy that the Koch brothers do, with their own wealth no less, to be admirable.
A short term improvement that directly leads to long term devestation is not a benefit.
And what does that observation have to do with fossil fuels? Let us keep in mind that catastrophic AGW remains an unfounded fear and nothing else about AGW generates long term devastation.
That's like asking someone to name one person killed by cigarette smoke
How about David McLean? Lifetime smoker who died from lung cancer and had suffered from emphysema. Both illnesses highly correlate with smoking in the developed world.
It's deceptive to claim that uncertainty associated with linking weather disasters to AGW is in any way comparable to the uncertainty of linking lung disease cases to particularly heavy smoking. The evidence supporting health consequences of tobacco smoking is well documented, has huge data sets (something like millions to hundreds of millions of people for the larger data sets), high degree of correlation, and as in the above case, one can even link extreme cases to tobacco smoking directly.
For the extreme weather stuff, they don't even have statistics indicating correlation and the data sets are very small.
It's a horrible system that harvests the lions' share of productivity from the masses (who haven't seen ANY return on those improvements in decades) to enrich a small leisure class to somewhere between Ludicrous Wealth and Plaid Dollars.
And this is worse than the "new economy" how?
This is happening just about everywhere, including places that don't have the US' pet problems.
Not in the third world. China and India are doing just fine.
It happened in the first Gilded Age too.
Another chicken little whining about the Gilded Age. Let us not forget that the developed world's considerable ability to squander the wealth of their societies and descendants comes in large part from this age.
Our (i.e., the U.S.'s) current social policies seem determined to reduce the population by the reintroduction of various plagues. Several that had previously been nearly wiped out have already reappeared.
Completely untrue. One merely needs to look at the minute body count to see that. If you're looking for policies that reduce population, look no further than equality of the sexes. Female education and employment has reduced the US population (well, it would be lower in the absence of immigrants and their kids) unlike "plagues". Not saying it's a bad thing, but just pointing out what actually is happening out there. I imagine some of the current games affecting youth like student loans, poor job prospects, and shaky real estate prices, will also help lower fertility.
If there is any evolutionary impact, I imagine that vaccine refusal would help the high fertility groups (who I think are more against vaccines) due both to their relative isolation (they tend to be rural) and the fact that higher mortality affects low fertility inordinately (it can easily turn a slight growth rate into a slight decline rate).
This "move" was a key part of the Kyoto treaty and was the stated reason why the USA didn't join, that makes it at least 15yrs old, the yearly conferences have only been going for 18yrs in total so it's a pretty good bet this "move" started before the talking.
A "move" can be planned well in advance. I'm not asserting that they just decided to do it on the spur of the moment. It'd be hard to coordinate your pet scientists on that short a notice.
The rest of your post is just an irrational anti-science rant that does not belong on a geek site.
You want to talk about anti-science? Then what's the justification for this fund that was just created? What damage has been done by AGW that requires any money?
As you evaluate the various competing claims before you, consider that perhaps laymen swayed by appearances and compelled to impute motives on strangers might not have the intellectual high ground over people who have studied and debated the topic for decades and live by the scientific method.
Nobody "lives" by the scientific method. And $100 billion a year (or whatever it ends up being) could easily buy the entire realm of climatology. I believe such money already has made significant progress on that as witnessed by the scare stories that came out over the past couple of weeks. The politicians needed cover, particularly, authoritative claims of urgency, some climatologists delivered.
My view is that nobody in this game has the high ground. The pro-AGW side is just making a huge argument from authority fallacy while simultaneously ignoring the money and power that regulation of carbon dioxide emissions bring. AGW reparations is just the tip of a very large iceberg.
So what you're saying is that the current system of Employer Provide healthcare cannot work, right? That is is impossible for individual companies to provide reasonable healthcare plans for their employees? I thought Private Enterprise could do everything better? No? Well, maybe we need Universal Healthcare then?
The US already has universal health care. It just doesn't always work pretty (for self insurance and ER-based care). We could just make that work better, but no one seems interested.
And there's huge interference from governments at the federal and state levels (for example, supply restrictions on hospitals and medical professionals, huge regulatory hurdles for businesses producing medical products, and the tax break for employer health insurance which merely serves to drive up the cost of heath insurance and care).
All I can say is that if you were planning to make health care expensive, you wouldn't do much different, even with Obamacare which claimed to reduce medical care costs, but won't due to its regulatory burden and subsidies.
Oops, forgot to stick in a second example. Let's consider defense spending.
There should be some level of defense spending simply because there's always someone around who wants to take things from you by force. Once again, the large, multinational business plays this game well and they're probably responsible for most of the problems that make defense spending so expensive, such as a chronic inability to fix requirements, huge and costly standards and requirements, big, expensive systems (such as two billion dollar stealth bombers), and contractors who cost several times what their predecessors, military workers (cooks, laundry, basic maintenance, janitors, etc) used to cost.
It's the same sort of game. A crisis happens and scares the public into spending more on the service. That new level of spending becomes the new normal. As does that new lack of accountability and economic sense.
You're putting the current economic system (and your worship of mythical Randian supermen) ahead of the civilization that economy is supposed to serve.
Why do you think there's anything wrong with how that economy serves that civilization? My bet is that all of your complaints will either be imaginary or due to government intervention (which I don't consider part of the economy). As to that latter point, let's give a couple of examples. US Social Security is allegedly a program for providing some level of support to people in their last years. It commonly is mislabeled as "retirement insurance".
What it is in practice is a pyramid scheme that allowed Congress to spend hundreds of billions more per year for decades. And that spending hasn't been for investments that would make future payouts possible but the usual squandering of public funds at vast, nearly incomprehensible levels. That squandering also helped create most of those little problems you claim to be concerned about, like income inequity. Who'll have a better shot at Uncle Sam's sugar? You or the rich multinational business that does this for a living?
In other words, the economy works fine, whether you want it to or not. This "tax the rich" fad is just more struggling in the net. The wealthy parasites will play this game better than you ever will and they'll do just fine while you'll be suffering in your "new economy". It's time for you to stop being part of the problem.
Do you seriously think that these negotiators are so stupid that they cannot distinguish between natural and anthropomorphic climate change?
Well, a large portion of them probably are that stupid. Most of the rest are looking for loot.
The only shock here is that one individual believes that they are more intelligent and have a better grasp of the environment, economics, and politics than the thousands of people who (directly or indirectly) contribute to these negotiations.
What's sad here is that the individual is probably right. When you have a revenue stream of tens to hundreds of billions per year, then that's plenty of incentive to be as wrong as you can get away with. It's interesting how this move followed a round of discoveries which claim harm of global warming is worse and more urgent than first claimed,
Maybe there's a real threat from AGW, but this looks to me more like a bunch of corrupt scientists sexing up their research (and possibly just making stuff up) in order to justify a transfer of wealth large enough to make the oil industry envious.
I can only respond to what you wrote. If it's not there, then better reading comprehension won't help. You keep making the same erroneous statements even after multiple attempts at correction.
Slashdot Mirror
We already waited 5 decades, how long do you still want to wait?
And we have as a yet a bunch of untested models, and a lot of vague extrapolations. We don't even know if we'll still be using fossil fuels in 2050 in the "do nothing" scenario.
Oh, shit, there is no urgency? On what planet do you live? For fuck sake how old are you even?
... every winter we had around christmas or 1st of january about -25 to -30 degrees centigrade. (Which is fucking cold). 3 years ago we had at the same time, I remember it because of the funny number coincident: 23th of december, +23 degrees centigrade. This is (just in case your math is as bad as your comprehension) up to 53 degrees warmer.
My coldest winters, that I remember, where during my age of 8 to 12
Here's one of those sayings that comes around at times like this. The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data".
You need to have very weird circumstances where waiting pays off.
Time value of money. Economics is one of those places that has those weird circumstances.
Sorry, you don't need evidence for the laws of physic.
The laws of physics are a human construct based on observation. If reality disagrees with the laws of physics, then it's not reality which is wrong.
And even though in theory, you can construct the right model from available data, we've always had to test our models against reality.
Climate models have the twin burdens of having to make a number of approximations (for example, for the cooling effects from storms and cyclones) and data of dubious integrity (there's something like three decades of fairly solid satellite data, about an additional century of less reliable temperature data from weather stations, and then temperature proxy data of dubious value past that point. The laws of physics don't tell you whether that data and those approximations are good enough or not.
This is what everyone is claiming right now ... but I find this unbelievable. Trends like this usually accelerate ... and after a while of accelerating just a little bit, they suddenly charge with immense speed.
How long is "a while" of accelerating a little bit? Please keep in mind that the radiative heating models they use are generally linear approximations which would snap as well.
Can you prove he wouldn't have gotten both diseases as a non-smoker? Some percentage of non-smokers get them both as well.
The non-smoker versions are different from the smoker versions. But I'm sure there is some small probability of something like that possible. It might be possible to defend oneself on that basis in a court of law, but I wouldn't bet on it. Now try that affair with weather and AGW.
Hurricane Sandy is used as an example of funny weather coming from AGW. But New York City gets hit by hurricanes regularly even in the absence of any sort of AGW. It's not prime hurricane territory like most of the Southeast coast, but it does get hit. So one can't use the fact that there is a hurricane to claim that AGW is causing something. Similarly, one can't use the unusual trajectory of that hurricane simply because we haven't seen enough hurricanes hit that area to know if the trajectory is unusual or not.
Another such example is the cyclone which apparently hit the Philippines recently. Apparently, an attendee to the Doha Climate Change Conference blamed AGW for that. No evidence provided.
At least, anti-smoking advocates had huge amounts of data showing a strong correlation between lung disease and smoking. No such correlation has yet been found for extreme weather and AGW.
Growing more food in Canada, doesn't mean that enough food won't be grown in the US. US doesn't have the population that say, India or China has. That's what would come to my mind, if we were to speak of countries without food security.
Having it work differently is kind of the point. Pessimism is one thing, but you presuppose that all possible alternatives will fail in the same manner?
I figure the new economy will just be the old economy, except with a large majority of people mooching instead of working. That'll work fine until the moochers lose enough power that either they cease to exist or they have to work again, this time starting from nothing they squandered all their capital including human capital.
I figure also that "This time it will be different," and yet the ones creating this new economy will still screw it up. Garbage in. Garbage out.
Really? China is at the same level as the US and India is only slightly better:
They've vastly improved over the past couple of decades. Maybe not by this "Gini coefficient", but definitely by an actual standard of living.
Your paranoia is kinda cute.
What I'm hearing is that there is hundreds of billions of dollars per year (from the sort of thing I mentioned in my previous post) on the table. But only if you can convince the developed world that there is a near future problem. Now to me, that's a lot of money.
And I'm seeing symptoms of classic con games such as urgency (it has to be done now, we're already too late (which is a new story that came out in the last year), etc), people making decisions on shaky evidence (untested computer models, temperature proxy paleoclimate data, extreme weather, etc), fallacies galore (particular appeals to authority and confirmation bias).
Huge stakes and a shaky, hastily done argument for those stakes. This should give you pause, even if you don't have a case of paranoia that requires medication.
In my world scientists are not payed according to "research results". If that is the case in your world I would challenge you to change something.
I am changing something by advocating wait and see. A lot of these paid for results lose their punch when things aren't rushed along. And there really isn't a good reason not to wait a couple of decades and see what sticks and what doesn't. Despite panicked claims to the contrary, there isn't urgency to AGW. Whatever happens isn't going to be significantly changed or cost more by another couple decades of waiting.
However, I have enough experience to know a fake Rolex when I see one.
Sure, you do. I imagine you'll find a different problem when SpaceX makes this one obsolete.
And at least you are starting to get the numbers right. $2.1billion for 12 jaunts to the ISS.
If so, that's a lot more than 12,000 pounds of ice cream. Maybe some people too, if the manned Dragon is in that.
Wikipedia indicates there would be something like 3300 kg of pressurized payload and a similar amount of unpressurized payload and 2500 kg of return pressurized payload for the cargo-only version of the Dragon. That's up to about 80 metric tons of upmass, half pressurized and 30 metric tons of downmass. That's a bit more than the roughly 5.5 metric tons of ice cream you were claiming would be lifted for the price.
Scientists have precious little power
They have the power to justify a $100 billion a year or so revenue stream plus all the other revenue streams that have come out of this, such as renewable energy, electric cars, carbon markets, etc. That's a lot more power than you're implying.
why would you trust the likes of the Heartland Institute over almost ever climatologist in the world?
I don't. But the bill of goods they're trying to sell me is a whole lot cheaper than the bill of goods that the AGW-oriented politicians are trying to sell me. As I see it, the AGW thing slid into scam territory, when they rushed through all these astoundingly expensive fixes and adaptions - for a problem we don't know exists.
What's more, considering which side benefits the most here, who has the greatest benefit; deniers or scientists?
There's a lot more money on the science side.
If it gets 5 degrees warmer they sink ... what has that to do with evidence?
"If". That's what it has to do with evidence.
Plus, there's the matter of timing. You're claiming 40 years till those people have to move. If instead, it's two centuries, then that changes the strategy. It no longer is such a good idea to pile up a lot of cash flow for something that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Simple logic, melting ice on greenland, and perhaps a few ice bergs breaking of from antarctica is enough.
No evidence that stuff "will" happen like you claim to justify your concern. For example, Antartica currently is accumulating ice and Greenland is within historical range for melting and a later paper indicates earlier results overestimated melt rate by a huge amount (about a factor of two or three allegedly, can't really tell from the story).
In other words, the ice fields that matter aren't melting particularly fast for a threat that supposedly will be bothering us in 40 years. For example, that last paper above estimates 2 mm of sea level rise from the melting of Greenland's ice fields over a six year period (2003-2009). That's under 2 cm of rise, if it continues as is through 2050.
OTOH, you need something more like 2 meters of rise. I doubt you'll see that by 2100, much less 2050.
Several things wrong with this picture. First, the biggest temperature increases come in the upper northern hemisphere, as the snow line retreats. Other land areas, especially those that already start very hot, don't heat up as much. Second, we have air conditioning and ground cooling. No one is going to hang around outside in 45C heat and 100% humidity. Pretty much what they do now anyway.
Third, what 4C change in global mean temperature? The Earth isn't heating up that much now despite how much CO2 has been put in the atmosphere. It's a prediction based on one or more untested models and doesn't really fit what we currently observe. It shouldn't be hard to figure out the problems with doing that sort of thing.
It's interesting how these issues of climate change bring out some of the worst psychopaths in slashdot.
People don't deserve a horrible death just because they disagree with you. I find the sort of advocacy that the Koch brothers do, with their own wealth no less, to be admirable.
A short term improvement that directly leads to long term devestation is not a benefit.
And what does that observation have to do with fossil fuels? Let us keep in mind that catastrophic AGW remains an unfounded fear and nothing else about AGW generates long term devastation.
tiny island nations that will be underwater 50 years from now.
How many meters does sea level have to rise to cause that? And what evidence is there that this will happen in 50 years?
That's like asking someone to name one person killed by cigarette smoke
How about David McLean? Lifetime smoker who died from lung cancer and had suffered from emphysema. Both illnesses highly correlate with smoking in the developed world.
It's deceptive to claim that uncertainty associated with linking weather disasters to AGW is in any way comparable to the uncertainty of linking lung disease cases to particularly heavy smoking. The evidence supporting health consequences of tobacco smoking is well documented, has huge data sets (something like millions to hundreds of millions of people for the larger data sets), high degree of correlation, and as in the above case, one can even link extreme cases to tobacco smoking directly.
For the extreme weather stuff, they don't even have statistics indicating correlation and the data sets are very small.
It's a horrible system that harvests the lions' share of productivity from the masses (who haven't seen ANY return on those improvements in decades) to enrich a small leisure class to somewhere between Ludicrous Wealth and Plaid Dollars.
And this is worse than the "new economy" how?
This is happening just about everywhere, including places that don't have the US' pet problems.
Not in the third world. China and India are doing just fine.
It happened in the first Gilded Age too.
Another chicken little whining about the Gilded Age. Let us not forget that the developed world's considerable ability to squander the wealth of their societies and descendants comes in large part from this age.
Our (i.e., the U.S.'s) current social policies seem determined to reduce the population by the reintroduction of various plagues. Several that had previously been nearly wiped out have already reappeared.
Completely untrue. One merely needs to look at the minute body count to see that. If you're looking for policies that reduce population, look no further than equality of the sexes. Female education and employment has reduced the US population (well, it would be lower in the absence of immigrants and their kids) unlike "plagues". Not saying it's a bad thing, but just pointing out what actually is happening out there. I imagine some of the current games affecting youth like student loans, poor job prospects, and shaky real estate prices, will also help lower fertility.
If there is any evolutionary impact, I imagine that vaccine refusal would help the high fertility groups (who I think are more against vaccines) due both to their relative isolation (they tend to be rural) and the fact that higher mortality affects low fertility inordinately (it can easily turn a slight growth rate into a slight decline rate).
This "move" was a key part of the Kyoto treaty and was the stated reason why the USA didn't join, that makes it at least 15yrs old, the yearly conferences have only been going for 18yrs in total so it's a pretty good bet this "move" started before the talking.
A "move" can be planned well in advance. I'm not asserting that they just decided to do it on the spur of the moment. It'd be hard to coordinate your pet scientists on that short a notice.
The rest of your post is just an irrational anti-science rant that does not belong on a geek site.
You want to talk about anti-science? Then what's the justification for this fund that was just created? What damage has been done by AGW that requires any money?
And by what standard do you judge corruption?
Dishonest or fraudulent actions by those in positions of power and trust.
As you evaluate the various competing claims before you, consider that perhaps laymen swayed by appearances and compelled to impute motives on strangers might not have the intellectual high ground over people who have studied and debated the topic for decades and live by the scientific method.
Nobody "lives" by the scientific method. And $100 billion a year (or whatever it ends up being) could easily buy the entire realm of climatology. I believe such money already has made significant progress on that as witnessed by the scare stories that came out over the past couple of weeks. The politicians needed cover, particularly, authoritative claims of urgency, some climatologists delivered.
My view is that nobody in this game has the high ground. The pro-AGW side is just making a huge argument from authority fallacy while simultaneously ignoring the money and power that regulation of carbon dioxide emissions bring. AGW reparations is just the tip of a very large iceberg.
So what you're saying is that the current system of Employer Provide healthcare cannot work, right? That is is impossible for individual companies to provide reasonable healthcare plans for their employees? I thought Private Enterprise could do everything better? No? Well, maybe we need Universal Healthcare then?
The US already has universal health care. It just doesn't always work pretty (for self insurance and ER-based care). We could just make that work better, but no one seems interested.
And there's huge interference from governments at the federal and state levels (for example, supply restrictions on hospitals and medical professionals, huge regulatory hurdles for businesses producing medical products, and the tax break for employer health insurance which merely serves to drive up the cost of heath insurance and care).
All I can say is that if you were planning to make health care expensive, you wouldn't do much different, even with Obamacare which claimed to reduce medical care costs, but won't due to its regulatory burden and subsidies.
Oops, forgot to stick in a second example. Let's consider defense spending.
There should be some level of defense spending simply because there's always someone around who wants to take things from you by force. Once again, the large, multinational business plays this game well and they're probably responsible for most of the problems that make defense spending so expensive, such as a chronic inability to fix requirements, huge and costly standards and requirements, big, expensive systems (such as two billion dollar stealth bombers), and contractors who cost several times what their predecessors, military workers (cooks, laundry, basic maintenance, janitors, etc) used to cost.
It's the same sort of game. A crisis happens and scares the public into spending more on the service. That new level of spending becomes the new normal. As does that new lack of accountability and economic sense.
You're putting the current economic system (and your worship of mythical Randian supermen) ahead of the civilization that economy is supposed to serve.
Why do you think there's anything wrong with how that economy serves that civilization? My bet is that all of your complaints will either be imaginary or due to government intervention (which I don't consider part of the economy). As to that latter point, let's give a couple of examples. US Social Security is allegedly a program for providing some level of support to people in their last years. It commonly is mislabeled as "retirement insurance".
What it is in practice is a pyramid scheme that allowed Congress to spend hundreds of billions more per year for decades. And that spending hasn't been for investments that would make future payouts possible but the usual squandering of public funds at vast, nearly incomprehensible levels. That squandering also helped create most of those little problems you claim to be concerned about, like income inequity. Who'll have a better shot at Uncle Sam's sugar? You or the rich multinational business that does this for a living?
In other words, the economy works fine, whether you want it to or not. This "tax the rich" fad is just more struggling in the net. The wealthy parasites will play this game better than you ever will and they'll do just fine while you'll be suffering in your "new economy". It's time for you to stop being part of the problem.
Do you seriously think that these negotiators are so stupid that they cannot distinguish between natural and anthropomorphic climate change?
Well, a large portion of them probably are that stupid. Most of the rest are looking for loot.
The only shock here is that one individual believes that they are more intelligent and have a better grasp of the environment, economics, and politics than the thousands of people who (directly or indirectly) contribute to these negotiations.
What's sad here is that the individual is probably right. When you have a revenue stream of tens to hundreds of billions per year, then that's plenty of incentive to be as wrong as you can get away with. It's interesting how this move followed a round of discoveries which claim harm of global warming is worse and more urgent than first claimed,
Maybe there's a real threat from AGW, but this looks to me more like a bunch of corrupt scientists sexing up their research (and possibly just making stuff up) in order to justify a transfer of wealth large enough to make the oil industry envious.
I can only respond to what you wrote. If it's not there, then better reading comprehension won't help. You keep making the same erroneous statements even after multiple attempts at correction.